Rig survivors: BP ordered shortcut on day of blast
June 9, 2010 -- Updated 0527 GMT (1327 HKT)
BP shortcut led to blast?STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Rig survivors say BP, Transocean official argued over shortcut on day of blast
- BP official won argument: "This is how it's gonna be," he said, according to witness
- BP says it won't comment on specifics
- BP routinely cut corners and pushed ahead despite safety concerns, workers say
(CNN) -- The morning the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, a BP executive and a Transocean official argued over how to proceed with the drilling, rig survivors told CNN's Anderson Cooper in an exclusive interview.
The survivors' account paints perhaps the most detailed picture yet of what happened on the deepwater rig -- and the possible causes of the April 20 explosion.
The BP official wanted workers to replace heavy mud, used to keep the well's pressure down, with lighter seawater to help speed a process that was costing an estimated $750,000 a day and was already running five weeks late, rig survivors told CNN.
BP won the argument, said Doug Brown, the rig's chief mechanic. "He basically said, 'Well, this is how it's gonna be.' "
"That's what the big argument was about," added Daniel Barron III.
Shortly after the exchange, chief driller Dewey Revette expressed concern and opposition too, the workers said, and on the drilling floor, they chatted among themselves.
"I don't ever remember doing this," they said, according to Barron.
"I think that's why Dewey was so reluctant to try to do it," Barron said, "because he didn't feel it was the right way to have things done."
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Revette was among the 11 workers killed when the rig exploded that night.
In the CNN interviews, the workers described a corporate culture of cutting staff and ignoring warning signs ahead of the blast. They said BP routinely cut corners and pushed ahead despite concerns about safety.
The rig survivors also said it was always understood that you could get fired if you raised safety concerns that might delay drilling. Some co-workers had been fired for speaking out, they said.
It can cost up to $1 million a day to operate a deepwater rig, according to industry experts.
Safety was "almost used as a crutch by the company," Barron said. He said he was once scolded for standing on a bucket on the rig, yet the next day, Transocean ordered a crane to continue operating amid high winds, against its own policies. "It's like they used it against us -- the safety policies -- you know, to their advantage.
"I don't think there was ever a plan set in place, because no one ever thought this was gonna ever happen," he added.
BP spokesman Robert Wine would not comment on specific allegations, saying the company has to "wait for the investigations to be completed. We can't prejudge them."
"BP's priority is always safety," he said.
Transocean, the world's largest offshore drilling contractor, said its top priority is safety.
"There is no scenario or circumstance under which it will be compromised," the company said in a written statement. "So critical is safety at Transocean that every crew member has stop-work authority, a real-time method by which all work is halted should any employee suspect an unsafe situation or operation."
In Washington on Tuesday, Rep. Nick Rahall, the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, sought more answers. In a letter to Steven Newman, CEO of Transocean, Rahall said records from the rig indicate 18 people at work on the second shift with "zero engineers, electricians, mechanics or subsea supervisors" on duty the night of the explosion.
Rahall added that payroll records show 20 crewmen, including seven of the 11 men who died, had worked a 24-hour shift six days before the explosion. Rig workers typically work 12-hour days.
"Although these reports do not provide a complete picture of who exactly was working during the time of the explosion and in the days leading up to it, when combined with the ongoing BP internal investigation that suggests that inattentiveness may have been a contributing factor in the disaster, I have serious questions about whether enough people were working on the night of April 20 to adequately handle the complex operations that were being performed, or if crew fatigue caused by extended shifts may have played a role," wrote Rahall, D-West Virginia, the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee.
Rahall called on the company to give his committee more detailed logs and a further explanation of its staffing -- a request Transocean said it would meet.
But Transocean said no worker put in a 24-hour day, and the documents Rahall cited didn't tell the whole picture. Daily drilling reports track operations and "certain personnel," it said, "but does not use them to catalog complete crew shifts or the actual hours worked by each crewmember."
"At the time of the accident, the Deepwater Horizon and its crew had compiled seven consecutive years of operations without a single lost-time safety incident," the company said in a written statement. "The vessel was properly and professionally manned; there was no shortage of technical expertise, nor did any crewmember work a 24-hour shift."
CNN was given access to individual time sheets that appear to back up Transocean's claim that no employees worked 24-hour shifts on April 14, six days before the explosion that eventually sank the rig.
Other documents reviewed by CNN seem to indicate that additional salaried workers may have been on the job that don't show up on time sheets, possibly refuting the committee's claim the rig was shortstaffed on April 20.
The rig workers have filed a negligence suit against BP, Transocean, oil field services contractor Halliburton and other companies involved with the deepwater rig.
"I've seen gross negligence, and this conduct is criminal," said Steve Gordon, the lawyer representing the men. "There's a crime scene sitting 5,000 feet below the water."
