TUESDAY, AUGUST 3, 2010


KLMNO POLITICS THE NATION & Humans not fail-safe


plan to stop disasters Oil rig workers are


allowed to stop action but face obstacles


by David S. Hilzenrath Overlooked among the systems


that apparently failed in the Deep- water Horizon catastrophe is what could be the most crucial safety device of all: the human blowout preventer. Every person working on the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico had the authority to stop action, according to the company that owned the Deepwater Horizon, if he or she considered the situation unsafe. Yet people exposed to an array of hazards refrained from demand- ing a halt, reflecting a pattern that extends to almost any office cu- bicle or industrial site. It is hard to rock the boat — un- til it bursts into flames and sinks to the bottom of the ocean — and a safety policy based on the assump- tion that any individual will rock the boat is likely to be flawed. Case in point: Michael Williams, a chief electronics technician on the Deepwater Horizon who dis- played remarkable courage during the disaster and who brought those challenges into focus in tes- timony to a federal investigative board last month. He described speaking up about problems but there were limits to what he could or would do.


Williams, an employee of rig owner Transocean, said he thought that the blowout prevent- er — the last line of defense against a gusher — had been dam- aged and that he had seen chunks of its black rubber innards ejected from the well. There was never enough time to


keep up with scheduled mainte- nance on the rig, he said, and some parts were so old that it took a year to get replacements custom made. In addition, to avoid the nuisance of false alarms, a system meant to automatically warn the entire crew about fire or leaking gas was routinely deactivated. Meanwhile, a computer used to monitor and control drilling op- erations intermittently crashed, leaving the driller staring at “the blue screen of death.” In the middle of sensitive opera- tions, the driller could switch chairs and move to backup com- puters, but if the backups failed, Williams said, the next step would be to “abandon ship.” Switching to a backup is not without risk, he pointed out: During the drilling of an earlier well, while the com- puter was out of commission for several seconds, the rig incurred a kick of gas, he said. At the government hearing in


Kenner, La., attorneys for BP, Transocean and the captain of the Deepwater Horizon pressed Wil- liams about his power to shut down the rig.


“I want to ask whether or not


you knew that you in fact not only had a right but you had an obliga- tion to stop anything that you be- lieved to be unsafe,” said Kyle Schonekas, an attorney for the captain. “Yes,” Williams said. “You ever ask to stop operations on the rig because of the blue screen of death?” BP attorney Richard Godfrey asked. “No, I did not. We had two other


chairs,” Williams answered. “Did anyone ever ask anyone to stop operations on the rig because of the inhibited alarms?” “Not to my knowledge.” “You never did that?” “No, I did not.” In an interview, a lawyer for Williams, Scott R. Bickford, said Williams stopped work “all the time” for “minor infractions” — for example, to caution a co-work- er to use ear plugs.


When it came to the alarm con-


figuration, Williams reported con- cerns to superiors, and he consid- ered his responsibility fulfilled when he was told that manage- ment wanted it that way, Bickford said. The blue screen of death was known up and down the chain of command, Williams testified. What was Williams supposed to do, his attorney asked, stand in the middle of the Deepwater Horizon and say, “I’m shutting the rig down”?


“Realistically, you’re painting a


situation that — that doesn’t make much sense.” Investigations of the drilling of


the Macondo well have shown that a variety of concerns arose — about issues as diverse as the type of cement job and the number of devices used to center the pipe in the hole — and the work contin- ued. Transocean, the company that


operated the Deepwater Horizon under contract to BP, placed such emphasis on its timeout-for-safety policy that it spelled it out in a health and safety manual, re- inforced it through training and recognized employees for exercis- ing it. The company condensed its stop-work policy to an oxymoron- ic acronym: START, for see, think, act, reinforce and track. “In fact, we promote them to stop the job . . . even if it turns out that it actually was safe but they had doubts about it,” Adrian Rose, Transocean’s health, safety and en- vironmental manager, told federal investigators in May. Daniel E. Becnel Jr., a Louisiana


lawyer representing victims of the oil spill, suggested that the expec- tation is unrealistic. “They kept telling you that any man could have stopped the rig at any time. But that never happens in real life,” he said. “If anybody would do it, that would be the last hitch they would be on an offshore drilling rig.” Yet it does happen. Rose estimated that over the


past five years, across the Transocean fleet of “100-odd rigs,” the stop-work policy has been in- voked hundreds of times. But BP well team leader John Guide testified that during the drilling of the Macondo well, such events mainly involved “lifting- type operations” — situations where somebody might be in the wrong place while equipment is being moved. Guide said he did not recall any such steps involving “the well bore construction opera- tion.”


