MSNBC (consider the source) has some bits and pieces on BP oil rig incident here. It appears that the owner of the rig, Transocean, is being thrown under the bus, rightly or otherwise. The house Oversight and Investigations Committee of the House Energy Committee seems to have drawn the following conclusions:

A “leak was found in the hydraulic system that provides emergency power to the shear rams, which are the devices that are supposed to cut the drill pipe and seal the well.” An official with Cameron, the preventer’s manufacturer, “told us that he did not believe the leak was caused by the blowout because every other fitting in the system was tight” and that “if the leak deprived the shear rams of sufficient power, they might not succeed in cutting through the drill pipe and sealing the well.”

The blowout preventer’s underwater control panel was modified prior to the explosion in a way that reversed how a device is supposed to seal off a pipe. After the explosion, “an entire day’s worth of precious time had been spent engaging rams that closed the wrong way.” BP said it was working off incorrect preventer schematics provided by Transocean.

The blowout preventer, due to its design, was “not powerful enough to cut through joints in the drill pipe” in order to shut off any leak.” The Cameron official “confirmed that it is not powerful enough to cut through the joints in the drillpipe. And he told us this was another possible explanation for the failure of the blowout preventer to seal the well.”

The emergency controls on the blowout preventer may have failed. BP said those were “activated on the drill rig before the rig was evacuated. But the Cameron official said they doubted the signals ever reached the blowout preventer on the seabed. Cameron officials believed the explosion on the rig destroyed the communications link to the blowout preventer before the emergency sequence could be completed. In other words, the emergency controls may have failed because the explosion that caused the emergency also disabled communications to the blowout preventer.”

The obvious question that comes to me is, how did they determine all of this? I don’t think they could have done this by inspection, it appears to be based on interviews. Given that this is Bart Stupek speaking this may be highly inaccurate, but if true, Transocean is going to go the way of Arthur Anderson. What they’re describing is a number of egregious failures of protocol, and a general operating philosophy of duct taping things because fixing them properly may take too much time, or whatever.

Stupek claims, and this is damning all to hell if true, that:

Stupak said the committee had been told that one of the preventer’s ram drivers had been changed so it could be used for routine testing and was no longer designed to activate in an emergency. He said after the spill BP “spent a day trying to use this … useless test ram,” which no longer was configured for emergency use.

This is up there with the on-line experiments that they were doing at Chernobyl, if true. You just don’t d*ck with these things like that. You just don’t. What’s not clear from the article is if this modification was done at Transocean’s request or BP’s. That’s a huge question that’s going to be at the center of the finger-pointing. This will be adjudicated in congress and in court.

IOW, a picture is emerging of, exactly as I expected, multiple f*ck-ups stemming from a culture of duct tape, and apparently worse. But at the same time, we still don’t know exactly why the BOP failed. So stay tuned. And if you have any Transocean stock…