Deepwater horizon explosion -- in depth article

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Wow, that was quite good! it was pretty amazing to see how ineffective all the people who SHOULD have responded were. Expecially the Diesel operators, who should have known what was going on, but failed to shut them down until they exploded. The overspeeding Diesel generators may have olver-volted critical electrical equipment and caused some other safety gear to fail to function. Of course, if they didn't have a compression release on those engines, or a very tight air cutoff, there would have been no way to shut them down. Cutting off fuel is ineffective if the intake air is combustible. You'd think, however, that a drilling platform would be designed with this possibility in mind.

Thanks for the link!

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

It was. A careful reading of the article discloses that all of the automated response systems had been specifically disabled. This wasn't anything nefarious and was done with deliberation.

Reply to
John R. Carroll

I've heard that diesels can actually suck lube oil up from the crankcase and run away, but that'd come from worn seals or piston rings.

Thanks, Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

Yes, my mind boggles to think that an alarm was not sounded for a long time, just because the girl operator was mentally paralyzed and did not do her job.

The diesel controls, too, clearly were not properly designed to stop them when overspeeding.

Generally, the platform does not seem to be well designed.

i
Reply to
Ignoramus7319

========== And this just in showing how the companies involved are "cooperating" with the Board of Inquiry to determine what went wrong.

Time for a little waterboarding?

-- Unka George (George McDuffee) .............................. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author. The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).

Reply to
F. George McDuffee

"Ignoramus7319" wrote

Thousands of rigs have punched thousands of wells before this one, and with far more primitive equipment. This is a comedy of errors. The design is not the question, the management override of the hands on men is.

What comes through to me is that the management of the platform was basically taken out of the hands of the men who had eyes on hands on ability to activate safety equipment at an early stage, the general approach being that anything that refined should not be left on the hands of a mere employee who is a only a technically skilled laborer.

And still, when the shit starts to fly, each man has to know his duties and responsibilities, and go do them. Here, there was a cluster jerk, each man running into the next who was only more confused as to what to do than he was, because the safety device they were supposed to deploy took a lot of time to get authorized, or it took approval of another level of management.

Replay the scenario, and the rig should have ideally shut in the well, sheared off it, and floated away. What kept it in place and caused it to blow up was redundancy of engineering that kept decisions from being made.

The motormen on a drilling rig, the ones who operated the EMD's had one of the toughest, easiest jobs on a rig. They were inside, warm all the time, with humming EMD's, clean well lit surroundings, and knew every sound and nuance of what was going on. The fact that the EMDs COULD be let run to a point of overspeeding speaks of someone defeating a safety limit for some other reason. Almost every motor package I entered on my years on platforms were clean enough that you almost had to take off your shoes to come in.

The hands not being on the floor to throw the first line of defense in the shut down process is inexcusable. One time, I saw a well kicking, just the exact same thing that happened here. I was sitting on my crane, and I saw drilling mud spurting three to four stories out of the mud separators. The hands and driller were all on the floor at a non-drilling stage, and sitting around the floor, smoking, sleeping, and not paying attention. I got on the crane whistle and held it open until the tool pusher came out to see what was happening, and I just pointed to the four story mud spurts. Boy, did that driller and those hands get a reaming! With their smoking on the floor, we could have gone up in one big Roman Candle like BP did.

Bottom line, your weakest link is your fail point, and when the engineering, or management department take away the decision making process from these lowly types because they deem them too uneducated to make these decisions, the dominoes will continue to fall.

I have reserved any judgement or opinion on this incident until these final facts have come out. Having speng years on offshore drilling rigs, I can clearly see that this is a management failure, and that failure is to let men whose own lives are at risk control the safety devices. Had they been allowed to activate these, the well would have been shut in, and we would have never heard about BP.

Steve

Reply to
Steve B

Maybe.. Some Rabbits would suck crankcase oil via the air filter, not just running away but also burning HOT and melting the glowplugs. Not Fun.

There was a recall.

