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by 82_28 » Thu May 27, 2010 9:01 pm
COVINGTON, La. - As BP labored for a second day Thursday to choke off the leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, dire new government estimates showed the disaster has easily eclipsed the Exxon Valdez as the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.
by chump » Fri May 28, 2010 3:30 am
This is an update from the joint hearings by the U.S. Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service held in Kenner Thursday into the explosion and fire aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20, which killed 11 workers and created the Gulf of Mexico oil spill currently fouling Louisiana's coast.
Chief Mate David Young's testimony:
Drillers on the Deepwater Horizon began having trouble with pressure from the well about 20 minutes before the fatal explosions that destroyed the rig and eventually caused the largest oil spill in U.S. history. But nobody tried to shut off the well until after the fire erupted, according to testimony from several survivors at hearings Thursday in Kenner.
The new testimony from Chief Mate David Young raises questions about why nobody tried to shut off the well before a kick of gas shot up the well and the rig's riser, spewing mud and seawater on the deck and taking the vessel's senior officers by surprise. The two top Transocean officers testified Thursday that anyone who had a concern about safety could call a "time out" to shut off a well that might go out of control.
Young, whose job included providing cement slurry for Halliburton contractors to apply the final plug to abandon the well, said he stopped by the rig's drill floor at 9:30 p.m. on April 20 to see when they would need the cement. He said he found drilling supervisor Jason Anderson and chief driller Dewey Revette there, trying to figure out some problematic pressure readings from down in the well. Anderson and Revette were among the 11 workers killed in the accident.
"They had a concern with differential pressure," Young said. "They said it would be a little longer to figure it out, for the cement job meeting. They were seeing a differential pressure. I didn't ask any questions about it."
Young said that after he went to another office to report that the cement job would be delayed, he testified he heard a release of gas. "I knew something was up so I went to the bridge," he said.
When he got to the bridge, he said found visiting executives from BP there. The rig's master, Curt Kuchta, testified the V.I.P.s were "basically playing a video game," a simulator of rig controls, and Kuchta said he was giving the visitors a tour. The other top officer on the rig, Offshore Installation Manager Jimmy Harrell, testified that he was in the shower.
That's when, at about 9:53 p.m., the first of several explosions occurred. It wasn't until Harrell put on some clothes, struggled from his quarters to the bridge and consulted with Kuchta that the captain said he ordered the activation of shear rams on the blowout preventer and the emergency disconnect system, according to their testimony.
Harrell said he believed the explosions somehow disabled the blowout preventer's control panel and the emergency disconnect system.
Young wrote in a statement to Coast Guard investigators immediately after the event that the drillers were "having well issues," but he testified Thursday that he didn't realize that meant they "had lost control of the well."
Capt. Hung Nguyen, chairman of the joint Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service investigative panel, has raised concerns in the hearings about a lack of clarity over who is ultimately in charge on the oil rig. Noting that Transocean puts the offshore installation manager in charge when the unit is drilling and the captain is in charge when the vessel is "under way," Nguyen noted that neither top official seemed to have "visibility" of the events that led to the disaster.
Master Curt Kuchta's testimony:
Patrick Semansky / The Associated PressCurt Kuchta, Transocean master on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, testifies during a joint hearing held by the Coast Guard and the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service in Kenner Thursday.Curt Kuchta, the Deepwater Horizon's captain, or master, who took over control of the rig the afternoon of the incident, said he was taking corporate "V.I.P.s" on a tour just before the explosions. He testified that the executives were "basically playing a videogame" simulator of the rig a few minutes before gas alarms rang, mud spurted out and the rig began exploding.
"Gas alarms. A flash of some sort. Fire. The alarms were just going crazy," Kuchta recalled. "Then, obviously, fire. We were blacked out. Personnel coming to the bridge. And somewhere in there, Jimmy (Harrell), the OIM (offshore installation manager) was on the bridge. As well as the subsea engineer (Chris Pleasant). I told Chris to shear - the EDS (Emergency Disconnect System)."
He said that was about 9:56 p.m., which is about three minutes after the first explosion was recorded. He was asked if he thought the disconnect system was properly engaged.
