Numerous reports and investigations have established that BP and government officials generally didn't know what they were doing in their early efforts to stop last year's Gulf spill. Now the experts who examined the blowout preventer from the Deepwater Horizon have concluded that some of those attempts to stop the flow may have inadvertently opened a wider path for the oil to gush.
It's important that two new industry-driven entities created to respond to future spills, as well as BOP engineers, absorb the lessons of BP's early bumbling.
According to Norway-based Det Norske Veritas, which performed an autopsy of the well's blowout preventer, BP and the government opened a new, larger path for the oil when they sliced through the pipe nine days after the blowout.
The autopsy showed that when the blowout first happened, some seals at the bottom of the BOP closed around the drill pipe, limiting the gusher to just the 5.5-inch pipe. But blind shear rams higher up in the BOP, which were supposed to cut and seal the pipe, didn't work because the blowout had knocked the pipe off center and the rams could only achieve a partial cut.
Engineers were able to activate another set of slicers, called the casing shear rams, on April 29 -- nine days after the blowout. But those rams are designed simply to cut the pipe and have no seals. That left oil and gas free to flow through the 15-inch wellbore. Over the next 78 days, the hydrocarbons eroded the underside of the blind shear ram and made larger pathways for the oil to flow.
Several experts said that would certainly have increased the rate of the oil flow, though Benton Baugh, president of Houston-based Radoil Tool Co. Inc., said erosion inside the BOP would have increased the flow over time anyway.
Mr. Baugh said that activating the casing shear rams might not have been the best option, "but hindsight is 20/20."
That's true, and obviously no one can change the past. But the industry and regulators can learn from the problems inside this BOP to review how the devices work and make adjustments if necessary.