Reply to
David Lesher

But, as far as I could tell, at least TWO operators were standing right AT the control panel, and apparently did nothing as the engines started wailing like banshees! That seems pretty amazing, as the article seems to state they knew a blowout was in progress and they could see the gas alarm panel indicating massive amounts of methane all over the platform. So, I'm not talking about an automatic system, but a manual intervention. Disabling automatic systems assumes that personnel will be able to react to an emergency.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

Well, maybe. It wasn't just paralysis at the moment of crisis, there was stuff done wrong starting, probably, before the well drilling was begun. I think there were 5 things (or more) wrong with the blowout preventer. At least 4 of those were known to BP and Transocean at the time. the BOP was 10 years old, and overdue for a major inspection. There was apparently another drill pipe left over from when the got a stock pipe several months before the accident that was passing through the BOP, and they had no idea it was in there. This may be why the shear ram couldn't cut the drill pipe. Of course, it is well-known that the testing of the final cement job was VERY poorly done, and a RAFT of abnormal indications were pretty much ignored. So, the BOP may have worked if activated early enough, and it may not have worked due to the multiple problems in the BOP and the extra drill pipe.

This was such a HUGE blowout, however, that there may have been no stopping it, once it got started with only seawater in the casing.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

Many diesels are turbocharged. If those seals fail, the engine ingests it's own lube oil and revs itself to destruction. It sounds like these diesels were running on the well gas. The normal engine governers would have shut off the fuel as soon as the speed increased. There are only two ways to stop this overspeed. 1) increase the mechainical load on the engine. This can be done in a car but not on a generator like these. 2) shut the air intake to the engine. That's also just about impossible on engines as big as these unless there's a system in place to do it.

John

Reply to
John

Not as amazing as it might first appear. It's human nature, even on the battlefield, to deny reality momentarily. Never having confronted a reality within the experience of this crew, they simple froze while their minds caught up with events. This is why emergency response systems in reactors (nuclear and others) are automated. Things go down hill faster than a human can observe, comprehend and react.

The assumption appears to be that automated systems over react in these circimstances. The article states that the automated alarms were dissabled in order to prevent false alarms from disrupting the sleep of the crew in the absense of a genuine emergency. What a bunch of BS.

Annunciator systems go off ALL THE TIME on commercial avation flights, negative control inputs are generated to provide the flight deck with the clues they need to correct problems and the passengers remain blissfully unaware of events. The flight deck, however, is well aware of a problem. Offshore rigs aren't any different.

Trans Ocean and BP were more than willing to put the crew at risk 99 times in 100 in the belief that an event that wouldn't lead to a loss of the rig would be a salvagable situation that only killed a few people.

The hardware, and the hole it was over, are more important than the safety or lives of a crew over the long haul. This is especially true as a financial matter. Death benefit payments for 50 families are a trivial matter when the cost of operating a rig in $250K per day and replacing it is a billion dollars or more. The math on this is extremely straight forward.

Reply to
John R. Carroll

"Jon Elson" wrote

I think there

There were enough things wrong with enough things that they should have shut down operations until everything had been corrected. But, as John Carroll said, the math would not let them do that. So what happened happened.

Steve

Reply to
Steve B

Many Diesels have one extra, last-chance emergency shutdown method, which is a system that locks open a valve in each cylinder. On Detroit Diesel engines so equipped, there is a linkage on the valve cover that swings spring-loaded catches against the valve spring retainers. As each valve is opened, the catch clicks into place, holding the valve open. I have seen a similar mechanism on some other make of Diesel engines.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

John R. Carroll wrote: (...)

That is some whopping benefit though. (...) "funeral expenses and a portion of the workers' lost wages."

--Winston

Reply to
Winston

I would ass-u-me that anything that large would have a fail-safe mechanical system of that sort.

Steve

Reply to
Steve B

When I worked in the oil patch,(about 40 years ago) all the diesels had a set of butterfly valves on the air intake. I think they were actuated when the blow out preventer was activated. It stopped them cold!

Reply to
Grumpy

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