"It was until I looked outside and saw the fuel to the fire wasn't slowing down," he said. He then defended his decision to abandon ship.
"It was pretty straight forward," he said. "The fuel to the fire wasn't shut off. We were dark. We had nothing to run the pumps so there was no choice but to abandon the vessel."
Kuchta said he watched his crew board lifeboats and helped eight people get on a life raft, which is released to the sea 75 feet below. When that life raft left, he had to manually crank the raft release back to the deck. Rather than do that, he decided to jump.
"I don't want to do that again," he said.
After he landed in the water, he said he had to swim to a small craft and get a knife so he could cut the life raft that had lowered without him free from the burning rig. He didn't have a knife on him because of a company policy against knives on board the rig, he said.
Coast Guard officials on the panel expressed concerns to both Harrell and Kuchta about who is in charge of the vessel when it's hitched up to a drilling well, when it's "under way" and when it's in the midst of an emergency. According to Transocean's organizational chart, the captain, or master, is in charge when the vessel is under way and the offshore installation manager takes charge during drilling.
But even during drilling, the vessel never anchors. Kuchta said that means he's in charge. Harrell testified he's in charge. Still, both said there was never a problem directing the workers during the accident, and Kuchta was the one who gave the abandon ship order, even though the vessel was never able to disconnect from the well.
Transocean lawyer Ned Kohnke said he was concerned about Coast Guard officials focusing on the confusion of the April 20 disaster given that 115 crew members, apparently all that weren't killed in the explosions, were successfully evacuated.
Final testimony from Jimmy Harrell of Transocean:
Patrick Semansky / The Associated PressJimmy Harrell, Transocean offshore installation manager on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, testifies during a joint hearing held by the Coast Guard and the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service in Kenner, La., Thursday. The hearing was held to investigate last month's explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, which has caused a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Throughout his testimony, Harrell expressed little concern about issues that panelists and lawyers for the various companies suggested could have raised red flags.
For example, Harrell said the reason he was suddenly handed a BP plan that didn't include the key negative pressure test was that BP was constantly changing the well plan. He said the company had added additional casings, the various size pipes that line the well, and he said the one that didn't include the pressure test had not been approved by federal regulators.
The rig's senior tool pusher, Miles Ezell, told Harrell once they were safe on the rescue ship that the rig had lost control of the well at 9:45 p.m., about eight minutes before the explosion. Harrell said the driller or tool pusher is authorized to activate the blowout preventer in case of lost well control. He said Ezell got word the well was being shut in, although it's now clear the blowout preventer didn't work.
Harrell said that when he'd started his stint on the rig a few weeks before the incident, there was a "tick" on the blowout preventer's test ram when it was in the open position. But he said he wasn't worried about it and felt the blowout preventer was functioning well before the incident.
Next to the blowout preventer, the only other emergency action the rig can take is to unhitch from the well equipment and sail away. But when the disaster struck, that system failed to work, too, Harrell testified.
"It appeared they had been taken out from the explosion," he said.
Previous testimony of Jimmy Harrell:
Members of the investigative board also asked Harrell questions that followed up on Wednesday's testimony by Douglas Brown, the rig's chief mechanic. Brown had said Harrell got into a "skirmish" with BP's company man at a meeting the morning of the incident. Harrell said he actually expressed concern to BP company man Robert Kaluza that a new drilling plan did not include a key test at a morning meeting April 19, the day before the accident.
Harrell said Kaluza's plan did not include a "negative test" to measure pressure in the well, and Harrell said he made sure the test was done before he would agree to displace mud from the riser with lighter seawater. He said he was successful at getting BP to authorize the test and, in fact, the test was performed twice. Harrell said the other BP company man, Don Vidrine, wanted to do the second negative test.
Harrell said he was happy with the results of the two negative tests, which, ideally, would have shown no drilling mud being returned to the rig. But he acknowledged that the first negative test returned 23 barrels of mud and the second test returned 15 barrels. According to previous testimony, a total of 51 barrels of cement slurry was used to seal the well casing.
Federal regulations require drilling rigs to perform a definitive test of the integrity of a well's cement -- called a cement bond log -- if there are concerns with the results of negative and positive pressure tests. Harrell said BP had a team from Schlumberger at the ready to perform a cement bond log, but Harrell said he was happy with the results of the negative test.
