BP's constant revisions of procedure caused chaos among the crew of the Deepwater Horizon days before the explosion that sank her and killed eleven men, according to John Guide, onshore manager for the rig.
"The operation is not going to succeed if we continue in this manner," wrote John Guide, who directed the Deepwater Horizon's operations from BP's Houston offices.
His supervisor, David Sims, told him to tell rig workers "to hang in there." Then Mr. Sims signed off to attend a dance practice, promising to call later in the day: "We're dancing to the Village People!" he wrote.
In a follow-up email that evening, Mr. Guide appeared mollified. "I totally concur," Mr. Guide wrote back. "I told them all we will work through it together. I want to do better."
Three days later, the rig blew up.
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The April 17 emails, which were given to government investigators by BP and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, are among the most direct evidence yet that BP workers on the rig were stressed out by the numerous changes, and had voiced their concerns to BP's operations managers in Houston. That could raise further questions about whether BP managers took enough time to consider the consequences of changes they were ordering on the rig, an issue investigators say contributed to the disaster.
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BP said, "Issues addressed in the emails have been the subject of numerous investigations, and the issues discussed are not inconsistent with any published findings."
The e-mail exchange, primarily concerned with matters of procedure and the constantly shifting plans for the well, reveals no indication that neither Guide nor Sims was anxious about the rig's safety.
In the morning on April 17, Guide wrote Sims to complain that there had been "so many last minute changes to the operation" that on-board managers had "finally come to their wits end."
Sims answered the e-mail an hour-and-a-half later, suggesting that the well team keep a positive outlook "until this well is over."
"It should be obvious to all," he wrote, "that we could not plan ahead for the well conditions we're seeing, so we have to accept some level of last minute changes."
No. Who would think that the difficulty of controlling a well miles beneath a mile of deepwater, and already known to be under abnormally extreme pressures, would be hard to predict?
Guide's lawyer, when questioned about the e-mail exchange, said that his client has...
"...done everything he could to bend over backwards to be as helpful as he can to any legitimate inquiry." Mr. Sims couldn't immediately be reached for comment. BP would not discuss whether the two men continued to hold those jobs, saying it was a personnel matter.
BP made several changes to the design of the well in the weeks leading up to the disaster, ultimately choosing an option that investigators say was riskier than other alternatives. The company also repeatedly altered its procedure for finishing up the well, which sowed confusion aboard the rig, according to subsequent testimony from workers. And a week before the explosion, BP made a series of rapid-fire changes to its drilling permit that were unusual, according to a Journal analysis of federal permit data going back to 2004.
BP has denied that its changes increased risk on the well or confused the crew.
Safety experts have long said that frequent procedural changes increase the risk of an accident, because they can create confusion and affect other operations in unintended ways.
Both BP's internal report and that of the National Oil Spill Commission assert that, while there were procedures for dealing with changes in operations on the Deepwater Horizon, the rig workers were inconsistent about following those procedures. The Spill Commission's report says, "Such decisions appear to have been made by the BP Macondo team in ad hoc fashion without any formal risk analysis or internal expert review. This appears to have been a key causal factor of the blowout."
To Fred Bartlit, general counsel for the Commission, Guide's e-mail "further confirms the commission's finding that BP poorly managed last-minute design and procedural changes at Macondo." Not surprisingly, BP's own report minimizes the effect of the constant changes, saying they had no bearing on the disaster.
BP's report did cite critical mistakes in the final hours before the rig blew on April 20 that were made by the same on-board managers that Mr. Guide said in his email were at wit's end. One of them, Robert Kaluza, later expressed confusion about the procedural changes in an interview with BP investigators after the explosion, according to notes from interviews reviewed by the Journal.
Mr. Kaluza has refused to testify before federal investigators, citing his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. His lawyer declined to comment on the emails.
In his email, Mr. Guide said the situation had gotten bad enough that one engineer on the rig, Brian Morel, was considering asking for a transfer or quitting altogether. Mr. Morel couldn't immediately be reached for comment.
"Brian has called me numerous times trying to make sense of all the insanity," Mr. Guide wrote.
Mr. Sims said Mr. Guide should remind Mr. Morel that "this is a great learning opportunity" and that, "the same issues—or worse—exist anywhere else."
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