(Found this interesting Don Vidrine article in my DWH folder)
Hearing Records Detail Deepwater Horizon Blast - NYTimes.com
Documents Fill In Gaps in Narrative on Oil Rig Blast
LAFAYETTE, La. — In a quiet suburb of this oiltown, there is a spacious brick house with all of the shades drawn. Inside is a graying and pale man who knows as much as anyone about what happened on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig the day it exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. He is not talking.
“No comment, no comment,” says Donald J. Vidrine, who was one of two “company men,” or well-site leaders for BP, when a surge of gas caused a blowout and fire on April 20, killing 11 men and starting one of the largest oil spills in United States history.
Mr. Vidrine, who was the most experienced and highest-ranking BP manager on the floating oil rig, has been mentioned frequently during hearings into the disaster, along with the name of the other, less-experienced well-site leader, Robert Kaluza.
Together the two men oversaw critical tests in the two days leading up to the explosion, and Mr. Vidrine, who is 62, overcame his apparent doubts about the well’s integrity and made a momentous decision that led to the accident, according to the testimony of others. He gave the order to replace heavy drilling mud in the riser pipe, which leads from the rig to the well’s head, with lighter seawater, a necessary step before capping the well.
That decision made it impossible for the drilling crew to control a surge of natural gas from deep within the well, leading to the blowout. The rig burned and then sank two days later. More details about the events may come to light Wednesday, with the release of BP’s internal investigation into the disaster.
Mr. Vidrine has refused three times to appear at hearings into the disaster held by the Coast Guard and federal regulators, saying he is in ill health.
Mr. Kaluza, 60, who had been on the rig for only a few days, has also declined to appear, citing his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. Both face possible federal criminal charges.
In hearings, witnesses from BP and the various subcontractors involved in the project have painted a picture of Mr. Vidrine as the pivotal figure in the drama preceding the disaster.
The roles of Mr. Vidrine and other managers on the rig are also being scrutinized as the companies involved in the disaster argue over liability.
Worried about an unexplained high-pressure reading in the drill pipe, Mr. Vidrine insisted on a second pressure test to make sure there was not an explosive bubble of gas building up in the well, even though senior members of the drilling team for Transocean, the Swiss company that owns and operated the rig, thought another test was unnecessary, according to the testimony of managers and workers on the rig.
In addition, notes from an interview he gave to BP officials investigating the blowout, obtained by The New York Times, show Mr. Vidrine raised concerns about the possibility of a surge of gas, or a kick, with a superior in Houston before going ahead and replacing the mud in the riser pipe with seawater.
Mr. Vidrine said the superior, Mark Hafle, an engineer, responded, “If there had been a kick in the well, we would have seen it.”
In the end, however, Mr. Vidrine made the call that it was safe to proceed, according to the notes and the testimony of several witnesses. He accepted the explanation provided by members of Transocean’s drill team that the high pressure reading in the drill pipe, of about 1,400 pounds per square inch, was no cause for alarm.
These drillers — chief among them the night-shift toolpusher, Jason Anderson, who died in the ensuing fire — insisted they had seen a similar phenomenon before, calling it “annular compression.”
Engineers say they were referring to cases in which the downward pressure from the heavy drilling fluid, known as mud, between the drill pipe and the walls of the well surrounding it pushes the seawater back up the drill pipe, an effect also known in the oil business as “U-tubing.”
Mr. Vidrine, who has 30 years’ experience working on oil rigs both at sea and on land, told lawyers from BP that he had heard about annular compression “but had not seen it before.”
“The toolpusher and the senior toolpusher told me it was this annular compression thing,” he said, according to the notes, dated April 27. “I wanted to do another test.”
Other witnesses, testifying at the Coast Guard hearing, described Mr. Vidrine as wary when he came on duty on the drill floor that day at 6 p.m. to relieve Mr. Kaluza.
It had been an unusually busy day for the two men because not only were they were preparing to seal the well, but four high-level executives from BP and Transocean had also visited the rig for a tour. Mr. Vidrine had skipped sleep and started work early to help shepherd the V.I.P.’s around the rig.
During the day, Mr. Kaluza and Transocean’s top manager on the rig, Jimmy W. Harrell, had overseen a “negative pressure test” to see if gas was leaking into the well, through its cement-and-pipe-lined walls or around a series of cement plugs.
The test involved replacing the heavy drilling fluid in the drill pipe with seawater down to 8,300 feet to see if the well would start to flow, an indication the well’s walls or plugs might be allowing gas and oil from deep underground to leak in.
Not only did the well flow, Mr. Harrell testified, but the drillers lost at least 23 barrels of drilling fluid during the test. Some drilling experts said that suggested that the well’s concrete casing and plugs were not entirely sound.
“They shouldn’t be losing any mud at all,” said Greg McCormack, an engineer with the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas. “That is an indication that something is wrong somewhere.”
Yet Mr. Harrell testified to the marine board that he still believed the test had gone well. He said that some drilling mud was always lost during such tests, and that the amount lost was too small to signal a leaking well.
“It had a good test the first time, but they wanted to do it again once the company man come on — Don Vidrine,” Mr. Harrell testified on May 27.
Senior members of the drilling crew agreed with Mr. Harrell and theorized that the pressure in the drill pipe was caused not by a surge of gas deep in the well, but by the U-tubing phenomenon.
Others on the rig were skeptical. Wyman Wheeler, who was the day-shift toolpusher, argued with Mr. Kaluza and others about the pressure and then walked off the drill floor in a huff.
“Bob Kaluza and them was saying it was U-tubing and Wyman was convinced that something wasn’t right,” recalled a witness, Christopher Pleasant, the subsea engineer.
Mr. Kaluza, who had little experience inoffshore drilling, also seemed doubtful, witnesses said. He called a stop to all work until Mr. Vidrine came on duty at 6 p.m.
When Mr. Vidrine arrived, he grilled Mr. Kaluza about the first test for about an hour, Mr. Pleasant recalled.
Mr. Vidrine told BP officials that some members of the Transocean team found his questioning of Mr. Kaluza and his worries about drill-pipe pressure odd. “They found it kind of humorous that I talked about it for a long time,” he said, according to the notes.
Still, Mr. Vidrine insisted on a second test that would be done slightly differently, measuring the upward flow in a smaller line running from the wellhead to the rig known as the “kill line.”
According to the notes, Mr. Vidrine’s theory was that if the pressure in the drill pipe was evidence of a surge of gas deep in the well they would see similar pressure in the kill line.
The precise results of the second test remain an open question. No paper record survived, and neither Mr. Vidrine nor Mr. Kaluza has testified. Mr. Harrell said he left the drilling floor and was told by Mr. Vidrine later “they had a good negative test for 30 minutes.” Other witnesses have reported that Mr. Vidrine told them the same thing.
In his comments to BP, Mr. Vidrine said the second test dispelled his doubts. “There was no indication the gas was coming up,” he said, according to the notes, which are not verbatim.
A short while later, Mr. Vidrine gave the order to start displacing all the drilling mud in both the riser pipe and the drill pipe with seawater, one of the final steps before capping the well and moving the rig to a new spot. He left the rig floor to go to his office and do some paperwork.
Ten minutes later, Mr. Anderson, the night-shift toolpusher, called Mr. Vidrine in a panic and said the drilling mud had begun to spew out of the well, according to the notes. This was around 9:30 p.m., according to witnesses.
“I grabbed my hat and started for the floor,” Mr. Vidrine told BP officials, according to the notes. “It must have taken around 30 seconds to get outside. I went through the short hall and upstairs. There was mud and seawater blowing everywhere.”
