Deepwater Horizon Offshore Oil Rig Explosion: 20 April 2010 - Gulf Of Mexico

1. New Orleans:                     155.152 Miles from Deep Horizon
2. Baton Rouge:                    205 .088 Miles from Deep Horizon
3. Mobile, Alabama:              135.729 Miles from Deep Horizon
4. Tuscaloosa, Alabama:     311.778 Miles from Deep Horizon

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• [1] -  In the minutes after a cascade of gas explosions crippled the Deepwater Horizon on April 20, confusion reigned on the drilling platform. Flames were spreading rapidly, power was out, and terrified workers were leaping into the dark, oil-coated sea. Capt. Curt Kuchta, the vessel's commander, huddled on the bridge with about 10 other managers and crew members.

• [2] -  Andrea Fleytas, a 23-year-old worker who helped operate the rig's sophisticated navigation machinery, suddenly noticed a glaring oversight: No one had issued a distress signal to the outside world, she recalls in an interview. Ms. Fleytas grabbed the radio and began calling over a signal monitored by the Coast Guard and other vessels.

• [3] -  "Mayday, Mayday. This is Deepwater Horizon. We have an uncontrollable fire."

• NOTE:  When Capt. Kuchta realized what Andrea  had done;  she says  he reprimanded her:According to Andrea:  Captain Kuchta said:  "I didn't give you authority to do that." he said.   She responded: "I'm sorry."
  

• In the minutes before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, almost no one on board realized that serious trouble was brewing, other than a few men on the drilling floor—the uppermost of three levels on the massive structure. The sea was as still as glass. A cool wind blew faintly from the north. Capt. Kuchta was hosting two BP executives on board for a ceremony honoring the rig for seven years without a serious accident.

• Nearly 20 men, many of them close friends, were operating the drilling apparatus, which already had bored through more than 13,000 feet of rock about 5,000 feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico. No alarms had sounded that day signaling gas on the platform.

• At about 9:47 p.m., workers all over the rig heard a sudden hiss of methane gas. Methane is often present in the ground in and near reservoirs of crude oil, and managing the threat is a regular part of drilling.

• Within two minutes, pressure caused by gas in the well pipe had spiked dramatically, drilling records indicate. A torrent of methane gas struck the rig. Power failed throughout the vessel. "Everything started jumping up and down and rocking us," said Kevin Senegal, 45, a tank cleaner, in an interview.

• Out on the water, 40 feet away, a 260-foot supply ship called the Damon B. Bankston was tethered to the rig by a hose. That ship's captain said in an interview that he saw drilling "mud," which is used as a counterweight to gas in the well, flying out of the drilling derrick like a "volcano." He radioed the bridge of the Deepwater Horizon. He was told there was "trouble with the well" and the Bankston should move 150 meters back. Then the channel went silent.

• Micah Sandell, a 40-year-old with a wife and three children, watched with alarm from the rig's gantry crane, a massive device that moved across the main deck on a track. He radioed his crew to move away from the derrick.

• Down on the deck, Heber Morales, 33, a former Marine from Texas, turned to the worker beside him. "Oh, man. That's not good," he said. The two moved away from the derrick.

• Up in the crane, Mr. Sandell saw another worker on the deck, assistant driller Donald Clark, a 48-year-old former soybean farmer from Newellton, La., bolt for a set of stairs leading for the area where workers were fighting to control the well.

• Ms. Fleytas, one of only three female workers in the 126-member crew, was on the bridge monitoring the rig's exact location and stability. Briefly, all the equipment went black, then a backup battery kicked on. She and her coworkers checked their monitors, which indicated no engines or thrusters were operational. Multiple gas alarms were sounding. One of the six huge engines that kept the floating platform stable was revving wildly.

• No methane had been detected on the Deepwater Horizon before the massive gas jolt. So no "Level 1" gas emergency—according to Transocean safety regulations, when "dangerous" levels of gas are detected in the well—had been declared, according to crew members. That meant the crew had gotten no general alert to prepare for trouble and no order to shut down anything that might ignite the gas.

• The rig's regulations state that in the event of such an emergency, the two top managers—on April 20 they were BP's senior person on the rig, Donald Vidrine, and Transocean's installation manager, Mr. Harrell—were to go to the drilling floor and evaluate the situation jointly. But once the gas hit, neither was able to get to the area.

• When the pressure in the well spiked suddenly, the drilling crew had limited options and little time to act. Jason Anderson, a 35-year-old "toolpusher" who was supervising the crew on the oil platform's drilling floor, tried to divert gas away from the rig by closing the "bag," a thick membrane that surrounds a key part of the drill mechanism. That didn't work.

