Investigative Report: How the BP Oil Rig Blowout Happened Three Mile Island, Challenger, Chernobyl—and now, Deepwater Horizon. Like those earlier disasters, the destruction of the drilling rig was an accident waiting to happen. Here, engineers in the growing science of failure analysis identify seven fatal flaws that led to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and draw lessons on how to prevent future catastrophes. By: Carl Hoffman PART ONE… April 20 was a triumphant evening for British Petroleum and the crew of Transocean's Deepwater Horizon. Floating 52 miles off the coast of Louisiana in 5000 feet of water, the oil rig was close to completing a well 13,000 feet beneath the ocean floor—an operation so complex it's often compared to flying to the moon. Now, after 74 days of drilling, BP was preparing to cap the Macondo Prospect well until a production rig was brought in to start harvesting oil and gas. Around 10:30 in the morning, a helicopter flew in four senior executives—two from BP and two from Transocean, to celebrate the well's completion and the rig's seven years without a serious accident. What unfolded over the next few hours could almost have been written as a treatise in the science of industrial accidents. As with the Three Mile Island nuclear plant partial core meltdown in 1979, the chemical leak in Bhopal, India, in 1984, the space shuttle Challenger disintegration in 1986 and the Chernobyl nuclear plant explosions and fi re that same year, there is never one mistake or one malfunctioning piece of hardware to blame. Instead, the Horizon disaster resulted from many human and technical failings in a risk-taking corporation that operated in an industry with ineffective regulatory oversight. By the time the blowout came, it was almost inevitable. “It's clear that the problem is not technology, but people,” says Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the university of California–Berkeley. “It was a chain of important errors made by people in critical situations involving complex technological and organization systems.” Bea and other engineers subject catastrophes like Deepwater Horizon to the science of failure analysis for good reason: Studying industrial disasters can lead to understanding the root causes behind every accident, which is the critical first step toward improving safety and preventing future big bangs. If we learn from mistakes, failure can drive innovation, both technical and organizational. “A lot of intelligence came out of Three Mile Island,” says Larry Foulke, former president of the American Nuclear Society and an adjunct professor at the university of Pittsburgh, knowledge that led to improvements like better control-room ergonomics and the standardization and accreditation of industry-wide training programs.Since Three Mile Island, there has not been another major accident in the U.S. nuclear industry. The following lessons drawn from forensic engineering should spur changes in the oil industry and government agencies that will lead to better risk assessment, more useful regulatory oversight, safer operating procedures and rapid crisis response. The blowout was a punishing lesson: 11 workers were killed and 17 injured in the accident itself. The resulting oil spill damaged the economy and environment of the entire Gulf Coast. But out of this calamity can come changes that will reduce the chances of such a tragedy occurring again, not just in deepwater drilling but in other high tech, high-risk industries as well. Success Breeds Complacency A simple but counterintuitive fact led to the Horizon disaster: wells, even ones drilled in deep water, had worked most of the time, just as the space shuttle and chemical and nuclear plants had functioned successfully, in some cases for decades. Although underwater drilling is complex and challenging, there are 3423 active wells in the Gulf of Mexico, 25 in water deeper than 1000 feet. Seven months before the blowout and about 250 miles southeast of Houston, the Horizon had drilled the world's deepest well—an astounding 35,055 feet. What was impossible just a few years earlier had become seemingly routine as BP and Transocean banged out record firsts on the farthest frontiers of technology and geography. The same offshore techniques and equipment that worked in shallow hydrocarbon formations seemed to function fine at ever greater depths and higher pressures. The offshore rush was on, and nothing was going to stop it. “when you think you've got a robust system,” says Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke university, “you tend to relax.” Other industries have lapsed into the same sense of false security. “By the time of Three Mile Island,” Foulke says, “the nuclear industry had not had a major mishap in 25 years. when you get an attitude that nothing bad happens, it leads you to believe that nothing ever will. ” It's called hubris, and it set the stage for the Deepwater disaster. “In the event of an unanticipated blowout resulting in an oil spill,” read the exploration plan that BP submitted on March 10, 2009, to the u.S. Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service (MMS), which then managed and regulated offshore drilling, “it is unlikely to have an impact based on the industry-wide standards for using proven equipment and technology for such responses . . . ” That was nonsense. Although offshore blowouts occur frequently—there were 173 in the Gulf of Mexico alone from 1980 to 2008—there had never been one in deep water. In fact, neither BP nor any of its competitors had “proven equipment or technology” or any backup plan for a catastrophic failure at great depth. “The industry has not developed an oil spill plan for the low probability, high- consequence event when everything fails,” says Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the university of Texas. CONTINUED… added by: EthicalVegan
