It might be worth reviewing the sordid history that led up to the discredited autopsy results. When Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) chose DNV to do the BOP autopsy there were serious conflict of interest questions raised.
In 2007, DNV inspected and recertified the Deepwater Horizon's [owned by Transocean] safety procedures. In 2009, Transocean hired DNV to study the reliability of subsea blowout preventers. That same year, DNV named a Transocean vice president, N. Pharr Smith, to be chairman of DNV's rig owners' committee, which provides "input" to DNV's rule-making process.
The Chemical Safety Board (CSB), a small government agency asked by Congress to investigate the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe pointed out the obvious to anyone not a part of the unholy alliance between the Department of the Interior's BOEMRE and the oil industry.
"It's of particular concern that DNV has done a specific analysis of the rig back in 2007, has opined separately on the reliability of BOPs and specifically taken the position that a second blind shear ram would only marginally make a difference," said Rafael Moure-Eraso, chairman of the Chemical Safety Board. "We think those positions are a conflict that should have been reviewed early."
Unhappy that the CSB riffraff had been invited to the in-crowd's party, the Department of the Interior sought to exclude them from meaningful access to the BOP autopsy. I guess they thought that CSB had been a meanie to its BP buddies in its investigation of BP's Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 workers and injuring more than 170 others.
The Interior Department has also been squabbling with the Chemical Safety Board over access to the blowout preventer autopsy.
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The access is important, CSB officials said, because many tests can't be undone or repeated. Citing limited space and "safety concerns," Interior said that it would allow only one expert from the CSB, which often leads investigations of complex industrial accidents, including the 2005 explosion at BP's Texas City oil refinery southeast of Houston.
Showing absolutely no embarrassment whatsoever about it's obvious conflict of industry DNV blithely charged forward by hiring one of its Transocean's buddy's managers to help out with the BOP autopsy.
DNV later arranged for Owen McWhorter, onetime subsea supervisor on the Deepwater Horizon, to assist in the testing.
According to documents obtained by the Houston Chronicle, the Transocean employee [McWhorter] has manipulated equipment on the 50-foot-tall, 300-ton blowout preventer, while a government contractor runs it through a battery of tests in New Orleans.
Again, the CSB valiantly took on the role of being the skunk at the insiders' picnic.
The government instructed DNV to terminate its contract with McWhorter after concerns were raised last week by the Chemical Safety Board, a federal agency also investigating the disaster.
The decision to use the Transocean employee as a consultant appeared to violate a conflict-of-interest provision in the government's contract with DNV, acknowledged Michael Farber, a senior adviser for the ocean energy bureau, in a letter to the Chemical Safety Board.
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Board Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso had said that while McWhorter wasn't on the rig when it blew up, he "still had responsibility" for the blowout preventer in the preceding weeks and months.
The Department of Interior couldn't have set things up more tidily to get the responsible parties off the hook. Transocean is sitting pretty because the investigator, DNV, shares their responsibility for the BOP being in working order. Cameron, the BOP's manufacturer, and BP are in hog heaven because it will be a walk in their park for their lawyers to argue to a jury that anything DNV finds holding them responsible is because DNV has a big dog in the BOP autopsy hunt. The public is the loser because the chances of there being an impartial BOP autopsy is slim to none with slim hightailing it out of town.
Fast forward to March 20 when the BOP autopsy was released basically finding that BOPs aren't designed to function as intended. That shouldn't have come as a huge shock to anyone given that DNV had found in previous study of deepwater blowouts that BOPs have a failure rate of 45 percent.
This Monday, The BOEMRE/U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) Joint Investigation Team started hearings on the BOP autopsy and things started unraveling before the hearing even got underway. It will be fascinating to see how the joint commission will handle the fiasco that followed.
Company that built blowout preventer objects to forensic report
David Jones, the lawyer for BOP-maker Cameron, said he objected that the data used to create computerized models of the accident had not been made available for Cameron and other interested parties to review. BP also joined Cameron in objecting to the lack of access to backup data.
