BP had wrong diagram to close blowout preventer
By Maria Recio, Dave Montgomery and Mark Washburn | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — In the days after a oil well spun out of control in the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers tried to activate a huge piece of underwater safety equipment but failed because the device had been so altered that diagrams BP got from the equipment’s owner didn’t match the supposedly failsafe device’s configuration, congressional investigators said Wednesday. The oil well also failed at least one critical pressure test on the day that gas surged up the drill pipe and set the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig aflame, killing 11 and setting off a spill that has spewed 210,000 gallons of crude into the gulf every day for three weeks, according to BP documents provided to congressional investigators. “The more I learn about this accident, the more concerned I become. This catastrophe appears to have been caused by a calamitous series of equipment and operational failures” said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said at a hearing on Wednesday — the third congressional hearing in two days on the unfolding catastrophe. … Word of the missing diagram, the failed test and the addition of another experimental option to close the leak came as the Obama administration announced that it had recruited five government and private scientists to add what Energy Secretary Stephen Chu called “intellectual horsepower” to BP’s efforts to contain the oil spill and shut off the well. …
