ON THE GULF OF MEXICO — Ships relaying the sights and sounds from BP’s broken oil well stood fast Friday as the leftovers of Tropical Storm Bonnie blew straight for the spill site, threatening to force a full evacuation that would leave engineers in the dark about whether a makeshift cap on the gusher was holding.
Vessels connected to deep-sea robots equipped with cameras and seismic devices would be among the last to leave and would ride out the rough weather if possible, retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said.
“If conditions allow, they will remain through the passage of the storm,” Allen said in New Orleans.
Bonnie made landfall south of Miami early Friday as a feeble tropical storm with top sustained winds of 40 mph. It broke apart as it crossed Florida and was a tropical depression as it moved into the Gulf, but forecasters expected it to strengthen slightly and roll over the spill site around midday today.
The ships holding the robots would be among the first to return if forecasts force them to leave, but they could be gone for up to two days, said Allen, the federal government’s spill chief.
The mechanical plug that has mostly contained the oil for eight days will be left closed, Allen said, but if the robots are reeled in, the only way officials will know if the cap has failed will be if satellite and aerial views after the storm passes show oil pooling on the surface.
Audio surveillance gear left behind could tell BP whether the well is still stable, but scientists won’t be able to listen to the recordings until the ships return to the area.
Scientists have not resolved a debate on whether lower than expected pressure in the well indicates an undiscovered leak under the seabed or is a result of depletion after the well gushed unrestricted for almost three months, Allen said.
For that reason, ships monitoring the well will remain as long as possible, and equipment will be left behind to record the sound of any leaks that may develop, he said.
Scientists say even a severe storm shouldn’t affect the plug, nearly a mile beneath the ocean surface 40 miles from the Louisiana coast.
“There’s almost no chance it’ll have any impact on the wellhead or the cap because it’s right around 5,000 feet deep and even the largest waves won’t get down that far,” said Don Van Nieuwenhuise, director of professional geoscience programs at the University of Houston.
Crews of other vessels, including one boring the tunnel meant to permanently stop the flow of crude, spent Friday hauling in their gear and getting out of the storm’s way. Workers were pulling up a mile of pipe in 40-to-60-foot sections and laying it on the deck of the drilling rig so they could move to safer water, probably to the southwest flank of the storm.
Shell Oil also was evacuating its operations in the Gulf, moving out more than 600 workers and shutting down production at all but one well sheltered safely in Mobile Bay.
Strong winds and waves could help break up the oil further, but a storm surge also might push it into sensitive marsh areas along the coast.
“Those are two opposite consequences and we’re prepared to move out and aggressively attack this once the threat has passed through,” Allen said.
The foul weather has stalled progress toward killing the well and could delay until mid-August the sealing of the nearly 2-mile underground shaft using mud and concrete, Allen and BP say. BP had hoped to finish drilling a relief tunnel Friday but had to plug it Wednesday to prepare for the storm.
On the tiny resort island of Grand Isle off southeast Louisiana, workers packed up the oil cleanup operation, tearing down tents, tying down clean booms and loading oil-soaked booms into large containers so they won’t pollute the area if the storm causes flooding.
“Part of our severe-weather plan is to remove all the equipment from the beach,” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Nan Bangs. “We don’t want to take a chance on something damaging the sand berm or the houses along there.”
Before the cap was attached and closed, the broken well spewed 2.2 million to 4.4 million barrels of crude into the Gulf after the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig exploded April 20, killing 11 workers. A barrel equals 42 gallons.
BP is likely to be fined per gallon spilled, although determining that could be difficult. Concentrations of underwater oil at least doubled last month, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Researchers at the University of South Florida said Friday that they have the first scientific proof that two giant plumes of oil beneath the surface of the Gulf came from the broken well. BP initially denied the plumes even existed.
RIG WORKER: ALARMS OFF
Certain alarms on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig had been disabled for a year before it exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, a rig worker said Friday.
The sound and visual alarms would’ve warned all crew members of a fire or a large amount of explosive gas and were connected to an emergency air-vent shutdown system, Mike Williams, chief electronics technician for Geneva-based Transocean, said at a U.S. Coast Guard and Interior Department joint investigation hearing in Kenner, La.
Supervisors told him when he discovered the issue that “they didn’t want people woken up at 3 a.m. to false alarms,” Williams said. A computer system would’ve still detected high levels of gas or a fire, he said.
In a statement, Transocean, which leased the rig to BP, said workers were allowed to change settings on the alarm to prevent it “from sounding unnecessarily when one of the hundreds of local alarms activates for what could be a minor issue or a non-emergency.”
“It was not a safety oversight or done as a matter of convenience,” the company said.
Transocean also pointed to a separate audit of the rig in early April, in which inspectors testing the fire-detection system found no detectors inhibited.
The panel is investigating what caused the rig to explode. Friday was the final day of a third round of hearings, which began in May. Another week of hearings has been scheduled in Houston next month.
Rig operators were assigned to monitor the computer system and announced the fire over a public-address system on the day of the blast, Ned Kohnke, Transocean’s attorney, said at the hearing Friday.
“Several witnesses have testified of having heard ‘fire, fire, fire’ over the PA system and alarms,” Kohnke said during an interview on the sidelines of the hearing.
Williams, who has filed a lawsuit against Transocean and BP, said he never heard a general alarm. After being slammed across a control room by a fire door that came off during the initial explosion, he said he reported to a secondary emergency station on the bridge.
“I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see,” he said Friday. He eventually jumped off the burning rig after helping other injured workers get on lifeboats. He was rescued by a person in a small boat, who helped him cut loose another raft that was tethered to the rig and holding workers.
Other alarms on the rig were triggered before the vessel caught fire, said Williams, a former Marine who was responsible for maintaining the fire and gas systems on the Deepwater Horizon. The rig was behind schedule for repairs, he said.
Information for this article was contributed by David Dishneau, Harry R. Weber, Mary Foster, Jason Dearen and Matthew Brown of The Associated Press and by Katarzyna Klimasinska, Jim Polson, Brian K. Sullivan and Mark Chediak of Bloomberg News and by Robbie Brown of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/24/2010