With the schedule slipping, Williams says a BP manager ordered a faster pace.
"And he requested to the driller, 'Hey, let's bump it up. Let's bump it up.' And what he was talking about there is he's bumping up the rate of penetration. How fast the drill bit is going down," Williams said.
But while it was shut tight, a crewman on deck accidentally nudged a joystick, applying hundreds of thousands of pounds of force, and moving 15 feet of drill pipe through the closed blowout preventer.
The BOP is operated from the surface by wires connected to two control pods; one is a back-up. Williams says one pod lost some of its function weeks before.
He discovered chunks of rubber in the drilling fluid. He thought it was important enough to gather this double handful of chunks of rubber and bring them into the driller shack. I recall asking the supervisor if this was out of the ordinary. And he says, 'Oh, it's no big deal.'
1. Mandate digging deeper and greedier.
2. Accidentally pull the lever and drill through your primary oil-blocking system.
3. Find out your emergency blocker doesn't work.
4. Tell everybody it's no big deal.
5. ? ? ?
6. WELCOME TO FUCKING RIGMURDERED! Hope you like oil!