Gulf oil rig's owner had safety issue at 3 other wells

[kpete]

Source: MSNBC


Gulf oil rig's owner had safety issue at 3 other wells
Internal reports also identify deficiencies involving Deepwater Horizon's equipment

By Ian Urbina
updated 8/5/2010 4:16:03 AM ET

The company that owned the oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April had widespread safety concerns about several of its other rigs in the gulf, and a month before the disaster it commissioned a broad review of the safety culture of the company’s North American operations, according to confidential internal reports.

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The confidential internal reports, obtained by The New York Times, offer an unusually candid view of safety and maintenance concerns within the world’s largest offshore drilling company, and they indicate that the problems highlighted in earlier reports provided to The Times about the Deepwater Horizon were not limited to that rig, which exploded on April 20, leading to an oil spill that is estimated to have poured at least four million barrels of oil into the gulf.

Transocean has 14 rigs now operating in the Gulf of Mexico, and 139 worldwide, and these documents raise concerns about locations beyond Deepwater Horizon, especially the three additional gulf rigs that were recently investigated. In fact, one of those rigs is being leased by BP to drill one of the two relief wells near the Deepwater Horizon site.

The new documents also shed light on one of the lingering mysteries of the disaster: why the rig sank. They indicate that there were problems with the Deepwater Horizon’s ballast system that was responsible for keeping the rig afloat and stable. If the rig had not sunk, the leak might not have occurred. Federal investigators have questioned whether deferred maintenance and other factors had played a role in the sinking of the rig.



Read more: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38570559/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/

[hedgehog]

1. I suspect "company had concerns" is short hand for "the engineers

were sending e-mails to the managers saying that all the deferred maintenance was an accident waiting to happen".