A GAPING hole in BP’s investigation of the Deepwater Horizon blow-out came under the spotlight this week in the first head-to-head meeting between company and US-government-appointed investigators.
A National Academy of Engineering (NAE) committee has been charged by the US Department of the Interior with investigating the causes of the accident. Committee member of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, told the meeting that the report failed to take into account factors such as worker fatigue, long shifts and a poor safety culture at BP. The company’s investigators “didn’t address human performance issues and organisational factors which, in any major accident investigation, constitute major contributing factors”, he said.
BP’s report, released in September, pointed to eight failures that led to the spill. In a presentation to the meeting outlining its findings, Mark Bly, the company’s head of safety and operations, admitted that three of the failures were partially caused by errors in human judgement.
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A pressure test which should have revealed problems in the drill “was incorrectly deemed a success by BP and Transocean rig personnel”, Bly said. And on three occasions, real-time monitoring data from the rig indicated that pipe pressure had increased when it should have dropped.
“A test which should have revealed problems with the drill was incorrectly deemed a success”
These indicators went “unobserved or unrecognised” for about 40 minutes, which “significantly shortened” the workers’ emergency response time, Bly said. BP’s report noted that “simultaneous operations”, such as preparing for the next operation, “may have distracted the rig crew”. The BP report failed to address the “root causes” of such distractions, Meshkati said.
The NAE committee’s interim findings are due this month.