Frarig, you know a lot about who and what’s going on, so can you give me some info please? We saw the Sr. Drllg Eng who designed both the casing and cement jobs on that well be interrogated by BP, T.O., Halliburton, and MMS at the Coast Guard hearing. He knew that some higher ups approved both those designs, but under oath he didn’t know how high it went nor who it was up higher. Please tell me.
If you can help me out with that I’ve got another one for you, thanks.
pumpjack, although I’d love to know, I’m afraid I have no idea how high it went. I’d imagine it went as high as is normal for individual well approval, which would be several significant levels below the CEO of a company the size of BP (or any other major oil company).
I’ll apologize in advance for going off on a tangent from your post… Whatever I post, I post as a guy who works on rigs hands-on, in and around the moonpool more often than not. I’m out there to perform a professional duty to the very best of my ability and (more importantly, to me) to feed my family. I’m not out there to get blown up or burned to death by idiots, regardless of their nationality. Like many of us here, I’ve worked all over the world. I’ve worked in the GOM for various US companies. I also had the particular misfortune to work in SE Asia for Unocal, and I can state without hesitation that in my 25+ years of offshore experience, I have never seen such lax and cavalier attitudes towards well safety as I’ve witnessed from American company men.
I may well be wrong. This personal experience of mine might just have been bad luck. I don’t know. What I do know, for a stone fact, is that the attitude developed on West Texas land rigs has no place on technically-challenging deepwater wells. This environment is entirely unforgiving, and there is simply no place for the old-school bullsh*t. The technology involved in drilling these things is already running way ahead of the average rig workers’ experience – the last thing you need is some ignorant as%hole in a Stetson hard-hat playing the big man and dictating that: This is the way it’s gonna happen!
What I’ve been saying is, understandably, unpalatable to most Americans on this forum. For those who feel offended, I apologize. However, I wouldn’t be saying it if I didn’t believe that there is a serious problem in your approach to deepwater drilling.
Instead of taking the easy and politically expedient approach of vilifying one particular (foreign) company, perhaps this disaster is an opportunity to take a hard look at the problems within your industry as a whole, and to make the necessary changes to ensure that something like this never happens again.
Too much to ask, maybe?