• Four emergency calls were made from the rig floor to senior crew members in the moments before the blast, according to a BP document reviewed by the Journal. One went to Mr. Vidrine, according to notes about a statement he gave the Coast Guard that were reviewed by the Journal. The rig worker, who isn't identified in the notes, told him the drilling crew was "getting mud back," a sign that gas was flooding into the well. At that point, Mr. Vidrine rushed for the drilling floor, but already "mud was everywhere," he told the Coast Guard. At about 9:47 p.m., workers all over the rig heard a sudden hiss of methane gas. Methane is often present in the ground in and near reservoirs of crude oil, and managing the threat is a regular part of drilling.

• Within two minutes, pressure caused by gas in the well pipe had spiked dramatically, drilling records indicate. A torrent of methane gas struck the rig. Power failed throughout the vessel. "Everything started jumping up and down and rocking us," said Kevin Senegal, 45, a tank cleaner, in an interview.

• At about 9:50 p.m., Stephen Curtis, the 40-year-old assistant driller working with Mr. Anderson, called the rig's senior toolpusher, Randy Ezell, who was in his sleeping quarters, according to a statement given by Mr. Ezell to the Coast Guard. Mr. Curtis said that methane was surging into the well and workers were on the verge of losing control.

• Two rig workers who later discussed the matter with Mr. Ezell said he was told that Mr. Anderson was going to trigger the blowout preventer, a 450-ton device designed to slice the drill pipe at the ocean floor and seal the well in less than a minute. If triggered in time, it might have been enough to prevent the explosions, or at least limit the scale of the disaster, say some drilling experts. Mr. Ezell prepared to go to the drilling floor, according to his statement.

• Seconds later, the methane ignited, possibly triggered by the revving engine. That set off an explosion that blew away critical sections of the Deepwater Horizon, sheared off at least one engine, set large parts of the rig on fire and allowed oil to begin spewing into the sea.

• Mr. Curtis, an ex-military man who enjoyed turkey hunting, and Mr. Anderson, a father of two who was planning to leave the Deepwater Horizon for good at the end of his 21-day rotation, almost certainly were killed instantly, according to other workers. So was veteran driller Dewey Revette, 48, from State Line, Miss. Six men working nearby also died. They included 22-year-old Shane Roshto and Karl Kleppinger, Jr., 38, from Natchez, Miss., and Mr. Clark, the assistant driller who had rushed to the stairs to help out.

• Dale Burkeen, a 37-year-old Mississippian who operated the rig's tall starboard crane, had been trying to get out of harm's way when the blast hit. It blew him off a catwalk, other workers say, and he fell more than 50 feet to the deck, where he died.

• A series of detonations followed. The motor room was wrecked. Steel doors were blown off their hinges. The wheel on one door flew off and struck a worker. Crew members were hurled across rooms, leaving many with broken bones, gashes and serious burns.

• When he heard the first explosion, toolpusher Wyman Wheeler, who was scheduled to go home the next day, was in his bunk. He got up to investigate. The second blast blew the door off his quarters, breaking his shoulder and right leg in five places, according to family members. Other workers scooped him up and carried him toward the lifeboat deck on a stretcher.

• The explosions knocked gantry-crane operator Mr. Sandell out of his seat and across the cab. As he fled down a spiral staircase to the deck, another explosion sent him into the air. He fell more than 10 feet, then got up to run. "Around me all over the deck, I couldn't see nothing but fire," he said in an interview. "There was no smoke, only flames." He ran for the lifeboat deck.

• From the bridge, Chief Mate David Young ran outside to investigate and to suit up for firefighting. After he encountered only one other crew member in gear, he returned to the bridge. Crew members say no significant firefighting efforts were undertaken. "We had no fire pumps. There was nothing to do but abandon ship," said Capt. Kuchta, in testimony at a Coast Guard inquiry on Thursday.

• As workers poured out of their quarters, many found their routes to open decks blocked. Ceiling tiles and insulation were blown everywhere. In some areas, fire-suppression systems were discharging carbon dioxide. Stairways were gone.

• According to many workers, most crew members didn't get clear direction from the bridge about what to do for several minutes. Finally, the public-address system began to blare: "Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire on the rig floor. This is not a drill."

• Many crew members couldn't reach their designated assembly areas. Scores scrambled instead toward the only two accessible lifeboats, which hung by cables 75 feet above the water on one side of the rig. Each enclosed and motorized boat could hold about 75 passengers.

