DOCUMENTS RELEASED BY WAXMAN. How are BP executives going to say they were out of the loop or removed from the decision to proceed with a bad blowout preventer? It’s already been admitted that they were on the rig at the time of the explosion.
The committee produced one document from BP that provided the most detailed information to date on what led up to and may have caused the explosion and spill at the Deepwater Horizon rig, floating in mile-deep waters 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana, and why equipment designed to stop a spill failed to do the job.
Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., said there were at least “four significant problems with the blowout preventer” – or BOP – including evidence that it had a significant hydraulic leak and a dead battery that was supposed to activate a so-called “deadman” trigger.
A 2001 report by Transocean, which made the BOP equipment, indicated there can be as many as 260 failure possibilities in the equipment, which is supposed to be the final safeguard against a well blowout by clamping down and sealing a gushing oil well, said Stupak, chairman of the panel’s investigation’s subcommittee.
“How can a device that has 260 failure modes be considered fail-safe?” asked Stupak.
Stupak said when an underwater remote vehicle tried to activate the blowout protector’s devices designed to ram through the pipe and seal it, a loss of hydraulic pressure was discovered in the device’s emergency power component.
When dye was injected “it showed a large leak coming from a loose fitting,” said Stupak, citing BP documents. He said officials at Cameron, the company that made the preventer, had told the committee the leak was not believed to have been caused by the blowout because other fittings in the system were tight.
Stupak also questioned why the BOP had been modified.
Newman, the Transocean executive told the committee that, indeed, the BOP had been modified in 2005 at the request of BP and with approval of the Minerals Management Service.
Stupak said the committee had been told that one of the BOP’s ram drivers had been changed so it could be used for routine testing and was no longer designed to activate in an emergency. He said after the spill BP “spent a day trying to use this … useless test ram” which no longer was configured for emergency use.
It is up to all of us to hold the oil industry accountable for this.
Surviving workers were forced to sign legal waivers (actual waivers shown at link) claiming no knowledge of the cause of the explosion before they could see their families.
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