Aboard the Deepwater Horizon, addressing concerns about the en- gineering of the well or the condi- tion of the rig would have re- quired more than a momentary pause. A government investigation of another incident in the Gulf of Mexico shows that even where crew complaints reach the boiling point it can be a mistake to de- pend on people to call a timeout. The Minerals Management


Service investigation of a 2006 blowout found that several crew members thought that operations on a Forest Oil platform were so dangerous that they took a boat back to shore, even after the man leading the operations said they would be fired for leaving, accord- ing to a government report. The man allegedly issuing the orders stayed behind with a short- handed crew and was killed when equipment ejected from the well. Before the blowout, a supervi-


sor refused to carry out an in- struction from the boss, fearing it could leave the well out of control. The supervisor “felt the job was unsafe from the beginning,” want- ed to get off the platform and would have boarded the boat with the others if he had been awake at the time, the report said. Despite his worries, he did not shut down the job. hilzenrath@washpost.com


JAE C. HONG/ASSOCIATED PRESS


Workers shown cleaning oil near Pass a Loutre, La. New estimates say most of the crude is still in the water.


Spill numbers again adjusted upward; ‘static kill’ delayed


oil spill from A1


BP pegged the flow at 5,000 bar- rels a day, sticking with that fig- ure even as outside scientists de- clared that it low-balled the actu- al rate. The flow rate team, assembled in May, tried to come up with a more solid figure. Sci- entists examining the surface slick as well as video taken by submersibles soon upped the es- timate; by early June, the govern- ment declared the flow to be 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day. Even the high end of that esti-


mate did not quite do justice to Macondo when it was at full throttle in the early weeks of the crisis. The new figures reflect more data, including high-defini- tion video, sonar measurements of the oil-gas ratio, and pressure readings in the new capping stack before, and then after, the sealing of the well July 15. “We may never know the exact


answer. But as we get more data, you’re able to shrink the un- certainty,” said Bill Lehr, senior scientist for the National Ocean- ic and Atmospheric Administra- tion and a leader of one of the teams. The new figures indicate that the roughly 800,000 barrels of oil that BP managed to capture with its various containment


strategies — a riser insertion tool, a “top hat,” and flaring from a surface rig — represented only about one-sixth of the crude that surged into the gulf over the course of nearly three months. In all, about 1.2 million barrels of oil have been accounted for, either burned, captured or skimmed off the ocean’s surface. That’s about a quarter of the new estimate for the total spill.


Where the other three-quar- ters has gone is unclear. Some has evaporated; some has been consumed by microbes; but sci- entists remain troubled by the possibility that large amounts of oil remain underwater in clou- dlike plumes. “This further confirms that a lot of the oil is still at sea. And we just don’t know the implications of it,” said Ron Kendall, director of the Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University. Kendall will testify before Congress on Wednesday about his fears that dispersant chemicals have helped much of this oil sink into deep-sea habi- tats. For government lawyers pre- paring a case against BP, this number could help calculate the maximum civil penalty BP might face for the spill. If BP is not found to have acted with negli-


DIGEST SECURITY


Two men convicted in JFK airport plot Two men were convicted Mon-


day of plotting to blow up jet fuel tanks at John F. Kennedy Inter- national Airport in New York. A jury in Brooklyn federal


court deliberated for five days before finding Russell Defreitas, 66, and Abdul Kadir, 58, guilty of multiple conspiracy charges. Defreitas, a former JFK cargo handler, and Kadir, once a mem- ber of Guyana’s parliament, were arrested in 2007 after an in- formant infiltrated the plot. Prosecutors alleged that De-


freitas, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Guyana, and Kadir wanted to kill thousands and cripple the American economy by using ex- plosives to blow up the fuel tanks and the underground pipelines. Authorities say the men sought the help of militant Muslims, in- cluding an al-Qaeda operative, in Guyana. Defense lawyers described their clients as clueless trash- talkers led astray by the infor- mant, a convicted drug dealer. The government’s case relied


heavily on secretly recorded tapes of Defreitas bragging about his knowledge of JFK and its vul- nerabilities. He also marveled at the lack of


security, saying: “No soldier. Nothing at all.” In other tapes, Defreitas ranted about punish- ing the United States with an at- tack that would “dwarf 9/11.” —Associated Press


JUSTICE DEPT.


Report: Child porn, violence increasing The spread of child pornog-


raphy, fueled by technology and the Internet, is outpacing efforts to combat it, the Justice Depart- ment said Monday in a report to Congress that promises more ar- rests, prosecutions, and better coordination among federal,


state and local authorities. Attorney General Eric H. Hold-


er Jr. said the distribution of child pornography, the number of images being shared online and violence against children have increased. “Tragically, the only place we’ve seen a decrease is in the age of victims,” he said in a speech at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Chil- dren, in Alexandria. The report, ordered by Con- gress in legislation approved two years ago, concedes that the mar- ket for child pornography con- tinues to grow rapidly and that determining its size is impos- sible.


