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Alarm system set to quiet mode on night of rig disaster
by Jed Lewison
Fri Jul 23, 2010
Here's what happens when you let a dangerous industry regulate itself:
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.
They didn't set the alarm fully because they didn't want to wake people up accidentally? Seriously? What is the point of having safety measures if you aren't going to use them? It's reminiscent of another BP-Transcoean also described by Williams last May. According to Williams, just before the accident BP had ordered Transocean to cut important safety corners, including using water instead of drilling mud in the final stages of attempting to seal the well. And now we know that not only did they order the companies to ignore important safety measures, they didn't even take advantage of the alarm system to alert them if something went wrong.
On the one hand, you'll probably have executives of other oil companies using stories like this to characterize the disaster as an example of individual corporate failure, arguing that BP and Transocean were merely reckless operators within an otherwise safe industry. But while it's true that BP and Transocean failed egregiously, it's also true that BP and Transocean weren't fringe operators. They were -- and continue to be -- two of the biggest companies in the industry. They weren't just tolerated, they were valued. And after this blows over -- if it blows over -- they will once again be welcomed back into the oil industry fold
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