Fire on the Horizon (23 page)

After all the spacer was in the well, the stinger began pumping seawater behind it. Wheeler and his team planned to pump enough water to push the spacer above the BOP—just barely, by twelve feet. When they believed that had been accomplished, they closed the BOP’s annular preventer—the rubber doughnut that sealed around the drill pipe.

Theoretically, this would hold all the spacer and mud above the test area, leaving only the weight of water against the upward pressure of the well. If the cement job had sealed properly, the inflow
pressure from the formation should be zero, as should the pressure on the drill pipe.

But that’s not what happened.

With the annular closed, the drill pipe pressure declined to 273 pounds per square inch, but no further. As the team puzzled over this, they discovered that the mud level in the riser had dropped about fifty barrels, which shouldn’t have happened. That could only mean that the annular preventer had leaked. Nobody mentioned the handfuls of rubber that had been found in the outflow from the well recently. In any case, for whatever reason, some 2,000 gallons of the Form-A-Set and Form-A-Squeeze combination had dropped through the annular into the seawater test area, contaminating it.

At this point, the test was ruined. Whatever pressure readings they got would have to be interpreted through the noise of the mud that had leaked in. The situation could be rectified, but it would mean starting over, refilling the well with mud, new spacer, and new seawater to reinstate pristine test conditions. Then the annular preventer would need to be resealed, this time tightly enough to make sure nothing could leak back down.

But only the second part of that happened. The pressure on the annular preventer was increased from 1,200 pounds per square inch to 1,900 pounds per square inch, and the drill pipe line and kill line—the line that bypassed the annular preventer and connected below it into the well—were closed while they all discussed what to do next.

As they talked, the drill pipe pressure shot up to 1,250 pounds per square inch in six minutes.

Jimmy Harrell and Randy Ezell ushered the VIPs around the rig on their tour. It became clear that the subject they were most inter
ested in was accident prevention. They had some recent incidents from other rigs in mind, and wanted to see if “lessons learned” from those could apply to the Horizon. They climbed out on the rig floor to see a piece of equipment where, on another rig, a worker had stepped into a twenty-four-inch depression, slipped, fallen, and dislocated a shoulder. They seemed a little disappointed to discover that the apparatus was entirely different on the Horizon. None of the learned lessons could apply.

Now they asked to go down into the columns, where the Horizon had had the flooding incident in 2008. The BP VIPs, Pat O’Bryan and David Sims, wanted to see what it looked like down there. Daun Winslow and Buddy Trahan asked if they could wander around, put eyes on the area and get a feel for what that had all been about.

First, though, the VIPs stopped into the driller’s shack. It was standing room only in there. Something obviously intense was happening. Daun sidled through the crowd and tapped the driller, Dewey Revette, on the shoulder.

“Hey, how’s it going, Dewey?” Daun asked. “You got everything under control here?”

“Yes, sir,” Dewey said.

Daun sensed something wasn’t quite right. He pulled Jimmy and Randy aside. They were the most senior Horizon hands aboard, and monopolizing them for the VIP tour suddenly seemed like a low priority.

“Looks like they’re having a discussion here. Maybe you could give them some assistance,” Daun suggested.

So Daun and the other execs went off to look at plumbing in the columns while their tour guides stayed behind to deal with whatever was going on in the driller’s shack.

The first thing the drill shack assemblage did after realizing what had happened was to call over to the workboat, the
Bankston
, and tell its captain, Alwin Landry, that they were shutting down the mud transfer for a while. Landry assumed they were breaking for dinner. But in the drill shack, dinner was the last thing they were worrying about. The debate continued for about an hour. Wyman was convinced the pressure readings were evidence of a problem in the well. Bob Kaluza, the day shift company man, thought otherwise. He argued that the pressure spike on the drill string had been caused by the weight of the mud dropping back down into the test area.

It was past five, and the night shift guys—Jason Anderson, Wyman’s replacement, and Kaluza’s replacement, Don Vidrine—showed up and joined the discussion. The emerging consensus was that the leak through the annular had caused the pressure spike. But Wyman still felt something was wrong.