A Schlumberger official told The Times-Picayune last week that the team of testers was sent home at 11 a.m. the morning of the accident without ever conducting the cement bond log.
Robert Kaluza declined to testify Thursday, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination.
Harrell testified that BP decided not to do a so-called bottoms-up test, which takes a sample of the drilling mud from the deepest part of the well to measure pressures and temperatures there. An attorney for Halliburton, the cementing contractor on the rig, asked Harrell if he was aware that Halliburton had "recommended running substantially more mud than BP decided to run," but Harrell said he was not aware of that and wasn't concerned about the lack of a bottoms-up test.
Douglas Brown also testified Wednesday that he'd heard Harrell leave the morning meeting and say in frustration, "Well, I guess that's what we have those pinchers for." Harrell said he may have said that and would have been referring to the possibility that they would have to employ the last-ditch shear rams on the blowout preventer to shut off the well in an emergency. He said the reason he would have said that was to prepare his crew for the possibility that the cement, a relatively new kind of nitrogen-infused cement from Halliburton, could cause problems.
Harrell said the Deepwater Horizon had used the nitrified cement to seal well casings at shallow depths, but never on the full length of a well as deep as this one. He said he'd heard of other rigs where nitrogen from the cement got into the riser and caused problems. The nitrified cement is supposed to bond faster and prevent the slurry from channeling into the surrounding rock formation.
Jimmy Harrell's opening testimony:
Transocean's top drilling official on the Deepwater Horizon said he was wrapped up with hosting top BP officials in the hours before his rig blew up April 20, but he denied Thursday that his crew was under any pressure from BP to complete its work more quickly.
Under tough questioning by Jason Mathews of the federal Minerals Management Service, the rig's offshore installation manager, Jimmy Harrell, said the cost of delays at the oilfield 50 miles off the Louisiana coast was not compromising safety on the rig.
"So there was no pressure at all about being about $20 million behind?" Mathews asked, referring to documents showing the Deepwater Horizon had been scheduled to start work at another oilfield 43 days earlier.
"I'm sure at times people want to get it done and want to meet timelines," said Harrell in his Mississippi drawl. "But never to jeopardize safety."
BP had sent some high-level personnel to the rig the day of the accident, led by Pat O'Brien, the corporate vice president for drilling, to congratulate the rig's crew for seven years without a lost-time incident and to discuss the completion of work at the exploratory well. Harrell said he spent a lot of time the day of the accident meeting with the company representatives and giving tours.
Mathews and another panel member, Russ Wheatley of the Coast Guard, wanted to know if the executives were there to put pressure on the crew, which had been forced to drill a bypass well in March, to speed up.
"It's part of the job," Harrell said. "No pressure concerns whatsoever."
Harrell, who said he was taking a shower when explosions set the rig on fire, said he directed the subsea engineer, Chris Pleasant, to activate the emergency disconnect system, which would have separated the rig from its drilling riser and the spewing well so the vessel could at least get away. Harrell said he saw Pleasant press the activation switch, but it didn't work.
He also said that as he stumbled from his quarters to the bridge, he saw the control panel that's used to activate the blowout preventer, a four-story stack of valves and pistons at the bottom of the sea that acts as a final fail-safe to shut off the well. He said it "wasn't normal," that yellow lights indicating certain functions were "blocked" or in a neutral position, were more prevalent than usual.
Attempts to activate the blowout preventer also failed.
by chump » Fri May 28, 2010 12:57 pm
Was this disaster just an accident, or were other more sinister forces at play in order to further cripple society toward a more manageable population size? Ominous midnight symbolism. BP's "live" feed caught in an obvious short loop shows further evidence of cover-up.
Below I document how BP's "live" feed was actually a brief (less than 15-seconds) loop repeating for more than 8 hours until the image went black at around 4:00 am this morning. The above image, for example, is made using just three frames repeating every 25/100ths of a second.
by Sterling D. Allan
Pure Energy Systems News
The Internet is abuzz regarding the 2008 moving "Knowing" that includes a scene in which actor Nicolas Cage is watching the news on television. The clock shows 11:59 when the anchor announces a devastating fire burning out of control in the gulf. Then the clock flips to 12:00, and the anchor says "that story leads our headlines at the top of the hour."