• "The scene was very chaotic," said worker Carlos Ramos in an interview. "People were in a state of panic." Flames were shooting out of the well hole to a height of 250 feet or more. Debris was falling. One crane boom on the rig melted from the heat and folded over.

• Injured workers were scattered around the deck. Others were yelling that the rig was going to blow up. "There was no chain of command. Nobody in charge," Mr. Ramos said.

• "People were just coming out of nowhere and just trying to get on the lifeboats," said Darin Rupinski, one of the operators of the rig's positioning system, in an interview. "One guy was actually hanging off the railing…. People were saying that we needed to get out of there."

• At one point, a Transocean executive was standing partly in the lifeboat, helping injured workers off the rig and telling Mr. Rupinski not to lower the boat yet. Rig workers piling in were shouting for him to get the boat down. "There had to be at least 50 people in the boat, yelling, screaming at you to lower the boat," Mr. Rupinski recalled. "And you have a person outside saying, 'We have to wait.'"

• Terrified workers began jumping directly into the sea—a 75-foot leap into the darkness. Mr. Rupinski radioed the bridge that workers were going overboard.

• A Transocean spokesman said the company hasn't yet been able to determine exactly what happened in the lifeboat loading area.

• Capt. Kuchta and about 10 other executives and crew members, including Ms. Fleytas, were gathered on the bridge, which was not yet threatened by fire. When word reached the bridge that workers were jumping, Ms. Fleytas's supervisor issued a "man overboard" call.

• The Bankston, now positioned hundreds of feet from the burning rig, picked up the call. Officers on that vessel had seen what appeared to be shiny objects—the reflective life vests on rig workers—tumbling from the platform into the water. The Bankston put a small boat into the water and began a rescue operation.

• Messrs. Vidrine and Harrell, the two highest ranking executives, appeared on the bridge. Mr. Vidrine later told the Coast Guard that a panel on the bridge showed that the drilling crew, all of whom were dead by then, had already closed the "bag," the thick rubber membrane around a section of the well.

• But the emergency disconnect, which would sever the drilling pipe and shut down the well, had not been successfully triggered. Some crew members on the bridge said the disconnect needed to be hit, and a higher-ranking manager said to do so, according to an account given to the Coast Guard. Then another crew member said the cutoff couldn't be hit without permission from Mr. Harrell, who then gave the OK. At 9:56 p.m., the button finally was pushed, with no apparent effect, according to an internal BP document.

• Mr. Young, the chief mate who had left the bridge to survey the fire, told Capt. Kuchta that the fire was "uncontrollable," and that everyone needed to abandon the rig immediately, according to two workers on the bridge. Under Transocean safety regulations, the decision to evacuate was to be made by Capt. Kuchta and Mr. Harrell.

• Capt. Kuchta didn't immediately issue the order, even though at least one lifeboat had already pushed away, according to several people on the bridge. At the Coast Guard hearing Thursday, several crew members said they weren't certain who issued the abandon ship order or whether one was ever given. Capt. Kuchta didn't return calls seeking comment, but in his testimony said it was obvious to all by that time that the crew should evacuate.

• Alarmed at the situation, Ms. Fleytas recalled in the interview, she turned on the public-address system and said: "We are abandoning the rig."

• Capt. Kuchta told everyone who remained on the bridge to head for the lifeboats, according one person who was there.

• One boat was long gone. When they reached the boarding area, the second was motoring away, according to several witnesses. Ten people were left on the rig, including Mr. Wheeler, the injured toolpusher, who was lying on a gurney.

• The deck pulsed with heat. The air was thick with smoke, and the surface of the water beneath the rig—covered with oil and gas—was burning. Crew members attached a 25-foot life raft to a winch, swung it over a railing and inflated it. Mr. Wheeler was lifted in and several others climbed in with him. As the raft began descending, Ms. Fleytas jumped in. The remaining people on the rig, including Capt. Kuchta, leapt into the Gulf.

1. Douglas H. Brown, Transocean's chief mechanic on the Deepwater Horizon rig, said key representatives from both companies had a "skirmish" during an 11 a.m. meeting on April 20. Less than 11 hours later, the well had a blowout, an uncontrolled release of oil and gas, killing 11 workers.
   
   
2. Mr. Brown said Transocean's crew leaders—including the rig operator's top manager, Jimmy W. Harrell—strongly objected to a decision by BP's top representative, or "company man," over how to start removing heavy drilling fluid and replacing it with lighter seawater from a riser pipe connected to the well head. Such pipes act as conduits between the rig and the wellhead at the ocean floor, and carry drilling fluid in and out of the well.
   
