Vidrine interview documents obtained by Bloomberg staff
BP Plc’s senior manager on the Deepwater Horizon rig saw no indications that natural gas was surging up a pipe before the explosion that set off the biggest U.S. oil spill, according to notes from an internal inquiry.
Donald Vidrine, BP’s well-site leader aboard the rig in the Gulf of Mexico on the night of the catastrophe that killed 11 workers, told company representatives conducting the probe that a BP engineer in Houston and employees of rig owner Transocean Ltd. assured him everything was normal during tests conducted shortly before the blast.
The five pages of interview notes, gathered by BP investigators seven days after the blowout, were obtained from a person with access to the information who asked not to be identified because the document hadn’t been made public. The notes provide a first indication of what Vidrine witnessed on April 20 as he and a Transocean crew worked to finish the well about 40 miles (64 kilometers) off the Louisiana coast.
Vidrine, 62, has turned down three invitations to testify before a U.S. Coast Guard-Interior Department investigative panel, citing poor health. His lawyer, Robert Habans, didn’t return a telephone message left yesterday at his Baton Rouge, Louisiana, office.
Elizabeth Ashford, a spokeswoman representing BP, declined to comment on the interview notes.
In the hours before the disaster, Vidrine sought guidance from Mark Hafle, a drilling engineer in BP’s Houston office, about an unusual pressure reading in the pipe that connected the floating rig to the well, according to the interview notes, which weren’t a verbatim transcript.
Vidrine was watching out for any signs of kicks, surges of gas from below the seafloor that can endanger a crew and rig.
Crew ‘On the Ball’
Hafle “said that if there had been a kick in the well we would have seen it,” Vidrine told company investigators, according to the notes.
When Vidrine persisted in asking about the pressure reading, the Transocean drilling crew “found it kind of humorous that I talked about it for so long,” according to the notes.
Vidrine said the Transocean drillers and other crew members were well-trained and attentive. A visiting delegation of high- ranking executives on the rig that day from BP and Transocean presented no distractions, he said.
“Crews were always on the ball,” Vidrine said, according to the interview notes. “They were experienced, competent hands.”
Under Investigation
The April 20 explosion sank a $365 million rig, shut down deep-water exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, and wiped out more than $45 billion in the market value of London-based BP. The blowout, which is under investigation by the Justice Department and a number of House and Senate committees, cost Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward his job and prompted threats from some lawmakers to bar BP from future offshore U.S. oil deals.
BP’s American depositary receipts, each equal to six ordinary shares, fell $1.06, or 2.8 percent, to $36.14 yesterday in New York Stock Exchange composite trading and have tumbled 40 percent in the four months since the catastrophe.
Vidrine told the BP investigators he had been doing paperwork in his office aboard the rig for 10 or 15 minutes when Jason Anderson, a Transocean toolpusher, called to say that drilling mud had begun flowing up the pipe, an indication that gas or crude had entered the well.
Vidrine grabbed his hard hat and was walking toward the drilling floor when a shower of drilling mud and seawater engulfed the rig deck, according to the notes. He turned to go in another direction when there was an explosion.
“I hunkered down on the deck,” Vidrine said, according to the notes. “I didn’t see any flames when the explosion occurred.”
Engine Room Gutted
He put on a life vest and went to the bridge to ensure the emergency switch had been hit to shut the well, slice the pipe and allow the rig to sail away to safety, the notes showed. After that, he headed for an escape capsule, an enclosed life raft that holds dozens of people, where some injured crew members already had arrived.
“I heard people say the engine room was gutted,” Vidrine said, according to the notes.
The blowout preventer, the device that would have sliced the pipe, failed to operate.
Of the 126 people on board the rig that night, 115 survived by getting into escape capsules or leaping from the deck into the ocean, a drop of more than 80 feet. Anderson, the toolpusher, was one of nine Transocean employees who perished along with two workers from M-I Swaco, which supplies drilling fluid systems.
When the company investigators asked Vidrine what he thought precipitated the disaster, the notes indicate that he said, “I have no idea.”