Midnight has long been associated with end times. With the "doomsday clock", the closer the clock is to midnight, the closer the world is estimated to be to global disaster.
One of the interesting things about the New World Order connivers is that for some reason they believe they must announce what they're going to do before they do it to you. Often, this predictive programming is done through the medium of Hollywood.
Most people would look at this as a coincidence, or maybe a lucky guess. I certainly don't have all the answers, but I do think this is an important question to pose.
Could it be that this Gulf oil volcano disaster was planned ahead of time for some nefarious purpose? What possible benefit could such a breach have for the oil industry, whose image is already suffering from an increasing abhorrence to its pollution and the wars it fosters? You would think that such an unfolding would only galvanize people in favor of cleaner alternative fuels and energy sources.
It's hard to fathom their possible reasons when we look at it from our perspective that has the betterment of humanity as the driving motivation. But if you look at this from the perspective of those who seek to reduce human population down to half a billion – a much more manageable size for control – then the possible motivations begin coming more clearly into focus...
... If I had my choice of bad things they might have done to us to get the population to go into civil unrest; I would have preferred the nuke event inasmuch as it wouldn't have effected other life forms nearly so much as the Gulf disaster, which primarily upsets nature...
... Here's a video I shot this evening showing the supposed "live" feed by BP, yet for nearly eight hours now, it has been the same short (less than 15 seconds) loop playing over and over, even as the clock continues to roll as if its live. What are they doing that they don't want us to see?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEtQo1u9 ... r_embedded
... first noticed this loop at around 8:00 pm Mountain time, and I shot this video at around 10:30 pm. I then composed the story on this page, staying up until past 3:45 am to post it, and the loop was still repeating at that time. If you happen to be reading this story and notice that the live feed is still in a loop, do me a favor and post a comment down below to that effect, as a witness. Shortly after I finally posted a link to this story in my news, the BP live feed went off-line to a black screen. It was down by 4:00 am. It was still down until around 11:30 am. Then by 11:48 am, the image was back up and still appearing to loop, but with a different configuration of the mechanism in front of it. At 11:53 am, the image was frozen. At 11:56 am, the image went blank. According to TreeHugger, the above footage shows equipment being used to try to plug a gushing oil well...
by 82_28 » Fri May 28, 2010 1:16 pm
NBC, msnbc.com and news services
updated 1 hour, 55 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - The flow of oil from the broken well in the Gulf of Mexico has stopped, the Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen claimed Friday, but BP warned it would be a further 48 hours before it was known whether the "top kill" procedure had been successful.
"They have been able to stop the hydrocarbons from coming up the wellbore," Allen said on ABC's Good Morning America. "I think the real challenge today is going to be sustain the mud on top of the hydrocarbons and reduce the pressure to the point where they could actually put a cement plug in."
BP CEO Tony Hayward told NBC's TODAY show that the top kill attempt, which involves shooting heavy drilling mud into the blown-out well 5,000 feet underwater, was "proceeding pretty well according to plan."
Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here
But he maintained that the procedure, which has never been attempted before so deep underwater, still had only a 60-70 percent chance of success, although some of the risks had been reduced.
"It will probably be another 48 hours before we know if we've met the success," Hayward added.
If the procedure works, BP will inject cement into the well to seal it permanently. If it doesn't work, BP says it has a number of backup plans. Either way, crews will continue to drill two relief wells, considered the only surefire way to stop the leak.
The company revealed Friday that the costs of its response to the spill so far were $930 million.
Meantime, President Barack Obama returns to the Gulf of Mexico coast Friday.
Obama was to attend a briefing Friday at the U.S. Coast Guard Station in Grand Isle, La., by Allen, who is overseeing the response to the spill.
For everyone, the stakes grew even higher Thursday as government scientists said the oil has been flowing at a rate 2 1/2 to five times higher than what BP and the U.S. Coast Guard initially estimated.
Even using the most conservative estimate, that means about 18 million gallons have spilled so far.
