Deepwater Horizon incident event

If the worst happens, and there is a big release of oil or gas to the ocean, industry needs to be able to respond quickly and effectively. The Deepwater Horizon incident demonstrated that such a response capability was not in place—it took industry 3 months to cap the leak from the damaged well head and to direct the flow of oil to a safe location. The National Commission report to the President (discussed in detail in the next chapter) says the following about that event. 

The Stop Work provision of the SEMS rule is not part of RP 75. It was introduced with SEMS II. The topic has received close attention from BSEE, presumably because there were so many occasions during the Deepwater Horizon/Macondo incident when someone had an opportunity to stop the event from progressing. 

But the impact of Deepwater Horizon/Macondo went beyond the United States the accident caused oil companies all over the world to think through the effectiveness of their safety management programs. Moreover, events such as the Montara blowout in Australian waters in the year 2009 showed that these events are not confined to one place. The contents of this book therefore go beyond the United States regulatory environment. The book describes some of the major offshore incidents that have occurred over the last 40 years or so, some of which occurred onshore, that led to the development of modem safety management systems and regulations. So, for example, it contains a thorough discussion of the Safety Case approach—a system that was first used in the North Sea but that has now spread to many international locations. 

The above quotation from the Wall Street foumal cites a munber of events and near-misses that occurred worldwide in a 12-month period prior to the Deepwater Horizon blowout. The frequency of such events suggests that the move to evermore-technically-challenging conditions (particularly drilling in deep water) have created problems that have not been fully overcome. Incidents that the article described included the following ... 

Figure 1.1 at the beginning of this chapter showed that the number of offshore safety incidents in the USA has declined dramatically over the last 15 years. Although such a record is very creditable, it does beg the question as to how major events such as the Montara and Deepwater Horizon can happen. One answer to this question is to draw distinctions between Occupational Safety, Process Safety, and Technical Safety, and then to recognize that improvements in one area do not necessarily translate into improvements in the other areas. 

Other contractors, however, have much more comprehensive responsibilities—as became very obvious in the follow-up analyses to the Deepwater Horizon event. Moreover, some of the contractors involved in that incident—Halliburton and... 

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