Usually, I get my news from dailykos before it appears in our local paper, but an article in the Fresno Bee today brought me startling information: Oil spill probe traces miscues...BP diagrams were flawed, keeping workers from fixing blowout preventer. The BEE is a McClatchy paper, and I was interested to see the original McClatchy headline (5/12): BP had wrong diagram to close blowout preventer. Wrong, not merely "flawed," but at least the BEE's article about "miscues" was the top front-page story.
According to the article, it is not yet known who altered the diagrams British Petroleum got from Transocean, the owner of the blowout preventer:
Who ordered the alterations in the blowout preventer, the 500,000-pound mass of gears and hydraulic valves that sits atop an underwater well and is intended to snap the pipe if disaster threatens, was the subject of dispute at Wednesday's hearing [by the House Energy and Commerce Committee chaired by Henry Waxman].
Details about the alterations and their consequences were explained by Rep. Bart Stupak:
Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, said the changes prevented BP's engineers from activating a "variable bore ram" intended to close tight around the pipe and seal it.
"When they investigated why their attempts failed to activate the bore ram," Stupak said of BP engineers, "they learned that the device had been modified. A useless test ram not the variable bore ram had been connected to the socket that was supposed to activate the variable bore ram."
"An entire day’s worth of precious time had been spent engaging rams that closed the wrong way."
Stupak said that BP officials told subcommittee investigators that "after the accident, they asked Transocean for drawings of the blowout preventer."
"Because of the modifications, the drawings they received didn’t match the structure on the ocean floor," Stupak said. "BP said they wasted many hours figuring this out."
Transocean said any alterations would have come at BP's request, which BP denied requesting. On Tuesday, a drilling engineer for the Mineral Management Service, which oversees offshore drilling, told an inquiry in Louisiana that BP and MMS would have needed to approve any changes.
Also McClatchy reports that on Wednesday, Coast Guard inspectors testified that regulations for offshore drilling rigs largely date to 1978 and have not kept pace with technological advances. "The pace of the technology has outrun the current regulations," Lt. Cmdr. Michael Odom told a joint panel of the Coast Guard and U.S. Minerals Management Service.
Just maybe these various investigations will lead to some updated regulations. As the McClatchy article says, documents provided by BP to the House Committee reveal:
a litany of worrisome events and findings that were at play on the night of the well explosion and pipe rupture...a complex cascade of deep-sea equipment failures and procedural problems.