In the worst-case scenario, 39 million gallons have leaked. The previous largest U.S. oil spill, the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, spilled nearly 11 million gallons.
In another troubling discovery, marine scientists said they have spotted a huge new plume of what they believe to be oil deep beneath the Gulf, stretching 22 miles from the leaking well head northeast toward Mobile Bay, Alabama.
They fear it could have resulted from using chemicals a mile below the surface to break up the oil.
The discovery by researchers on the University of South Florida College of Marine Science's Weatherbird II vessel is the second significant undersea plume reported since the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20. The plume is more than 6 miles wide and its presence was reported Thursday.
The cloud was nearing a large underwater canyon whose currents fuel the foodchain in Gulf waters off Florida and could potentially wash the tiny plants and animals that feed larger organisms in a stew of toxic chemicals, another researcher said Friday.
Larry McKinney, executive director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, said the DeSoto Canyon off the Florida Panhandle sends nutrient-rich water from the deep sea up to shallower waters
by Nordic » Fri May 28, 2010 3:00 pm
by 82_28 » Fri May 28, 2010 3:20 pm
by Peachtree Pam » Fri May 28, 2010 3:39 pm
by chump » Sat May 29, 2010 1:53 am
...Miles Ezell, the senior tool-pusher on the Deepwater Horizon, gave a vivid and horrifying description of the destructive moments when the rig lost control of the well, and natural gas and oil shot to the surface and ignited, killing 11 of his colleagues.
Ezell had handed off control of drilling operations to his relief, Jason Anderson. Ezell knew there was some concern about a negative pressure test conducted about 4 p.m. on April 20, and he offered to stay and help Anderson and the others. But Anderson told him, "I got this, I'll call you if there's a problem."
Ezell said he had worked with Anderson a long time and trusted him completely.
"He was probably more experienced shutting in kicks than anybody on the Deepwater Horizon," Ezell said of Anderson. "In fact, he'd just been offered a position running well-control training."
A few hours later, Anderson was killed by a kick of gas that shot out of control.
Ezell said he was just settling in to sleep when he got a call from the drill floor.
"It was 10 minutes to 10. It was Steve Curtis, the assistant driller. He said, 'We have a situation, the well is blowing out, we have mud going to the crown.' I was just horrified. I said, 'Do y'all have it shut in?' He said, 'Jason's shutting it in now.' Then he said, and I'll never forget this: 'Randy, we need your help.'"
As Ezell went to get his boots, an explosion threw him across the room and against a bulkhead. Heavy smoke filled the quarters and methane droplets hit his face, he said. He found a colleague, Wyman Wheeler, lying in the rubble. Then he found a visiting official from Transocean crying for help under a pile of debris. He stayed with his comrades until stretchers came and helped them into life rafts.
A Marine Board investigative panel of Coast Guard and federal Minerals Management Service officials have been posing tough questions to survivors throughout the five days of hearings in Kenner, but Ezell took the opportunity to throw some harsh criticism back at the Coast Guard, which kept the 115 survivors on a supply vessel near the burning rig for a full day, until a new search-and-rescue control ship could make it to the remote location.
"That was one of the most painful things we could have done, to stay on location and watch the rig burn," Ezell said. "Those people were like family to us. It would be like watching your children or your brothers or sisters perish. At a bare minimum, move us away so we don't have to view it that many hours."
Testimony of Christopher Haire, Halliburton, cementer:
The Halliburton employee who performed several of the cement lining jobs on the Deepwater Horizon said Friday that only the deepest casing in the well was closed with a new kind of light, quicker-curing nitrogen-infused cement.
The testimony from cementer Christopher Haire was something of a surprise because Jimmy Harrell, the top drilling official on the rig when it exploded in the Gulf on April 20, testified Thursday that the rig had only used the nitrified cement on shallower casings. Harrell said he'd been warned that nitrogen from the cement could get in the well hole and cause problems.
The well plan had changed several times before the incident, in which natural gas and oil got into the well and shot up the marine riser to the rig, igniting in huge fireballs.
Final testimony of Chris Pleasant, Transocean, subsea supervisor:
Contrary to prior testimony from other rig leaders and BP's drilling engineer that tests gave no reason for concern and conditions were safe for the Deepwater Horizon to displace heavy drilling mud the evening of April 20, the rig's subsea supervisor testified Friday that workers were confused by some test results that showed possible leaks in the well.