   Removing heavy drilling fluid prior to temporarily sealing up a well and abandoning it is normal, but questions have emerged about whether the crew started the process without taking other precautionary measures against gas rising into the pipe.
   
   
3. It wasn't clear what Mr. Harrell objected to specifically about BP's instructions, but the rig's primary driller, Dewey Revette, and tool pusher, Miles Randall Ezell, both of Transocean, also disagreed with BP, Mr. Brown said. However, BP was in charge of the operation and the BP representative prevailed, Mr. Brown said.  "The company man was basically saying, 'This is how it's gonna be,' " said Mr. Brown, who didn't recall the name of the BP representative in question.
   
   Mr. Brown said he didn't normally pay close attention to drilling discussions during the 11 a.m. meetings, which detailed all events on the rig that day. But he said he recalled the dispute, and the cynical reaction of Mr. Harrell as he walked away afterward, in light of the April 20 accident.
   
   
   
4. Mr. Harrell "pretty much grumbled in his manner, 'I guess that is what we have those pinchers for,' " Mr. Brown testified. He said it was a reference to the shear rams on the drilling operation's blowout preventer, which are supposed to sever the main pipe in case of a disaster.
   
   
5. The blowout preventer failed to stop gas from rising to the surface, causing the explosion, BP has said.
   
   
6. Mr. Harrell hasn't testified and declined repeated requests for comment. Donald Vidrine, listed on Transocean's documents as BP's "company man" on April 20, couldn't be reached. Mr. Revette was among the 11 workers who were killed.
   

• As much as 1 million times the normal level of methane gas has been found in some regions near the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.   Texas A&M University oceanography professor John Kessler, just back from a 10-day research expedition near the BP Plc (BP.L) oil spill in the gulf, says methane gas levels in some areas are "astonishingly high."  In some areas, a  crew of 12 scientists found concentrations that were 100,000 times higher than normal.

• Methane occurs naturally in sea water and dissolves in seawater;   but high concentrations can encourage the growth of microbes that gobble up oxygen needed by marine life.  Kessler said oxygen depletions have not reached a critical level yet, but the oil is still spilling into the Gulf, now at a rate of as much as 60,000 barrels a day, according to U.S. government estimates.

1. During the first weeks following the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico, oil drifting from the site of the incident usually headed west and northwest to the Mississippi River Delta. But in the third week of May, currents drew some of the oil southeast. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the southward spread increased the chance that the oil would become mixed up with the Loop Current, which might carry the oil toward Florida and the Keys.
   
   
2. The Loop Current pushes up into the Gulf from the Caribbean Sea. The current’s tropical warmth makes it stand out from the surrounding cooler waters of the Gulf of Mexico in this image. The current loses its northward momentum about mid-way through the gulf, and bends back on itself to flow south. It joins warm waters flowing eastward between Florida and Cuba, which then merge with the Gulf Stream Current on its journey up the East Coast.
   
   
3. At a May 18 press conference, NOAA reported that “satellite imagery on May 17 indicates that the main bulk of the oil is dozens of miles away from the Loop Current, but that a tendril of light oil has been transported down close to the Loop Current. NOAA is conducting aerial observations today to determine with certainty whether oil has actually entered the Loop Current…. The proximity of the southeast tendril of oil to the Loop Current indicates that oil is increasingly likely to become entrained.”
   
   
4. The ABOVE  image shows the location of the leaking well and the approximate location of the southern arm of the oil slick on May 17 (based on natural-color MODIS imagery). Oil was very close to the Loop Current, whose warm waters appear in yellow near the bottom of the image. However, there is also an eddy of cooler water (purple) circulating counterclockwise at the top of the Loop Current. According to NOAA, “Some amount of any oil drawn into the Loop Current would likely remain in the eddy, heading to the northeast, and some would enter the main Loop Current, where it might eventually head to the Florida Strait.”
   

• Updated, May 20: In a web posting, NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration confirmed that "a small portion of the oil slick has reached the Loop Current in the form of light to very light sheens.”

1. Part of the Gulf Stream, the Loop Current is a warm ocean current in the Gulf of Mexico that flows northward between Cuba and the Yucatán  peninsula, moves north into the Gulf of Mexico, loops west and south before exiting to the east through the Florida Straits.
   
   
2. A related feature is an area of warm water called an "Eddy" or "Loop Current ring" that separates from the Loop Current, somewhat randomly. These rings then drift to the west at speeds of about 5 cm/s (0.18 km/h or 0.11 mph) and bump into the coast of Texas or Mexico.

