Further evidence of criminal negligence by BP and US government in Gulf disaster

Further evidence of criminal negligence by BP and US government in Gulf disaster

“While Obama has publicly claimed he will crack down on the abuses of oil companies and do whatever is necessary to prevent another disaster of this kind, his administration continues to approve new leases for offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico without adequate analysis of the dangers presented to the environment by such projects”

By Hiram Lee
22 June 2010

Evidence of the criminal negligence of BP and the US government in the run-up to the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion continues to mount. BP’s decision to ignore important safety warnings for the sake of profit and repeated regulatory green lights from the Bush and Obama administrations made a disaster like that presently overtaking the Gulf of Mexico all but inevitable.

Central to the new revelations are flaws in BP’s blowout preventer (BOP) system. The blowout preventer is a device that acts as a measure of last resort to prevent an uncontrolled release of oil. The BOP at the Deepwater Horizon site was five stories tall and contained a shear ram that was designed to cut through the pipe connected to the well on the ocean floor and clamp off the flow of oil in an emergency. The BOP had two control pods containing electronics and hydraulic valve systems that power the device.

Engineers working on the Deepwater Horizon rig have reported a failure in the BOP system during the April 20 blowout. Pressure gauges revealed hydraulic fluid was not flowing into the BOP, leaving the shear without power.

Both BP and the Obama administration have claimed that the failure of the blowout preventer was an unforeseeable event. Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen has declared, “It’s hard to write a plan for a catastrophic event that has no precedent, which is what this was.”

This is simply a lie. Studies conducted by independent companies, the US government as well as BP and Transocean, reported Monday by the New York Times, reveal significant problems with blowout preventers in general and the equipment at the Deepwater Horizon rig in particular. (“Regulators failed to address risks in oil rig fail-safe device” June 20).

The Times cites a study by a Norwegian company, Det Norske Veritas, examining 15,000 wells drilled off the coast of North America and in the North Sea between 1980 and 2006. “It found 11 cases where crews of deepwater rigs had lost control of their wells and then activated blowout preventers to prevent a spill,” the Times reports. “In only six of those cases were the wells brought under control, leading researchers to conclude that in actual practice, blowout preventers used by deepwater rigs had a ‘failure’ rate of 45 percent.”

The problems surrounding failures of BOPs were “common knowledge in the drilling industry,” the Times comments.

Measures that could have improved BOP reliability were simp ly ignored by corporations and the government. A 2001 study of 83 wells requested by the federal Minerals Management Service (MMS) found 117 instances of BOP failures. It concluded that “all subsea BOP stacks used for deepwater drilling should be equipped with two blind-shear rams,” in case one of them fails.

The MMS refused to act on the information. No new standards or regulations were put into place. The Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer had only one shear ram.

Not only were BOPs in general considered faulty but specific concerns were repeatedly raised about the BOP used by the Deepwater Horizon rig.

An internal document from 2001 belonging to Transocean, the corporation in charge of operations at Deepwater Horizon, was discovered by the House Energy and Commerce Committee in May. It revealed the Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer contained an alarming 260 “failure modes” and should have been replaced.

In 2005, West Engineering Services conducted an assessment of the Deepwater Horizon well control system for Transocean using a checklist of over 250 items for examination. No less than 72 items on the checklist went unexamined, including important tests of the blowout preventer. Already considered defective in 2001, the BOP now went untested four years later.

Also in 2005, a Transocean document assessing problems at the Deepwater Horizon rig found that the “hot line,” a hose on the BOP carrying hydraulic fluid which is described as “critical when running and pulling the BOP stack” needed to be replaced due to “frequent failures” and found that the line “was observed to be leaking badly during a rig move.” The report says the leak was not repaired during the investigation because it could not be reached.

Deepwater Horizon worker Tyrone Benton spoke with the BBC in an article published Monday and revealed he had also observed a leak in the rig’s blowout preventer just weeks before the April 20 explosion. Benton is now suing both BP and Transocean for negligence…

www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/gulf-j22.shtml

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