Chris Pleasant, the man in charge of the blowout preventer and other well systems on the sea floor, said he was part of lengthy discussions about fluid losses during a negative pressure test about four hours before the accident.
In a negative pressure test, the well head is shut off using annular valves in the massive blowout preventer device on the sea floor, and workers measure whether pressure causes any mud to come up to the rig from the marine riser that runs down to the well.
Pleasant said when he began his shift that day, he went to the drill floor and found a tool-pusher, one of the main drilling crew, discussing results of the negative pressure test with Robert Kaluza, BP's top official on the rig. He said the tool-pusher, Wyman Wheeler, was concerned that barrels of mud had leaked out during the pressure test. The workers disagreed about where the mud had been lost.
Pleasant said Kaluza, who invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination this week to avoid testifying, was the one who insisted that the test results weren't satisfactory.
"Bob Kaluza said that according to APD (the rig's permit to drill), we didn't achieve the results," Pleasant said.
Similarly, Christopher Haire, a cementer for Halliburton, said drillers were "unsatisfied" with the negative test, which returned 15 barrels of mud, rather than the ideal of no mud released.
And yet, the top drilling official on the rig, Offshore Installation Manager Jimmy Harrell, and BP's well designer on shore, Mark Hafle, testified previously that they believed the pressure tests were successful and no cause for concern.
Kaluza and the other BP man on the rig, Donald Vidrine, ended up deciding to alter some valve pressures and do a second negative test that showed no mud returns and that Pleasant agreed appeared to be a successful test.
Earlier testimony of Chris Pleasant, Transocean, subsea supervisor:
Moments after explosions rang out and set the Deepwater Horizon on fire April 20, the man in charge of the blowout preventer that's supposed to close the well on the sea floor said he asked the captain to hit an emergency disconnect system.
"Calm down! We're not EDS'ing," Capt. Curt Kuchta told subsea engineer Chris Pleasant, according to Pleasant's testimony Friday before a Marine Board panel investigating the incident.
But about 30 seconds later, with total chaos on the rig, Pleasant decided on his own to hit the emergency button, which would trigger the blowout preventer's shear rams to close the well and unhitch the rig. It didn't work
"It went through the sequence at the panel, but it (the signal to disconnect) never left the panel. I had no hydraulics," Pleasant recalled..
He said it was about four or five minutes later when Kuchta decided it was time to get the rig off the well.
"The captain asks Daun Winslow (a visiting Transocean official), 'Do we EDS?' The captain comes over and tells me to EDS, not knowing I already hit the button."
Pleasant said he had the authority to activate the emergency disconnect.
"I am the authority," he said. "It's my equipment."
Testimony of Mark Hafle, BP drilling engineer
A BP engineer who helped design the Gulf oil well that exploded April 20 wouldn't admit that his handiwork led to the disaster, despite browbeatings from a lawyer and a member of the federal investigative panel.
Mark Hafle, the BP drilling engineer who wrote plans for well casings and cement seals on the Deepwater Horizon's well, testified that the well had lost thousands of barrels of mud at the bottom. But he said models run onshore showed alterations to the cement program would resolve the issues, and when asked if a cement failure allowed the well to "flow" gas and oil, he wouldn't capitulate.
Hafle said he made several changes to casing designs in the last few days before the well blew, including the addition of the two casing liners that weren't part of the original well design because of problems where the earthen sides of the well were "ballooning." He also worked with Halliburton engineers to design a plan for sealing the well casings with cement.
John McCarroll from Minerals Management Service, a member of a six-person investigative panel holding hearings in Kenner, couldn't hold back his opinion that cement failures allowed the well to flow as he questioned Hafle.
"Don't you think for that size casing, you set up your Halliburton cementer for failure, especially when you had a loss return zone (where drilling mud was seeping into the earth) below the hole?" McCarroll pointedly asked.
"I believe it's a sound engineering practice," said Hafle, who said the internal investigation would have to be completed before anyone knows what went wrong.
"Personally, I would not want to try to attempt that," McCarroll added.
