A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [7]
At the closing of a well, it might seem you’d want the team members most familiar with the well and one another to be present. But approaching the critical juncture of closing up the well they’d been drilling for months, one of BP’s company men, with thirty-three years of experience as a well site leader, was sent off the rig to take his mandatory biannual well-control certification class. Just four days before the explosion, his replacement, Bob Kaluza, appeared on the rig. A Wall Street Journal article said of Kaluza, “His experience was largely in land drilling,” and he told investigators he was on the rig to “learn about deep water,” according to Coast Guard notes of an interview with him. We don’t have a better feel for Kaluza because he has exercised his Fifth Amendment right not to provide testimony that could incriminate himself.
Transocean’s onshore manager responsible for the Horizon, Paul Johnson, testified that he was troubled by the timing in BP’s switch of well site leaders. “I raised my concerns,” he noted. “I challenged BP on the decision. We didn’t know who this gentleman was. I wasn’t making any assumptions on him, I just—I heard he come from a platform, so I was curious about his deepwater experience in a critical phase of the well. They informed me that Mr. Kaluza was a very experienced, very competent well site leader, and it wouldn’t be a concern.”
Kaluza showed a tendency toward appropriate caution, but the simple fact that he was new seemed to get in the way. At a critical juncture, Kaluza was uncertain enough about a crucial procedure called a “negative pressure test” that he sought out Leo Lindner, a drilling fluid specialist with the company M-I Swaco. Lindner, who’d worked on the rig for over four years, was in charge of the different types of fluids used during the negative test, an important role.
“Mr. Bob Kaluza called me to his office,” Lindner testified. “He wanted to go over the method. I briefly explained to him how the rig had been conducting their negative tests and he just wanted—.” Lindner interrupted himself to note, “Bob wasn’t the regular company man on the Horizon.”
So, competence aside, there were working dynamics, team cohesion. It was a time for familiar faces and an almost literally well-oiled team. But it felt like BP was taking out its quarterback during the fourth quarter of a playoff game.
And on the morning of April 20—the day the rig exploded—BP engineer Brian Morel departed the rig, creating space for visiting company VIPs. Wrote one industry analyst later, “Let’s face it; the timing of that VIP visit was terrible. It could not have been at a worse time.”
A difficult pregnancy, new doctors, altered procedures: BP decided to turn this exploratory well into a production well. Usually, the purpose of an exploratory well is to learn about the geological formation and what the oil and gas–bearing production zone contains. Then the well is closed out. Engineers use the information to decide where to drill a production well, perhaps in a nearby spot. If you decide to turn an exploratory well into a production well, you obviously save a fair amount of drilling expense. But is an exploration crew going to be familiar with production technology? BP’s drilling and completion operations manager David Sims testified that the decision