New computer animation details 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout

Investigators with the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) suggest the same conditions at the time of the Deepwater Horizon blowout – prompting the largest oil spill in the history of the United States – could occur at other drilling rigs, perhaps making existing blowout preventer designs less effective in emergency situations.

A drill pipe that buckled as a result of a mechanism known as “effective compression” caused the Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer to fail to seal the Macondo well following an explosion on the rig, suggests an 11-minute narrated video computer animation released last week by the CSB.

The animation – which recreates the Deepwater Horizon blowout in April 2010 – depicts how high-pressure oil and gas from the well in the Gulf of Mexico caused an explosion on the drilling rig, notes a statement from the CSB, an independent federal agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents.

The blast killed 11 workers, seriously injured 17 others and caused the rig to burn for two days, eventually sinking and triggering the massive oil spill.

The video shows the blowout preventer’s blind shear ram – an emergency hydraulic device with two sharp cutting blades meant to cut the drill pipe and seal the well – likely did activate on the night of the accident, the statement notes.

It was determined that because the drill pipe was buckled and off-center inside the blowout preventer, it was trapped and only partially cut. “This failure directly led to the massive oil spill and contributed to the severity of the incident on the drilling rig,” the statement notes.

The video explains that effective compression has never before been recognized as a problem affecting drill pipe during well operations. CSB investigators say this is an important finding because the same conditions “could occur at other drilling rigs – even if a crew successfully shuts in a well.”

This could make existing blowout preventer designs less effective in emergency situations, the statement adds.

CSB investigations look into all aspects of chemical accidents, including physical causes such as equipment failure, as well as inadequacies in regulations, industry standards, and safety management systems.