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BP Oil Rig Alarms Were Disengaged, Blue Screen of Death Common

by Matthew Zuras on July 26, 2010 at 10:26 AM

bp monitoring center with blue screen of death
Here's hoping you're still full of BP outrage: Maybe 50 million barrels of crude destroying the ecosystem and the lives of Gulf locals hasn't been enough or the backfired PR photoshoppery and the revelation that the company had known the blowout prevention system was leaking don't sufficiently rouse your ire. Perhaps, then, you'll be moved to know that the emergency alarm system on the Deepwater Horizon rig was not in operation on the day of the explosion, and that it was habitually "inhibited" to keep sleeping workers from being awakened by false alarms.

Rig worker Mike Williams testified to a panel of federal investigators during a hearing on Friday that Deepwater Horizon was plagued with technical problems since its inception. He said that the computer system had been freezing up for months, producing the all-too-familiar Blue Screen of Death. "It'd just turn blue. You'd have no data coming through," Williams said, noting that the system operated in this condition for months, and that replacement software had been ordered but not installed at the time of the explosion.

Transocean, the company that leased the rig to BP, claimed in a statement that the emergency alarm system had been turned off in order to stop it "from sounding unnecessarily when one of the hundreds of local alarms activates for what could be a minor issue or a non-emergency." But Williams also said that a Transocean official had turned off another system for removing dangerous gases from the drilling shack. When he questioned Mark Hay, the subsea supervisor, about the decision, he was told, "No, the damn thing's been in bypass for five years... The entire fleet runs them in 'bypass.'"

According to the New York Times, Transocean supervisors were under incredible pressure to complete the well, which was over a month behind schedule when it exploded. BP conducted a safety audit of the rig back in September 2009, and found 390 needed repairs, many of which were considered "high priority." The Times notes that the software issues' contributions to the spill itself are still being investigated, but in our very humble tech experience, the BSOD never bodes well for anyone. [From: New York Times]

Tags: alarm, BlueScreenOfDeath, bp, bsod, DeepwaterHorizon, gulf oil spill, MikeWilliams, oil, OilRig, OilSpill, top, transocean

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