Ok. I'm not nearly as up to speed on what is going on here as I'd like to be, but seeing as no one else here actually works in the industry...
This was not a 30-year old drilling rig. The Deepwater Horizon was a state of the art semi-submersible drilling rig built in 2001. This platform had some of the best technology the industry has to offer onboard. The target zone was deep. Very deep. My work is almost entirely on land, but most of my "deep" target zones are in the 13,000-foot range. This one was in over 5,000 feet of water with a target zone at 18,000 feet. Pressure and temperature were both high.
Information is sketchy. Halliburton and BP don't want to talk much. But it sounds like they had floated a liner down to bottom and were cementing around the bottom. Standard procedure. At around 20 hours after the cement job was completed, there was an uncontrolled flow of oil and gas to the surface. No one is saying, but it sounds like they were performing a negative pressure test of the cement job and lost control of the well.
Regardless, when the blow-out took place, the blow-out preventers (BOPs) on the subsurface wellhead at the ocean floor SHOULD have kicked in. These are massive rams that are strong enough to cut through any pipe that is in their way and shut off the well. The BOPs failed. That's not the only failsafe, but for that device to fail in this manner... heads are going to roll. Whatever else went wrong, that is a failure on the part of the QA department in Cameron that is just unforgiveable.
