Rig Worker Was Worried About Safety, Widow Says

Rig Worker Was Worried About Safety, Widow Says
By ROBBIE BROWN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: July 22, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/us/23hearing.html?th&emc=th


KENNER, La. — Government investigators on Thursday pressed a BP official who supervised the Deepwater Horizon about whether the company took shortcuts to save money and time by selecting riskier equipment at the oil rig.

The official, John Guide, the well team leader, denied that BP had chosen a potentially risky type of well casing over more traditional equipment because it would save the company three days and $7 million to $10 million.

“It just happened to be a case where it also saved money,” Mr. Guide said. The casing’s lower cost played no role in the decision, he said, even though the company considered it the “best economic case.”

The federal panel investigating the causes of the rig explosion that resulted in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has focused this week on whether financial calculations may have trumped safety considerations in the weeks before the disaster. When the rig exploded April 20, BP was 43 days behind schedule, costing the company about $1 million a day in rig rental rates, company officials say.

At the end of the hearings, the panel announced that two BP officials had been named "parties of interest," making them potential targets of the investigation. The two men, Robert Kaluza, the well site manager on the rig, and Patrick O'Bryan, the vice president for drilling and completions, are the first individuals to be named from BP. They could not be reached for comment.

Also on Thursday, the widow of one of the 11 rig workers killed in the explosion testified that her husband had felt pressure to continue drilling for oil despite frequent equipment malfunctions and setbacks. The widow, Natalie Roshto, said her husband, Shane Roshto, a 22-year-old roustabout for Transocean, the rig’s owner, expressed grave concerns about work conditions before his death.

“From Day 1, he deemed this the well from hell,” Ms. Roshto said. “He said Mother Nature just didn’t want to be drilled here.”

Her testimony before the six-member panel in this suburb of New Orleans reinforced a growing perception that workers were concerned about the rig’s safety standards. Ms. Roshto said her husband had not expressed similar concerns about other wells.

A confidential survey of rig workers conducted a month before the disaster showed that many were distressed about safety conditions and feared reprisals if they reported mistakes or other problems. The survey, commissioned by Transocean and obtained by The New York Times, said workers “often saw unsafe behaviors on the rig.”

“For our men to be there drilling and their lives to be put under business interests, that’s what I want to stress,” said Ms. Roshto, who has also testified before Congressional investigators. “I don’t think we need to make any more safety rules. I think they need to be implemented harder for our men who work out there.”

Mr. Guide testified that workers were aware of a leak on a critical safety valve on emergency equipment. He said that the leak was detected in February and March and was repaired. But the equipment failed to activate after the explosion.

Investigators raised questions about BP’s choice of the less-expensive casing. “Is it true that decisions were made based on cost savings?” asked Jason Mathews, a member of the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, which is overseeing the hearings along with the Coast Guard.

“The culture is that safety is the priority,” Mr. Guide said.

“Culture is one thing,” said Capt. Hung Nguyen of the Coast Guard, who is chairman of the panel. Enforcement, he added, “is another thing.”

But Mr. Guide assigned blame to Transocean, which leased the rig to BP and employed most of its workers. “We had faith that Transocean was attempting to maintain a safe ship,” he said.

Captain Nguyen dismissed the answer. “In the military, we often say hope is not a plan,” he said. “It seems like faith is not a very good business decision here.”

It also emerged at the hearings that a top BP official on the rig had expressed concerns about how workers were planning to close the well safely. The official, Mr. Kaluza, the well site leader, said after the disaster that he believed that workers might have taken unusual steps, including combining a safety test with the displacement of protective drilling solution, “to save time.”

“Don’t know why,” Mr. Kaluza said, according to a BP document quoted by a lawyer for one of the rig workers. “Maybe trying to save time. At the end of the well, sometimes they think about speeding up.”