Ned Kohnke, a lawyer for Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig, also asked Hafle pointed questions, especially about BP's decision not to run a key cement integrity test called a cement bond log. Kohnke told Hafle that The Times-Picayune had reported that BP sent a team of testers home before performing that test, but Hafle said he wasn't aware of that.
Hafle gave what appeared to be conflicting testimony about the cement bond log, considered by engineers to be the "gold standard" of testing cement jobs. Initially, when asked why no cement bond log was conducted, Hafle said it was because "we had not gotten that far in the well plan when the incident (blowout) occurred." But later on, he said there was no plan to conduct the test and the crew was about to close off the well with a final plug, which would close of the well to cement bond log tests.
Kohnke asked Hafle what could have gone wrong if it wasn't BP's cement design, but Hafle said he wouldn't speculate.
"I don't believe you'll ever find out how the hydrocarbons got in the well bore," he said.
by Allegro » Sat May 29, 2010 2:09 am
by Allegro » Sat May 29, 2010 2:12 am
by Allegro » Sat May 29, 2010 3:01 am
I'm listening to Maddow again, and there's no speculation about volumes of those plumes. I'll add that the plume discovered yesterday, May 27, seen in the middle of three in the above image was described as clear, and contrasted to the plume on the far right described as dark. Meaning, when the exploratory instrument was brought back to the water's surface, it was totally blackened with oil. Maddow interviews an NBC news journalist located in Venice, Louisiana, in Red Fish Bay, Ann Thompson, who discusses the oil that's into the foliage, choking it causing it to fall over; the stench of oil would make your stomach turn.chump wrote:What are the volume of those plumes?
by Pele'sDaughter » Sat May 29, 2010 9:28 am
by chump » Sat May 29, 2010 8:25 pm
The joint Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service panel investigating the cause of the BP oil spill had a chance Saturday to question a BP official who approved the design of the well that exploded April 20, causing the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
But with the witness testifying by telephone, the panel decided to avoid any questions about the well design Saturday until July, when the panel hearings are scheduled to resume.
Asked after the hearing in Kenner why nobody asked BP executive David Sims about the well design he approved, one of the panelists, Jason Mathews of MMS, said those were questions the panel wanted to ask in person. The panel allowed Sims to testify by telephone from Houston because he is in charge of BP's relief well operations
... The New York Times reported Saturday that internal BP reports obtained by that newspaper indicate that BP had long-running concerns about the well's safety.
The Coast Guard-MMS panel in Kenner did ask some pointed questions Friday to another BP employee, senior drilling engineer Mark Hafle, who, along with Sims, approved the well plan for the Deepwater Horizon's work off the Louisiana coast, in an oilfield known as Mississippi Canyon 252.
Hafle told the panel he had no concerns about the well's design or the size of casings used, but The Times story Saturday quoted Hafle in an internal BP report from June 2009 saying the company's preferred casing could collapse under heavy pressure in a worst-case scenario.
Rather than get into those tough questions, the panel asked Sims to recall his visit to the Deepwater Horizon on April 20. A lot of time was spent establishing whether he or other visiting "V.I.P.s" were using a simulator on the rig bridge at the time of the accident. The rig master, Capt. Curt Kuchta, previously testified that he showed the visitors the simulator. "They were basically playing a videogame," Kuchta told the panel.
Sims said he wasn't at the joystick at the time of the explosion, although he couldn't remember if another visitor was using it when explosions struck.
Another significant line of questioning focused on whether Sims and the other visitors, including BP Vice President for Drilling and Completions Pat O'Brien, were there to give Deepwater Horizon an award for safety. He said the Deepwater Horizon was "a good rig, a good crew," but he said that wasn't the reason for the visit.
Capt. Hung Nguyen, chairman of the joint investigative panel, said that because of their "conduct" on the Deepwater Horizon, the rig's two senior officers, Kuchta and Installation Manager Jimmy Harrell, are now considered "parties of interest" in the investigation.
The other parties of interest are BP, Transocean and several BP contractors, who have lawyers at the hearings to cross-examine witnesses.
Crane operator Micah Sandell:
The joint investigation hearings in Kenner have been dotted with vivid retellings of the harrowing and chaotic moments when the Deepwater Horizon exploded April 20.
