Fox News: Warning Alarm on BP Oil Rig Was DISABLED Long Before Blast ... !! .
U.S. .World U.S. PoliticsEducationBay AreaChicagoN.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports Opinion Arts Style Travel Jobs Real Estate Autos Oil Rig Alarm Was Not Fully Turned On, Worker SaysBy ROBBIE BROWN Published: July 23, 2010 Facebook Twitter Recommend Sign In to E-Mail
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Share Close LinkedinDiggMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalink. KENNER, La. — The emergency alarm on the Deepwater Horizon was not fully activated on the day the oil rig caught fire and exploded, triggering the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a rig worker on Friday told a government panel investigating the accident.
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Interactive Map Tracking the Oil Spill in the Gulf .Multimedia Feature: Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Multimedia Collection Related Tropical Storm in Gulf Halts Spill Response Efforts (July 24, 2010) Official Denies BP Put Cost Ahead of Safety at Oil Rig (July 23, 2010) Times Topic: Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill (2010)The worker, Mike Williams, chief electronics technician aboard the Transocean rig, said the general safety alarm was habitually set to “inhibited” to avoid waking up the crew with late-night sirens.
“They did not want people woke up at 3 a.m. from false alarms,” Mr. Williams told the federal panel of investigators in this New Orleans suburb. Consequently, the alarm did not sound during the emergency, leaving workers to relay information through the loudspeaker system.
A six-member panel is investigating the April 20 disaster that killed 11 people and unleashed the largest oil spill in United States history. At hearings this week, crew members have described repeated failures in the weeks before the disaster, including power losses, computer crashes and leaking emergency equipment.
On Friday, Mr. Williams added several new details about the equipment on the vessel, testifying that another Transocean official turned a critical system for removing dangerous gas from the drilling shack to “bypass mode.” When he questioned that decision, Mr. Williams said, he was reprimanded.
“No, the damn thing’s been in bypass for five years,” he recalled being told by Mark Hay, the subsea supervisor. “Why’d you even mess with it?”
He recalled that Mr. Hay added: “The entire fleet runs them in ‘bypass.’ ”
Problems existed from the beginning of drilling the well, Mr. Williams said. For months, the computer system had been locking up, producing what the crew deemed the “blue screen of death.”
“It would just turn blue,” he said. “You’d have no data coming through.”
Replacement hardware had been ordered but not yet installed by the time of the disaster, he said.
At Thursday’s hearings, government investigators pressed a BP official who supervised the rig about whether the company took shortcuts to save money and time by selecting riskier equipment.
The official, John Guide, the well team leader, denied that BP had chosen a potentially risky type of well casing over more traditional equipment because it would save the company three days and $7 million to $10 million.
“It just happened to be a case where it also saved money,” Mr. Guide said. The casing’s lower cost played no role in the decision, he said, even though the company considered it the “best economic case.”
The panel has focused this week on whether financial calculations may have trumped safety considerations in the weeks before the disaster. When the rig exploded April 20, BP was 43 days behind schedule, costing the company about $1 million a day in rig rental rates, company officials say.
The federal investigators announced Thursday that two BP officials had been named “parties of interest,” making them potential targets of the investigation. The two men, Robert Kaluza, the well site manager on the rig, and Patrick O’Bryan, the vice president for drilling and completions, are the first individuals to be named from BP. They could not be reached for comment.
Also on Thursday, the widow of one of the 11 rig workers killed in the explosion testified that her husband had felt pressure to continue drilling for oil despite frequent equipment malfunctions and setbacks. The widow, Natalie Roshto, said her husband, Shane Roshto, a 22-year-old roustabout for Transocean, the rig’s owner, expressed grave concerns about work conditions before his death.
“From Day 1, he deemed this the well from hell,” Ms. Roshto said. “He said Mother Nature just didn’t want to be drilled here.”
Mr. Williams said Friday that the term “well from hell” was common aboard the rig. He said the phrase was coined by Stephen Curtis, a senior tool pusher, while working on a previous well called Devil’s Tower, but he also used it to refer to the failed well. Mr. Curtis died in the disaster. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/us/24hearings.html
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