Brown, the rig's mechanic, had traveled with the rig from South Korea, where it was made nearly a decade ago. He had seen the mechanical crew get downsized over the years. Yet as the rig aged, the engines began having more problems.
"It became overwhelming," he said. "We couldn't keep up with the flow of it. ... We constantly over the years kept telling them, 'Hey, we need more help back here.'
"They pretty much just said, 'Well, we'll look into it.' "
About nine months ago, Brown said, he got an additional first engineer, yet the crew was still overloaded with work.
Even more alarming, the rig survivors said, was the amount of resistance the well was giving them. "We had problems with it from the day we got on," Matthew Jacobs said.
There was always like an ominous feeling. This well did not want to be drilled.
--Rig survivor Daniel Barron IIINearly every day, Jacobs said, "we had problems with that well."
Barron said it was like an eerie cloud hung over the well being dug 5,000 feet into the sea.
"There was always like an ominous feeling," he said. "This well did not want to be drilled. ... It just seemed like we were messing with Mother Nature."
At times, the drill got stuck. Many times, it "kicked," meaning gas was shooting back through the mud at an alarming rate.
"I've seen a lot of gas coming up from muds on different wells, and the highest I've ever seen in my 11 years was 1,500 units. And this well gave us 3,000," Brown said. "I've never been on a well with that high of gas coming out of the mud. That was kind of letting me know this well was something to be reckoned with."
It all came to a head at 9:56 p.m., when the first of three explosions rocked Deepwater Horizon, 52 miles southeast of Venice, Louisiana, with 126 people aboard. Tiles fell from the ceiling, walls collapsed, and people ran for their lives. It reminded Matt Jacobs of the movie "Titanic."
"It looked like you was looking at the face of death," he said. "You could hear it, see it, smell it."
He scrambled to the lifeboat deck. Jacobs had been trained to fight fires aboard the rig. But when he looked at the flames shooting 150 feet into the air, he knew there was nothing they could do. "There is no way we can put that fire out," he thought.
Jacobs hopped in a lifeboat. He screamed for co-workers to jump aboard. A second explosion rocked the rig. The lifeboat, still suspended in the air, went into a free fall of about 3 feet.
"Here I am on a lifeboat that's supposed to help me get off this rig," Jacobs thought. "And I'm gonna wind up dying."
He bowed his head and prayed.
Now, 50 days later, the survivors are telling their stories. It's become part of their everyday lives. They can't shake what happened that day, even when they close their eyes at night.
"It's like being in a neverending nightmare," Brown said. "You dream about it. You see it in your sleep. Then, we wake up in the morning, and we realize it's not a dream. It's real. ... It doesn't end for us."
CNN's Aaron Cooper contributed to this report. This piece is part of a CNN Special Investigations Unit project.
BP cut corners in days before oil well blowout in Gulf of Mexico, documents say
Published: Monday, June 14, 2010, 10:40 PM Updated: Monday, June 14, 2010, 11:07 PM
BP made a series of money-saving shortcuts and blunders that dramatically increased the danger of a destructive oil spill in a well that an engineer ominously described as a "nightmare" just six days before the blowout, according to documents released Monday that provide new insight into the causes of the disaster.
Democratic Reps. Bart Stupak, left, and Henry A. Waxman The House Energy and Commerce Committee released dozens of internal documents that outline several problems on the deepsea rig in the days and weeks before the April 20 explosion that set in motion the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history. Investigators found that BP was badly behind schedule on the project and losing hundreds of thousands of dollars with each passing day, and responded by cutting corners in the well design, cementing and drilling mud efforts and the installation of key safety devices.
"Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense. If this is what happened, BP's carelessness and complacency have inflicted a heavy toll on the Gulf, its inhabitants, and the workers on the rig," said Democratic Reps. Henry A. Waxman and Bart Stupak.
The missteps emerged on the same day that President Barack Obama made his fourth visit to the Gulf, where he sought to assure beleaguered residents that the government will "leave the Gulf Coast in better shape than it was before."
Obama's two-day trip to Mississippi, Alabama and Florida represents his latest attempt to persevere through a crisis that has served as an important early test of his presidency. The visit coincides with a national address from the Oval Office on Tuesday night in which he will announce new steps to restore the Gulf Coast ecosystem, according to a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to upstage the president's announcements.
President Barack Obama watches as an oil containment boom is repaired during a tour of the Theodore Staging Facility in Theodore, Ala., on Monday. "I can't promise folks ... that the oil will be cleaned up overnight. It will not be," Obama said after encouraging workers in hard hats as they hosed off and repaired oil-blocking boom. "It's going to be painful for a lot of folks."
But, he said, "things are going to return to normal."
The breached well has dumped as much as 114 million gallons of oil into the Gulf under the worst-case scenario described by scientists -- a rate of more than 2 million gallons a day. BP has collected 5.6 million gallons of oil through its latest containment cap on top of the well, or about 630,000 gallons per day.