"The report by Det Norske Veritas is based on a single hypothesis," Jones said. "That hypothesis is based not on testing but on computer models. The data that supports those computer models not included in the report. We requested the backup data on March 25."
Jones said the U.S. Interior Department would be releasing its own report analyzing the forensic report in 10 days.
Once the hearing started Cameron's attorney brought up the awkward fact that the computer model used for the BOP autopsy's conclusions was based on an impossible assumption. Oops!
BOP investigator admits to fault in model used in forensic examination
The lawyer, David Jones, showed that a model used by examiners at DNV depicted an impossibility: In running the computer models of how a key set of slicers and seals would have malfunctioned, it placed the drill pipe where oil was flowing in a place where it couldn't have been.
The model showed the drill pipe inside a wall of the BOP, and Neil Thompson, the project manager for DNV, was forced to admit it was an error in the model placement.
There was more awkwardness to come.
That, combined with Thompson's acknowledgement that he'd "never laid eyes on a blowout preventer" before he began this examination, called into doubt some of the most critical findings of the report.
Thompson also admitted that his team never conducted tests to determine flow pressures or figure out what forces caused the pipe to deflect inside the BOP and muck up the works.
It didn't seem that DNV troubled themselves to pay attention to witness testimony.
Thompson stumbled when Jones asked him repeatedly about how Det Norske Veritas determined a valve called the "upper annular" was closed. Testimony from surviving rig workers stated a different valve was the one closed.
BP then had their turn at the fun with the hapless Thompson.
Joining Jones in his skepticism of the forensic report was BP lawyer Richard Godfrey. He wanted to know whether there was any physical evidence that the 5.5-inch, heavy-duty drill pipe bowed in the middle, knocking it off-center. That's a key hypothesis of the inspectors' report.
Thompson said there was no physical evidence of the elastic bowing of the pipe. He said it was recovered as a straight, 28-foot piece because it would have straightened out after it was cut, about two days after the accident. Godfrey suggested that nobody in the industry had ever seen such "elastic buckling" of a drill pipe before. But Thompson said it's a commonly understood concept of physics.
It looks like DNV conveniently overlooked including the possibility that the blind shear rams might not have closed because Transocean, their BFF, might have neglected maintenance.
Uncertainties emerge in blowout preventer examination
Another important uncertainty was when the blind shear rams actually attempted to cut the pipe. Det Norske Veritas tested a 27-volt battery that controlled what should have been an automatic trigger of the blind shear rams moments after the accident, and found it had just 7 volts of charge in June and 0.7 volts of charge in September.
Based on that, Kenney [lead forensic investigator] and Thompson concluded the automatic trigger of the shear rams probably failed, meaning it likely took until two days after the accident for remote-controlled submarines to activate the rams. But they also said it was possible that a backup control pod worked in the minutes after the blowout and succeeded in triggering the blind shear rams.
That is an important distinction because it could mean that rig-owner Transocean didn't properly maintain the BOP and that might have contributed to the accident. Transocean witnesses who were scheduled to testify Tuesday have refused to show up and could not be compelled to do so because they live out of the area, where the federal subpoenas served against them from New Orleans have no power.
Bob Cavnar (eljefebob), industry expert and author of Disaster on the Horizon accurately sums up the mess in which we now find ourselves.
Back to Square One? BOP Investigator Admits to Key Error in Report - The Daily Hurricane
I'm afraid that this testimony has the effect of the ol' one step forward and two steps back. Cameron has revealed critical mistakes in the DNV study, and at least one government agency, the Chemical Safety Board, has implied that more study is needed before we will really know what happened. Yet, with all these huge question marks, we are still going back to work in the deepwater. Was it design? Poor maintenance? Merely a "black swan"? These are critical questions that have not been answered and workers' lives and the environment hang in the balance.
Just a note: The raging apathy and silence from the media on this issue is deafening. The hearings are not being live streamed by anyone, including C Span, and the only news outlets covering what are probably the most important of these critical hearings is the Times-Picayune out of New Orleans and my pals over at the Houston Chronicle's Fuel Fix. All else is dead silence. I'm amazed.
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