60 Minutes Report on Gulf Oil Spill is Scathing-- Criminal Charges to Follow?
A 60 Minutes story paints a scathing picture of operations on the Deepwater Horizon in the days and hours leading up to the fatal explosion and resulting oil spill. The main source of the report was Mike Williams, Transocean's chief electronics technician on the rig.
Significant points from the story include:
- With the schedule slipping, Williams says a BP manager ordered a faster pace.
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We were informed of this during one of the safety meetings, that somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million was lost in bottom hole assembly and 'mud.' And you always kind of knew that in the back of your mind when they start throwing these big numbers around that there was gonna be a push coming, you know? A push to pick up production and pick up the pace," Williams said.
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But the trouble was just beginning: when drilling resumed, Williams says there was an accident on the rig that has not been reported before. He says, four weeks before the explosion, the rig's most vital piece of safety equipment was damaged.
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Williams says, during a test, they closed the gasket. But while it was shut tight, a crewman on deck accidentally nudged a joystick, applying hundreds of thousands of pounds of force, and moving 15 feet of drill pipe through the closed blowout preventer. Later, a man monitoring drilling fluid rising to the top made a troubling find.
"He discovered chunks of rubber in the drilling fluid. He thought it was important enough to gather this double handful of chunks of rubber and bring them into the driller shack. I recall asking the supervisor if this was out of the ordinary. And he says, 'Oh, it's no big deal.' And I thought, 'How can it be not a big deal? There's chunks of our seal is now missing,'" Williams told Pelley. -
In the hours before the disaster, Deepwater Horizon's work was nearly done. All that was left was to seal the well closed. The oil would be pumped out by another rig later. Williams says, that during a safety meeting, the manager for the rig owner, Transocean, was explaining how they were going to close the well when the manager from BP interrupted.
"I had the BP company man sitting directly beside me. And he literally perked up and said 'Well my process is different. And I think we're gonna do it this way.' And they kind of lined out how he thought it should go that day. So there was short of a chest-bumping kind of deal. The communication seemed to break down as to who was ultimately in charge," Williams said. -
What strikes Bea is Williams' description of the blowout preventer. Williams says in a drilling accident four weeks before the explosion, the critical rubber gasket, called an "annular," was damaged and pieces of it started coming out of the well.
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In finishing the well, the plan was to have a subcontractor, Halliburton, place three concrete plugs, like corks, in the column. The Transocean manager wanted to do this with the column full of heavy drilling fluid - what drillers call "mud" - to keep the pressure down below contained. But the BP manager wanted to begin to remove the "mud" before the last plug was set. That would reduce the pressure controlling the well before the plugs were finished.
Asked why BP would do that, Bea told Pelley, "It expedites the subsequent steps." -
To do it BP's way, they had to be absolutely certain that the first two plugs were keeping the pressure down. That life or death test was done using the blowout preventer which Mike Williams says had a damaged gasket.
- They didn't stop. As the drilling fluid was removed, downward pressure was relieved; the bottom plug failed. The blowout preventer didn't work. And 11 men were incinerated; 115 crewmembers survived.
The law does not allow a company to sacrifice safety for profits. But that looks like exactly what BP did.
The more dangerous an activity is, the more careful the company or person performing the activity must be. A drilling operation in deep water must be much more careful than a drilling operation on land, since if anything goes wrong in the deep water, the problem will be much harder to fix. BP and Transocean know this principle, but they ignored it. For money.
In addition to civil liability, authorities need to consider filing criminal charges against BP and key personnel involved in operating the rig. Given the blatant and intentional disregard of safety on the rig and resulting deaths, the matter should at least be presented to a grand jury to determine if criminal charges should be filed.
