Oil Rig Alarm Was Not Fully Turned On, Worker Says
KENNER, La. — The emergency alarm on the Deepwater Horizon was not fully activated on the day the oil rig caught fire and exploded, triggering the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a rig worker on Friday told a government panel investigating the accident.
The worker, Mike Williams, chief electronics technician aboard the Transocean rig, said the general safety alarm was habitually set to “inhibited” to avoid waking up the crew with late-night sirens.
“They did not want people woke up at 3 a.m. from false alarms,” Mr. Williams told the federal panel of investigators in this New Orleans suburb. Consequently, the alarm did not sound during the emergency, leaving workers to relay information through the loudspeaker system.
A six-member panel is investigating the April 20 disaster that killed 11 people and unleashed the largest oil spill in United States history. At hearings this week, crew members have described repeated failures in the weeks before the disaster, including power losses, computer crashes and leaking emergency equipment.
On Friday, Mr. Williams added several new details about the equipment on the vessel, testifying that another Transocean official turned a critical system for removing dangerous gas from the drilling shack to “bypass mode.” When he questioned that decision, Mr. Williams said, he was reprimanded.
“No, the damn thing’s been in bypass for five years,” he recalled being told by Mark Hay, the subsea supervisor. “Why’d you even mess with it?”
He recalled that Mr. Hay added: “The entire fleet runs them in ‘bypass.’ ”
Problems existed from the beginning of drilling the well, Mr. Williams said. For months, the computer system had been locking up, producing what the crew deemed the “blue screen of death.”
“It would just turn blue,” he said. “You’d have no data coming through.”
Replacement hardware had been ordered but not yet installed by the time of the disaster, he said.
View User's Journal
2010, July 4th. Beginning date
 |
