Never forget Macondo
Don’t roll back safety rules created after the 2010 disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
The massive explosion at the Macondo drill site happened so far offshore that it was initially invisible even to the nearest Gulf Coast residents. But it didn’t take long for images of the largest oil spill in U.S. history — the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster — to be displayed on television screens across the globe.
In response, industry leaders, safety advocates and government regulators subsequently worked together to improve offshore safety. They promised to prevent another Deepwater Horizon.
It is a promise routinely on the verge of being broken. Out of sight, risk remains routine for offshore drilling.
At least 87 fires and 10 explosions have been reported on platforms, drillships and related operations in the Gulf in the last eight years, according to a review of data by the Houston Chronicle editorial board.
In more than 200 reported incidents, workers were evacuated. At least 11 offshore accidents involved one or more deaths, according to statistics kept by the offshore safety agency now called the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.
You would think that this pattern of danger would inspire regulators to keep crafting more safety rules. Instead, the Trump administration is proposing regulatory rollbacks. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has announced changes to a rule based on the Macondo disaster that focuses on “Blowout Preventer/Well Control Requirements.”
Those technical terms should sound familiar.
Eight years ago, BP overseers disagreed with their partners from Transocean, operators of a so-called drillship, over how to best handle problems encountered as they aggressively plumbed beneath Gulf waters at a site far off the coast of Louisiana. Ultimately, they ignored some of their own safety rules and failed to detect signs of a well control disaster in time. In the end, they turned to a fail-safe device known as a “blowout preventer.”
The result left 11 people dead. That was Macondo/Deepwater Horizon.
We now know — as the result of eight years of safety probes, criminal prosecutions and environmental studies — that at least 3.9 million barrels of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico. The disaster caused billions of dollars in economic damages for coastal residents and businesses. The spill also killed thousands of endangered sea turtles, sickened fish, prompted mass strandings of dolphin and devastated populations of pelicans and other creatures that depend on coastal waters and marshes.
Safety advocates and responsible upstream companies — like those who gathered this week in Houston for the 50th Offshore Technology Conference — should carefully review the proposed revisions to the well control rule, participate in the comment period and preserve rules to protect oil field workers and the environment.
Eleven lives lost and billions in damages must not so soon be forgotten.
Truly massive drilling disasters are uncommon partly because of lessons learned from disasters such as the 1988 explosion of the Piper Alpha platform in British waters that claimed 167 lives in the North Sea — a disaster that remains the deadliest in global offshore history — and, yes, Deepwater Horizon.
Nevertheless, some already are supporting proposals to relax Deepwater-related reforms.
The International Association of Drilling Contractors, in a statement, said that the well control rule’s requirements should be “appropriately refined to increase their effectiveness while removing those provisions that add unnecessary costs without increasing safety.”
Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, also has supported revising the Well Control Rule to “bring standards up to speed, and maintain safety protocols for American workers and protection for the environment .”
But we should not be too hasty to discard reforms based on years of studies of what went wrong at Macondo. All those offshore fires, near-misses, blowouts and even deaths reported in the Gulf of Mexico since April 2010 show we need to remain vigilant. Recent incidents also should be reviewed to see whether new requirements could have prevented them. The oil and gas industry needs to keep learning from mistakes.
The routine dangers of deepwater drilling might remain out of sight for now. But if we start to forget about the risk of disaster, don’t be surprised when you see another Deepwater Horizon appear on your television screen.