• The current begins in the gap between Cuba and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Each second, millions of gallons of warm water shoot from the Caribbean Sea through the gap and into the Gulf of Mexico.

• Underwater features called shelves, along with the Earth's rotation, help turn the current east toward the Florida peninsula.

• Even using the more favorable numbers for the most recent 64 months, 25 percent of monthly inspections were not performed. The first set of data supplied to AP represented a 59 percent shortfall  in the number of inspections.

• In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by AP, the agency has released copies of only three inspection reports — those conducted in January, February and April. According to the documents, inspectors spent two hours or less each time they visited the massive rig.  Some information appeared to be "whited out," without explanation.

• Since the explosion, the agency has reiterated several times the inspection once-per-month assertion, which appeared on its website at least as early as 1999.

• In an e-mail to AP, an Interior Department official emphasized with italics  that the MMS inspects rigs "at least once a month" when drilling is under way.  Monthly inspections of offshore drilling rigs are an agency policy, though not required by regulation, said David Dykes, chief of the agency's office of safety management for the Gulf region.

• Last week, at a joint Coast Guard-MMS investigatory hearing in Kenner, La., MMS official Jason Mathews asked Michael Saucier, MMS's regional supervisor for field operations in the Gulf, "And how often do we perform drilling inspections in the Gulf of Mexico?"  "We perform them at a minimum once a month, but we can do more if need be," Saucier said.
  

• The job falls to the 55 inspectors in the Gulf who are supposed to visit the 90 drilling rigs once per month and the approximately 3,500 oil production platforms once per year.

• The Deepwater Horizon's inspection frequency numbers struck Kenneth Arnold, a veteran offshore drilling consultant and engineer.  "I'd certainly question it," he said. "I'd ask, 'Why aren't you doing it?'"

• When the AP did ask, MMS and Interior would not answer directly.  Instead providing a set of conditions when a rig would not typically be inspected — including during bad weather, when it is jumping among short-term jobs, when a rig is preparing to drill or is done drilling but hasn't left for another site.

• Transocean Ltd., which owned the Deepwater Horizon and leased it to BP PLC, would not provide a detailed accounting of the rig's activity history. According to RigData, a Texas firm that monitors offshore activity in the Gulf, the Deepwater Horizon was working approximately 2,896 days of the 3,131 days since it started its first well — about 93 percent of the time. That number represents the total number of days between when the Deepwater Horizon broke the sea floor during a drilling operation to when it was released to another site.

• A summary of the inspection history that the MMS officials provided AP said the Deepwater Horizon received six "incidents of noncompliance" — the agency's term for citations.

• The most serious occurred July 16, 2002, when the rig was shut down because required pressure tests had not been conducted on parts of the rig's blowout preventer — the device that was supposed to stop oil from gushing out if drilling operations experienced problems.  That citation was "major," said Arnold, who characterized the overall safety record related by MMS as strong.

• A citation on Sept. 19, 2002, also involved the blowout preventer. The inspector issued a warning because "problems or irregularities observed during the testing of BOP system and actions taken to remedy such problems or irregularities are not recorded in the driller's report or referenced documents."  During his Senate testimony last week, Transocean CEO Steven Newman said the blowout preventer was modified in 2005.

1. Two on May 16, 2002, for not conducting well control drills as required and not performing "all operations in a safe and workmanlike manner."
   
   
2. One on Aug. 6, 2003, for discharging pollutants into the Gulf.
   
   
3. One on March 20, 2007, which prompted inspectors to shut down some machinery because of improper electrical grounding.

• Late last week, several days after providing the detailed accounting, Interior officials told AP that in fact there had been only five citations, that one had been rescinded. The officials said they could not immediately say which of the six had been rescinded.

• The agency's problems with providing information extends to the data on display on its website. For example, the accounting of accident and incident reports is incomplete, making it very difficult to perform a thorough data analysis of the agency's performance and preventing a full accurate tracking of safety records of the rigs.

• Data problems date back at least a decade. According to John Shultz, who as a graduate student in the late 1990s studied MMS' inspection program in depth for his dissertation, the agency's data infrastructure was severely limited.

• "The thing I regret most is that, to my knowledge, MMS has not fixed the data management problem they have," said Shultz, who now works in the Department of Energy's nuclear program. "If you have the data you need, the analysis becomes fairly straightforward. Without the data, you're simply stuck with conjectures."

• Whatever the correct citation total — five or six — the Deepwater Horizon's record was exemplary, according to MMS officials, who said the rig was never on inspectors' informal "watch list" for problem rigs. In fact, last year MMS awarded the rig an award for its safety history.

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