Hearings: BP cementing engineer refuses to admit his actions led to disaster

[maddezmom]

Source: NOLA.com

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.



Read more: http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/hearings_bp_cementing_engineer.html

[truthisfreedom]

1. The key paragraph in this article will probably prove to be the nail in the coffin:

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.

[maddezmom]

2. Hearings: Transocean supervisor activated emergency disconnect, but it failed

Hearings: Transocean supervisor activated emergency disconnect, but it failed
By David Hammer, The Times-Picayune
May 28, 2010, 10:58AM
This is an update from the joint hearings by the U.S. Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service held in Kenner Friday 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.

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.


more: http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/hearings_transocean_supervisor.html

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. Jesus. One FUBAR after another.

My question now is, did anybody ever do anything RIGHT in drilling on that rig?
And how many other rigs are as equally FUBAR?

[izquierdista]

4. That's the pattern

I had to take an industrial safety course that analyzed some of these spectacular disasters. What they have in common is: (1) not just one thing goes wrong, but a chain of FUBARs takes out all the redundancies that were designed in and (2) they never happen at 9 am when the experienced day shift is there with backups. Most often they happen in the wee hours with the least experienced workers in temporary charge. Titanic, Chernobyl, and Exxon Valdez all happened between 11 pm and 2 am.

What we learned from the course was to never short-cut on safety, check, double check and triple check your equipment, and train the second shift and night crew to follow safety procedures.

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. "night shift"....that is interesting.

Had not realized that before.

[fascisthunter]

6. perfect example of why regulation is crucial

when leaving companies to their own devices, they screw up and everyone else pays for it. And yet the same people arguing against regulation are the ones also whining about taxes.