The latest came from Micah Sandell, a crane operator.
Sandell said he first noticed something was wrong when he saw the de-gasser, a goose-neck tube that pointed down toward the rig deck.
"It came out of it so strong, so loud, that it filled up the whole back deck with a gassy smoke," Sandell said. "Then, something exploded. I'm not sure what exploded, but looking at it, I think the tank exploded. That was the first fire."
A second explosion was soon to follow.
"I turned off the AC on my crane," Sandell continued. "I wasn't sure if I should get out or not. Then, the whole back deck exploded and came in on me. I just fell to the ground, put my hands on my head and said, 'No, God, no!' Because I thought that was it."
Sandell said that once he and several roustabouts got to the rig's lifeboats, chaos reigned.
"There was a lot of screaming, hollering, a lot of scared people, including me," Sandell said. "They were trying to get people on boats. It was very unorganized. People were yelling, 'Drop the boat! Drop the boat!' But we didn't have everyone on the boat yet. We couldn't get people to count. People couldn't even count right because they were so scared."
Testimony of driller Micah Burgess
BP decided not to perform a test on the mud at the bottom of the well before starting to place the final cement lining that may have been the source of gas that eventually blew out the well, according to testimony at investigative hearings in Kenner.
The top drilling supervisor on the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20, Offshore Installation Manager Jimmy Harrell, testified Thursday that BP decided to forego a "bottoms-up" test that would have examined the condition of drilling mud sitting in the zone where a casing shoe was about to be placed to protect the well from natural gas or oil pressing in against the hole.
On Saturday, a driller who worked under Harrell, Micah Burgess, was asked if it was standard to perform a bottoms-up test.
"Yes sir, you try to," Burgess said. "Just to make sure you got good clean mud (before starting a cement job). You check for gas, too."
As it turned out, gas got into the well after the crew had finished sealing it laterally with metal casings and cement poured between the casing pipes and the surrounding earth formation. That gas blew out through valves and seals at the ocean floor, up 5,000 feet of riser pipe in the sea and onto the rig, engulfing it in flames, killing 11 workers and starting the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
Burgess, who was off-duty and in his living quarters when the explosions rung out, also said that he and his night-side counterpart, Dewey Revette, had the authority to trigger an emergency disconnect system to dislodge the rig from the well in an emergency. But, he said, the standard procedure was to check with another employee, the subsea supervisor, before tripping the ultimate fail-safe shearing devices on the huge stack of valves and pistons known as the blowout preventer.
In the tragedy April 20, Revette was killed, likely by the initial explosion after his and others' attempts to control the well that suddenly kicked with gas. The subsea supervisor, Chris Pleasant, testified Friday that he didn't try to hit the emergency disconnect system until several minutes after the explosions. Pleasant said that as soon as he got to the bridge after the explosions, he encouraged the rig's master, Capt. Curt Kuchta, to disconnect.
"Calm down! We're not EDS'ing," Kuchta told him, Pleasant said.
But 30 seconds later, Pleasant said he did hit the button to trigger the emergency disconnect and shear rams on the blowout preventer. The panel indicated they worked, but in reality, they did not, Pleasant said.
Testimony of motorman Paul Meinhart III
During the explosions April 20 on the Deepwater Horizon, the rig's diesel engines revved up and tripped an automatic power shut-off as gas seeped through ducts into the engine room, according to testimony Saturday in investigative hearings.
Motorman Paul Meinhart III testified that emergency generators didn't work after the first explosions rang out, and his subsequent attempts to manually start a backup electrical generator were also unsuccessful.
On Thursday, the rig's chief mate, David Young, testified that with no power, the rig's fire pumps didn't work and attempts to fight the fire were abandoned.
But given the enormity of the explosions from unexpected kicks of gas from the well below, Meinhart was skeptical that any power would have helped fight the fires.
"Due to the fact half the vessel was on fire at the time," he said.
Steve Gordon, a lawyer questioning Meinhart interrupted and continued the thought: "One more fire wouldn't have mattered, right?
by Moddey Screbbagh » Sat May 29, 2010 10:36 pm
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