It was now just past 6 p.m. Randy Ezell had been on duty for twelve hours. The VIP meeting he was expected to attend would begin at seven. But Randy told Jason he’d stick around to help them figure out what to do about the negative test.

“Why don’t you go eat?” Jason said.

Randy hesitated. “Well, I can go eat and come back.”

“Man, you ain’t got to do that,” Jason said. “I’ve got this. Don’t worry about it. If I have any problem at all with this test I’ll give you a call.”

Randy studied Jason closely. He’d known Jason ever since Korea. Jason was not only his top lieutenant; he was one of his closest friends on the rig. Randy felt he could read Jason just by his body language, and now what he saw was confidence. He had no doubt that Jason had what it took to deal with the situation, and would be as good as his word and call at the first sign of trouble.

“Well, maybe I will go eat then,” Randy said.

He would never see Jason again.

The night crew decided to conduct a second negative test. They were still debating how do to it when Vidrine pointed out to Kaluza that his shift had ended an hour earlier, and suggested he get out of there and get some rest. You can call Houston on the way out and let them know where we’re at, Don told him.

Bob went off. But a few minutes later he was back.

Don did a double take. “Bob, what are you doing here? Go on to bed.”

Bob shook his head. “No, he told me to come back and stay with you for the negative test. He wanted both of us up here.”

It was a tricky situation. Their problem was that the heavy spacer that had infiltrated the test area was creating pressure that registered on the drill pipe. That pressure would mask any pressure flowing into the well from the hydrocarbon deposit, which defeated the purpose of the negative test.

But they thought they had a way to get around that. Instead of using the drill pipe to conduct the negative test, they could use the kill line. The kill line connected at the bottom of the BOP, beyond the seal on the annular preventer, but still several thousand feet above the end of the drill pipe, where the leaked spacer was wreaking havoc. The pressure created by the weight of the spacer should have no effect on the kill line—which meant if they
did
see pressure on the kill line during the test, it would have to be coming from formation pressure pushing into the well.

They began by releasing the pressure that had built up in the system. Based on their calculations, the compression of the liquid around the drill string should result in 5 barrels of backflow out
the top after it was opened. The 5 barrels flowed into the tanks, and then kept flowing. In the end, 15 barrels came out. When they closed the valve, the drill string pressure quickly rose back to 790 pounds per square inch, fell, then slowly rebuilt to 1,400 pounds per square inch over thirty-one minutes.

The results were odd. It wasn’t clear, even with the leaked spacer down in the test area, why the pressure reading should rise, fall, then rise again. But they decided to just focus on the kill line.

The kill line was opened. Mud flowed and spurted. The pressure released.

Now they pumped seawater into the kill line to make sure the line was full. Then they opened it again. A small amount of water flowed back out, then the flow stopped. The pressure read zero. They watched for thirty minutes and saw no increase.

“Go call the office,” Vidrine told Kaluza. “Tell them we’re going to displace the well.”

Finally, they were ready to declare the negative test a success.

They were wrong.

A month later, an analysis of well data would suggest that not only did 50 barrels of heavy spacer fluid leak through the annular preventer and fall into the test area, but the rest of the spacer, more than 350 barrels’ worth, had not been pumped high enough. During the second negative test, the bottom of the spacer level was invading the top of the test area, including the bottom of the kill line. The reason the kill line pressure fell to zero and stayed there may not have said anything about what was happening down the well. It may have meant nothing more than that the kill line had been plugged with a thick and sticky mix of Form-A-Set and Form-A-Squeeze.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

SAILOR TAKE WARNING

1900 Hours, April 20, 2010

Macondo Prospect

As the sun dropped toward the rim of the ocean, the horizon caught fire. A handful of rig crew—the poets among the pragmatists—stopped, as always, to admire the reddish orange glow spreading across the western sky. It never got old, reminding them just how close their work brought them to nature’s immense power. They were more akin to shepherds than factory workers in that way.

It was the kind of moment Dale Burkeen appreciated. The big bear of a crane operator was just beginning his shift as the horizon launched its nightly light show, and nobody had a better view than Dale, sitting in the cab of his crane, 185 feet above the water. The Horizon was an odd place—the heaviest of heavy machinery, a factory on pontoons, but nonetheless surrounded by an unbroken sweep of ocean wilderness under a dome of the biggest, and often bluest, sky anywhere. He often wished he could share the moment with Rhonda and Timmy. On his last shore leave, Dale had sat on his front stoop, Timmy tucked in the space between his dad’s legs
looking like a kangaroo pup in a pouch, wishing he could come to the rig with Dad.

Dale had promised a camping trip when he returned home as compensation. Now, as he watched the red smolder in the western sky, he missed his family. This day was his and Rhonda’s eighth wedding anniversary, and his thirty-eighth birthday was just four days off. But the celebrations would have to wait.

If Daun Winslow paused to appreciate the sunset, it didn’t distract him from mentally outlining the upcoming meeting he had arranged for the VIPs and the Horizon’s top managers. It was the main business of this visit, allowing them to get together face-to-face instead of being projected on a video screen. The agenda, meant to be informal, was still rather full. They would review goals for the coming year, talk about maintenance issues and the scheduled drydock renovation of the rig in 2011, reemphasize the need to take a proactive approach in dealing with the danger of dropped objects (maybe they’d even get around to revealing the mystery of what the letters in DROPS stood for). Mention would be made of Randy Ezell’s nomination for a company excellence award (for which Randy would no doubt take a lot of affectionate ribbing). And there would be a presentation honoring the Horizon’s amazing record of safety—those seven years without a single lost-time incident.

Just before the meeting was to begin, Jimmy Harrell straggled in from the driller’s shack where Daun had left him an hour earlier in intense discussions about the negative test.

“Everything all right up on the rig floor there? Get everything sorted out?” Daun asked.

Jimmy gave a thumbs-up.

After the negative test was declared a success, the annular preventer was opened. The pumps cranked up and began again forcing seawater into the hole to flush out mud and spacer that remained in the riser.

The pumping continued for nearly an hour, then slowed as the mud handlers watched for the spacer to appear at the surface. As the pumping rate decreased, the flow from the well into the fluid return tanks should have decreased in step. Instead it increased. The return tanks filled rapidly, and a gauge on the driller’s panel registered the increased flow. Amid all the activity, and the security of knowing the well had been sealed, nobody noticed.

Between 8:58 and 9:10, the volume of mud coming out of the well exceeded the volume of the seawater going in by about 2,400 gallons. When the spacer appeared at the surface, the pumping stopped altogether for five minutes, long enough for a “compliance” contractor to test the material and certify it safe to dump overboard, directly into the ocean. The pressure on the drill pipe steadily increased.

Jason called over to the
Bankston
and told the crew to stand by to take on the rest of the mud.

There would soon be nothing but seawater between the rig and the well.

Things were winding up on the drill floor. Chris Pleasant, subsea supervisor, looked at his watch. It was 9:10. “Jason, I’m done,” he told the toolpusher. “I need to go work on the BOP crane and get it ready and inspect it to pick up the BOP before—before, you know, we unlatch.”

“Okay,” Jason said. “You got your tensioners where they need to be?”

“Everything is perfect,” Chris said.

In the accommodation block, the VIP meeting was finishing up with the presentation of the Horizon’s award for safe operation. When that was over, Horizon department heads went off to bed or to their tour assignments, leaving the four shoreside execs to debate what to do next.

Buddy Trahan was an old hand on Transocean rigs, and there wasn’t much he hadn’t seen. But Daun thought Pat O’Bryan and David Sims, the BP contingent, might enjoy going up to the bridge to get a sense of the maritime side of things. On a lot of these tours, the VIPs didn’t bother to go up there. They toured the rig floor and the drilling machinery, because that’s what the rig was to them, a drilling machine.