—Associated Press


Millions stolen from ATM busi- ness: Four armed bandits clad in black overpowered two workers at an ATM-servicing business in St. Louis on Monday, then used an armored vehicle to haul away possibly millions of dollars. Nei- ther of the employees at ATM So- lutions Inc. in the city’s theater district was harmed. The robbers subdued the workers with duct tape and locked them in a vault after the raid. Media outlets re- ported that the robbers made off with $4 million to $5 million. Authorities found the armored vehicle — a specially modified van — about 90 minutes later less than two miles away.


Marijuana found in home of child who was missing: Author- ities in Maine say they found a 3- year-old boy who wandered away from his home — and a stash of marijuana plants being cultivat- ed by his father. Officials say the boy was reported missing about 2:30 p.m. Sunday by his father. A pilot with the Maine Warden Service found the child, who was unhurt. The Kennebec County sheriff ’s office said searchers dis- covered 147 marijuana plants in- side the home. The boy’s father, Jonathan Lehr, 41, faces charges of cultivating marijuana and en- dangering the welfare of a child. —From news services


S


A3


ERIC GAY/ASSOCIATED PRESS


A man in Belle Terre, La., uses a suction hose to remove oil washed ashore from the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Every worker on the drilling rig, which exploded April 20, had the authority to stop operations, according to the company that owned the rig.


on washingtonpost.com Get updates on static kill


The latest developments Reports throughout the day on plugging the leak; join discussions,


ask questions, read updates, watch video, view photos and find interactive graphics. washingtonpost.com.oilspill


 A hydraulic leak delayed the static kill, which will pump mud into the damaged well in an attempt to force the oil back to the source rock. That could be followed by a cement plug. But the first step in the static kill, an “injectivity test,” was put off by the discovery of a leak in the hydraulic system on the well’s cap, BP announced late Monday.


 BP’s well was gushing faster than expected, government experts said. The latest estimate pegs original “flow rate” at 62,000 barrels a day (2.6 million gallons), higher than the last estimate of 35,000 to 60,000 barrels. As the reservoir was depleted, the rate was reduced to 53,000 barrels a day. They calculated the total oil coming from the blown-out well at 4.9million barrels, more than 18 times the amount of oil that was spilled during the Exxon Valdez disaster.


 Several environmental groups have asked a federal appeals court to disqualify a judge from hearing a case about the Obama administration’s initial six-month moratorium on deep-water oil drilling. U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman overturned the temporary drilling ban in June and refused last month to withdraw from the case. In a court filing Thursday, environmental groups supporting the moratorium asked the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to remove Feldman because of his investments in several oil and gas companies. Feldman says he learned he owned Exxon Mobil stock a day before he ruled and sold it several hours before he issued the decision.  Transocean stock closed at $50.68, up $4.47 or 9.67 percent. BP did slightly better than the market overall, closing at $39.42, up 95 cents or 2.47 percent.


gence, the penalty would be $1,100 per barrel. About 4.1 mil- lion barrels escaped into the gulf, according to the new estimate, so that fine would come to $4.5 bil- lion. If BP is found to have acted with “gross negligence” in the lead-up to the spill, the maxi- mum penalty would be $4,300 a barrel, which would work out to $17.6 billion. “You’ve got to go in with a number,” said David Uhlmann, a law professor at the University of Michigan and the former chief of the Justic Department’s Environ- mental Crimes Section. “And I think these numbers strengthen the government’s hand,” com- pared with previous estimates that produced only a range. In all, the 4.1 million barrels es-


timated to have polluted the gulf would be enough to fill the Penta- gon to a depth of 18 feet or to fill 260 Olympic swimming pools. The entire Gulf of Mexico, by comparison, would fill 880 mil- lion Pentagons, or 973 billion Olympic pools. John Amos at SkyTruth, an or-


ganization that uses satellite im- agery to study environmental


problems, said that this new fig- ure showed how far off BP and the Coast Guard were in the cru- cial days at the beginning of the spill. “When the next spill happens, being in the right order of magni- tude with the spill estimate is go- ing to be important,” he said. The well remains pressurized and dangerous, but BP and gov- ernment officials hope that will change with the static kill at- tempt. The goal is to inject mud into the well and drive the oil back to the source rock. First comes what BP calls an


injectivity test. Mud will be pumped into the well from a sur- face ship at a gentle rate of one barrel a minute, then two barrels a minute, then three, as engi- neers monitor pressures and look for signs that the rogue oil is be- ing forced back into the source rock 21


⁄2


miles below the seafloor.


“We want to confirm that we can inject the oil that’s in the well bore back into the reservoir,” BP Senior Vice President Kent Wells told reporters Monday. achenbachj@washpost.com fahrenthold@washpost.com


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54