Deepwater Horizon Blowout Gear Was Overdue for Maintenance (by years)

[The Straight Story]

Deepwater Horizon Blowout Gear Was Overdue for Maintenance

April 6 (Bloomberg) -- The blowout preventer that failed on a BP Plc well last year, leading to the worst U.S. offshore oil spill, was four years overdue for maintenance under driller Transocean Ltd.’s internal guidelines, a U.S. regulator said.

The Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer hadn’t been disassembled and refurbished since the rig was commissioned in 2001, Jason Mathews of the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, said today during an investigative hearing in Metairie, Louisiana.

Under Transocean’s rules, the blowout preventer should have been overhauled no later than the summer of 2006, Mathews said. The preventer is a 300-ton stack of valves and pipes designed to stop an oil well from surging out of control.

The blowout preventer’s blades failed to sever and seal the pipe from BP’s Macondo well during the April 2010 disaster that killed 11 rig workers, sank the vessel and spewed enough crude into the sea to fill two supertankers, according to a study commissioned by a joint U.S. Coast Guard-Interior Department panel. Mathews is one of eight members of the panel.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-04-06/deepwater-horizon-blowout-gear-was-overdue-for-maintenance.html

[Urban Prairie]

1. The BOP was OVERDUE for maintenance, meaning repair/replace cost+time=MONEY

"The blowout preventer wasn’t in need of an overhaul, Michael Fry, a Transocean manager who oversees subsea equipment used on all of the company’s Gulf of Mexico rigs, told the panel." Under Transocean’s rules, the blowout preventer should have been overhauled no later than the summer of 2006, Mathews said. The preventer is a 300-ton stack of valves and pipes designed to stop an oil well from surging out of control."

"Fry testified today that if there had been any indications that the blowout preventer was defective, the senior Transocean manager aboard the Deepwater Horizon, Jimmy Harrell, would have halted drilling operations and called for help."

“If Jimmy thought there was anything wrong with the BOP, he would have shut it down,” Fry said.

If I remember correctly, the BP boss that was on the rig when the explosion occurred, allegedly told the Transocean manager to continue to pump seawater into the pipe and prevented Harrell from halting the drilling operations even when it became obvious that stronger back-pressure was causing the methane gas to quickly rise within the drilling pipe.

Regardless, this was a massive fail by all involved, and especially the executive suits at BP HQ, who are much further up the corporate ass-kissing ladder, and who are FAR removed from the actual day to day operations, that are responsible for causing the gigantic ecotastrophe in the GOM, whose after-effects will linger for years, if not decades, and it is ALL due to these fuckers' insatiable sociopathic greed and unbridled lust for more power and authority over others.