Oil Spill update from Mark

Mark went back to work on Wednesday and has been checking in with his 30+ years of contacts in the drilling industry.  Here's his take on the rig explosion:

"I have been getting lots of scuttlebutt from many sources on the Transocean Horizon. An interesting sequence of events appears to have led up to the loss of the rig and 11 hands. They had just finished running a hole liner to 18,000 feet and cemented it in place. At the bottom of the liner there is a "shoe" that has a one way valve that lets the cement go down, but prevents anything from coming up.  They then flushed the heavy drilling mud out of the liner and replaced it with salt water -- not a good idea until the well is proven static. The heavy mud holds the pressure down. Salt water cannot.

Either before the cement could set up, or as a result of a bad cement job, the valve in the shoe failed, letting the oil blow up through the water and escape. The driller probably activated the BOP's (blow out preventers) and hit the Total Rig Shut Down Button before dying in the explosion. The blow out preventers didn't work, but the shut down did. It killed all the rig power to prevent an explosion / fire. Unfortunately the emergency generator was set on "auto" instead of "manual" (where it should have been, given that they were having problems with the blow out preventers). It started up and the arcing set the rig on fire, causing the explosion.

I heard from another source that the blow out preventers were defective and had been for some time (emphasis added).  This industry generally, through my experience, does the job correctly, BUT there is always some fool who puts costs ahead of safety because "he always got away with it."  Some Transocean Fat Cat has the lives of 11 hands and the destruction of the entire Louisiana coast mashland on his conscience -- or should."

He sent along this copy of a report from an employee of the company who tried unsuccessfully to fix the blow out preventors on the sunken rig a number of times.  Writing is obviously NOT this guy's main talent, but what he's saying is that the people on the rig who were working with them on the blow out preventors were unqualified, and that the reason the BOP's could not be repaired was that the rig personnel were unwilling to shut down drilling (and put income on "hold") long enough to do so.

Bottom line:  like the banks in the financial crisis, money came first.   It always comes down to that, doesn't it?