[B]
Interview of Mike Williams, Chief Electronics Technician aboard DWH 4-20-10
60 Minutes
Blowout: The Deepwater Horizon Disaster
May 16, 2010
[/B]<snip>
The tension in every drilling operation is between doing things safely and doing them fast; time is money and this job was costing BP a million dollars a day. But Williams says there was trouble from the start - getting to the oil was taking too long.
Williams said they were told it would take 21 days; according to him, it actually took six weeks.
With the schedule slipping, Williams says a BP manager ordered a faster pace.
“And he requested to the driller, ‘Hey, let’s bump it up. Let’s bump it up.’ And what he was talking about there is he’s bumping up the rate of penetration. How fast the drill bit is going down,” Williams said.
Williams says going faster caused the bottom of the well to split open, swallowing tools and that drilling fluid called “mud.”
[B]“We actually got stuck. And we got stuck so bad we had to send tools down into the drill pipe and sever the pipe,” Williams explained.[/B]
[U][B]That well was abandoned and Deepwater Horizon had to drill a new route to the oil. It cost BP more than two weeks and millions of dollars.[/B][/U]
</snip>
[B]
Discovery of second pipe in Deepwater Horizon riser stirs debate among experts
July 09, 2010[/B]
[B]David Hammer, The Times-Picayune[/B]
For the first time Friday, the Coast Guard and BP acknowledged that a mysterious second pipe, [B]wedged next to the drill pipe in what remains of the Deepwater Horizon’s riser [/B]is fouling up the works where the well is spewing hundreds of millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
[B]"We used a diamond saw and we got inside. We found there was actually two sets of drill pipe there, " said retired Adm. Thad Allen,[/B] the top U.S. Coast Guard official overseeing the response to America’s worst oil spill ever.
Some experts say a second piece of drill pipe in the riser could have prevented shear rams on the rig’s blowout preventer from sealing the well and permanently cutting off the flow of oil after the April 20 explosion. The presence of two pipes could have also contributed to BP’s failure to make a clean cut on the riser when securing the existing containment dome, inhibiting its ability to collect the maximum amount of oil.
</snip>
photo at http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/07/post_19.html
They got stuck, capped that well and MMS gave BP permission to drill [B]horizontally[/B] and then down to the oil.
Is that also “fringe”?