But BP believes it will see considerable improvements in the next two weeks. The company said Monday that it could trap a maximum of roughly 2.2 million gallons of oil each day by the end of June as it deploys additional containment efforts, including a system that could start burning off vast quantities as early as Tuesday. That would more than triple the amount of oil it is currently capturing -- and be a huge relief for those trying to keep it from hitting the shore.
"It would be a game changer," said Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Mark Boivin, deputy director for near-shore operations at a command center in Mobile. He works with a team that coordinates the efforts of roughly 80 skimming boats gathering oil off the coast.
Still, BP warned its containment efforts could face problems if hoses or pipes clog and engineers struggle to run the complicated collection system. Early efforts at the bottom of the Gulf failed to capture oil.
Meanwhile, congressional investigators have identified several mistakes by BP in the weeks leading up to the disaster as it fell way behind on drilling the well.
BP started drilling in October, only to have the rig damaged by Hurricane Ida in early November. The company switched to a new rig, the Deepwater Horizon, and resumed drilling on Feb. 6. The rig was 43 days late for its next drilling location by the time it exploded April 20, costing BP at least $500,000 each day it was overdue, congressional documents show.
As BP found itself in a frantic race against time to get the job done, engineers took several time-saving measures, according to congressional investigators.
In the design of the well, the company apparently chose a riskier option among two possibilities to provide a barrier to the flow of gas in space surrounding steel tubes in the well, documents and internal e-mails show. The decision saved BP $7 million to $10 million; the original cost estimate for the well was about $96 million.
In an e-mail, BP engineer Brian Morel told a fellow employee that the company is likely to make last-minute changes in the well.
"We could be running it in 2-3 days, so need a relative quick response. Sorry for the late notice, this has been nightmare well which has everyone all over the place," Morel wrote.
The e-mail chain culminated with the following message by another worker: "This has been a crazy well for sure."
BP also apparently rejected advice of a subcontractor, Halliburton Inc., in preparing for a cementing job to close up the well. BP rejected Halliburton's recommendation to use 21 "centralizers" to make sure the casing ran down the center of the well bore. Instead, BP used six centralizers.
In an e-mail on April 16, a BP official involved in the decision explained: "It will take 10 hours to install them. I do not like this." Later that day, another official recognized the risks of proceeding with insufficient centralizers but commented: "Who cares, it's done, end of story, will probably be fine."
The lawmakers also said BP also decided against a nine- to 12-hour procedure known as a "cement bond log" that would have tested the integrity of the cement. A team from Schlumberger, an oil services firm, was on board the rig, but BP sent the team home on a regularly scheduled helicopter flight the morning of April 20.
Less than 12 hours later, the rig exploded.
BP also failed to fully circulate drilling mud, a 12-hour procedure that could have helped detect gas pockets that later shot up the well and exploded on the drilling rig.
Asked about the details disclosed from the investigation, BP spokesman Mark Proegler said the company's main focus right now is on the response and stopping the flow of oil. "It would be inappropriate for us to comment while an investigation is ongoing," Proegler told AP. BP executives including CEO Tony Hayward will be questioned by Congress on Thursday.
The letter from Waxman and Stupak noted at least five questionable decisions BP made before the explosion, and was supplemented by 61 footnotes and dozens of documents.
"The common feature of these five decisions is that they posed a trade-off between cost and well safety," said Waxman and Stupak. Waxman, D-Calif., chairs the energy panel while Stupak, D-Mich., heads a subcommittee on oversight and investigations.
Matthew Daly and Ray Henry of The Associated Press wrote this report. Erica Werner in Gulfport, Miss., and Harry R. Weber in Houston contributed. Daly contributed from Washington, D.C.
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Congress blames BP cost-cutting
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By Erika Bolstad | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — BP knew its Macondo well was troublesome in the days leading up to a fatal April 20 blowout, congressional investigators found, but the company "appears to have made multiple decisions for economic reasons that increased the danger of a catastrophic well failure."
From the company's uncommon well design to its fatal decision not to circulate drilling mud, which could have cleared out pockets of gas, and the lack of critical testing, which could have pinpointed problems with its cementing, the company had many points at which it could have prevented an explosion, investigators with the House Energy and Commerce Committee have found.
Instead, the company violated industry guidelines and proceeded "despite warnings from BP's own personnel and its contractors," said the chairman of the committee, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and the chairman of the investigative subcommittee that handled the probe, Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich.
Those decisions led to 11 deaths and the worst oil spill in U.S. history and will continue to have an effect on the environment and the future of offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, the two wrote in a letter to BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward that was released Monday.
"Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense," they wrote. "If this is what happened, BP's carelessness and complacency have inflicted a heavy toll on the Gulf, its inhabitants and the workers on the rig."
The committee will ask Hayward to address its findings Thursday, when it examines some of the root causes of the accident. The day before, Hayward is set to meet with President Barack Obama.
Tuesday, top executives with Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhill