This Drill-Pipe Killed 11 Men

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Something is very wrong if employees are afraid to sound the alarm and press emergency buttons though everything around them is on fire and exploding.

I’m an offshore worker, currently on a transocean rig watching this. These types of documentaries are equally fascinating as they are a valuable learning tool. 👏

"your pay depends on you doing this quickly" "we don't pressure our employees to cut corners"

Their exemplary “safety” record was more a record of LUCK than safety looking at the gross neglect of major safety systems and training!

"We can't let staff unilaterally activate alarms or shutoffs because we might lose a few hundred thousand dollars in lost drilling time; we prefer to mandate captain / manager approval, virtually guaranteeing loss of life and an eventual pricetag of billions..." - BP, probably

Executives should never be allowed to make decisions because they are driven by monetary values rather than life issues.

I have no idea why, but this specific disaster fascinates me. It’s such a perfect storm of errors that showcases the breakdown of a complex system.

Those blind rams are a deadman solution for when everything else fails. Theres literally a valve on the BOP that opens and closes like a tap like you suggested. The BOP in the case of the DWH disaster was a story unto itself. The well casing buckled inside the bore of the BOP and caused all kinds of problems and on top of that It wasnt put together right, and it WAS designed to kill the well on its own if it lost communication with the rig. The system was powered by onboard batteries, one bank per ram. Iirc, on one bank the batteries were faulty and had no charge, and on the other ram they had the switch wired backwards. You'd expect a little tighter QC on a $45,000,000 piece of equipment but hey thats the times we live in.

I think my blood pressure elevated while watching this story. I hate management.

I worked for this company and quit shortly before this happened. I’d had enough of seeing close calls because of cutting corners.

This is like a caricature of corporate greed causing death and destruction. Unreal.

The men who took action as they should, the drilling crew, paid the price for all those in clean coveralls that took no action.

This whole thing stems from a bad test that no one is willing to call bad cause they would be replaced. Then the corner cutting and lack of training in an emergency situation compounded the severity, it’s a miracle that about 92% of the people made it off that rig with their lives

I only worked on this rig for a short period filling in for someone. I spent over 30 years in the oil field and was shocked at this tragedy. The search for scapegoats was enormous and costly. Lots of training resulted and many changes. I have never had a chance to read any official results of investigations or what needed changing. So many errors caused and missed by Transocean and BP. I have retired now, so I hope things have drastically improved.

I've seen the Movie Deep Water Horizon and I've learned more about how the Disaster happened in the last 22:30 than I ever did watching the Movie. Top Job ☝🏻

My understanding is that BOPs do have "on/off" options as well. There's one for sealing the well when there's no string down hole and there's one for closing the annular space between the string and casing. When there is drill string down hole like in this scenario the annular space is closed and that valve the floorhand would have been trying to attach is attached in the open position so you can attach it during a kick or blowout and then the valve is closed after. I'm fairly new to oil and gas work though so take what I've said with a grain of salt 😅 great video as usual

Your editing and content is superb. You're a one-man production crew who ought to have a syndicated show

Wow this still drives me nuts every time I hear this story. And I remember living through it thinking they will never be able to catch this well and we're going to live with this oil spill for the next 30 years just continuously pouring oil into our ocean. And everything that BP got away with, it's mind-blowing. And the fact that they are afraid to hit the cap off after multiple explosions back to back to back they still want someone higher than them to hit the cap off. If I was on a thing like that and there was multiple explosions non-stop and there was no way to stop it because the oil pressure was massively too high I would have made the executive decision to push the cap off immediately. And if I lost my job due to it I could live with myself because I've saved probably countless lives doing that. If these peons would have just thought for themselves and push the cap off everyone would probably be alive

I like the oil rig stories, as tragic as they can be.