A federal agency investigating the Deepwater Horizon disaster on Thursday said that conflicts of interest are compromising the integrity of a forensic examination of critical safety equipment retrieved from BP’s Macondo well.
The chairman of the Chemical Safety Board, Rafael Moure-Eraso, complained that companies with a stake in the examination — Cameron International, and Transocean Ltd., — “have been granted unique access to the testing process.”
At issue is the testing of the blowout preventer that failed to stop oil from flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. The BOP examination, which began in mid-November and is expected to last until February, is being conducted at a NASA facility in New Orleans by the forensic analysis firm Det Norske Veritas.
A “technical working group” made up of representatives of BP; Transocean, the Deeepwater Horizon owner; Cameron, the BOP manufacturer; the CSB; the Justice Department; and plaintiffs in multi-district oil-spill litigation.
At times, multiple representatives from Transocean and Cameron have been allowed in the secure, limited-access testing space and have been permitted hands-on contact with the device, even though that violates a testing agreement, Moure-Eraso said.
“That approach diminishes the credibility of the entire process and jeopardizes the public’s trust in the examination results,” Moure-Eraso said in a letter Thursday to Michael Bromwich, the director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. ”Given the well-publicized history of improper relationships between the (bureau) and members of the oil industry, one would have expected that extraordinary care would be taken to conduct the BOP testing above reproach. Regrettably, this has not been the case.”
The complaints come in the wake of separate allegations that a Transocean employee who worked as a subsea supervisor on the Deepwater Horizon weeks before it exploded April 20 had been hired as a consultant to assist DNV in the testing.
The government has since instructed DNV to terminate the contract with the Transocean employee and DNV complied, Bromwich said in a letter to Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., obtained by the Chronicle. Regulators are also is pressing DNV for more information about “the nature of his involvement with the forensic examination,” Bromwich said. “We are pursuing these issues aggressively.”
But Bromwich insisted it is appropriate for company representatives in the technical working group to offer their “expertise and experience . . . during the examination.”
“The Deepwater Horizon BOP is a highly specialized and complex — as well as a heavily modified — piece of equipment,” he said. “The number of personnel who possess expertise with respect to BOPs, as well as familiarity with the history of this BOP in particular, is extremely limited.”
A bureau spokeswoman noted that the working group — which includes a CSB representative — was formed to provide guidance during the testing process.
“The companies have been permitted to provide technical expertise through an agreement reached with the court, for the sole purpose of answering any technical questions the DNV personnel performing the examination may have,” said spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz. “Representatives from these companies are observers only and are not involved in the examination.”
Bromwich noted that the testing plan was endorsed by the federal district judge in New Orleans overseeing the oil spill litigation.
“The (technical working group plan) was developed — and sanctioned by the Department of Justice and the federal court presiding over the multi-district litigation related to the Deepwater Horizon accident — to make this expertise and experience available to the DNV . . . during the examination.”
Because the CSB has a representative on the technical working group, the agency has access “on equal terms with other parties in the technical working group,” Bromwich said.
It’s been so long out in the salt air. The parts are frozen in place by rust and corrosion. The engineers from the contractors are the only ones that want to get anything done, while the gov guys just sit around and complain while they milk the system.
We ought to get some Washington politicians or the Horizon ambulance chasers to NO to get to the root cause, to ensure we maintain integrity, get the facts out and find the truth. I do not know of two better qualified groups.
Really. Let’s have nobody who knows anything be the ones looking at it. That will ensure the political result they really want, anyway.
I wasn’t aware B.P. had any integrity.
Candidly, I could not agree more.