Updated | 2:37 p.m. In an interview published online on Monday, a technician who worked on the Deepwater Horizon told the BBC that the rig’s blowout preventer, which failed to seal BP’s Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico after an explosion on April 20, was leaking fluid weeks before the accident. Tyrone Benton, who worked for a subcontractor on the rig, operating underwater robots, said in a video interview that he had spotted a leak in one of two control pods in the blowout preventer weeks before the explosion and notified BP and Transocean, the rig operator.
As my colleague Ian Urbina reported in May, internal BP documents mentioned leaks in the blowout preventer.
Federal drilling records and well reports obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and BP’s internal documents, including more than 50,000 pages of company e-mail messages, inspection reports, engineering studies and other company records obtained by The Times from Congressional investigators, shed new light on the extent and timing of problems with the blowout preventer and the casing long before the explosion. [...]
The documents show that in March, after problems on the rig that included drilling mud falling into the formation, sudden gas releases known as “kicks” and a pipe falling into the well, BP officials informed federal regulators that they were struggling with a loss of “well control.” On at least three occasions, BP records indicate, the blowout preventer was leaking fluid, which the manufacturer of the device has said limits its ability to operate properly.
While working on the Deepwater Horizon, Mr. Benton told Hilary Andersson of the BBC, “We saw a leak on the pod.” He added, “seeing the leak we informed the company men,” at BP and Transocean. According to Mr. Benton, the companies did not take immediate steps to repair the device. “They have a control room where they could turn off that pod and turn on the other one, so that they don’t have to stop production.”
To really fix the problem, Mr. Benton said, the companies would have had to “stop production, bring the B.O.P. completely up and start working on it.” But, he said, that was not done.
According to the BBC’s report, “Transocean said it tested the device successfully before the accident.”
My colleagues David Barstow, Laura Dodd, James Glanz, Stephanie Saul and Ian Urbina reported on Sunday that engineers scrambling to activate the blowout preventer days after the explosion discovered that part of its hydraulic system was leaking, “meaning pressure could not be maintained on its shearing blades,” which were supposed to cut and seal the pipe. They noted:
This leak shocked engineers because the blowout preventer’s hydraulic system was obsessively checked for leaks. “We see tests fail because the hydraulics leaked two drops,” said Benton Baugh, a leading authority on blowout preventers. Indeed, the blind shear ram had been tested for leaks only hours before the blowout, and according to Transocean, no hydraulic leaks had been detected in the weeks before the blowout.
Their article is accompanied online by a brief video report explaining how central hydraulic fluid is the proper functioning of a blowout preventer.
Mr. Benton’s statement to the BBC seems to contradict this assertion by Transocean that there were no leaks in the weeks leading up to the accident.
As The Wall Street Journal reported in May, Mr. Benton is suing BP and Transocean, “claiming physical injury and mental anguish.” He told the Journal that it seemed to him that managers on the rig were “pushing” to finish work early before the explosion and “were doing too many jobs at one time.”
