The Well From Hell | Men's Journal

“One of the last areas that we went to was the rig floor, where they were already conducting the negative test. The first negative test,” Ezell said later. “And the tour group left and left Jimmy Harrell and myself there because they were having a little bit of a problem.”

Ezell’s “bit of a problem” has since been described by BP as “a very large abnormality” in the pressure readings — most likely caused by gas building up in the well. Highly pressurized methane is almost always present in an oil formation, and if there were leaks or other defects in the walls of the well, this gas could seep in and build up to a potentially dangerous level. In extreme cases, if the pressure from the formation outside (and beneath) the pipe exceeds the pressure of the drilling mud or water inside the pipe, it can lead to a full-on blowout of the well.

The decisions Harrell made next, and the subsequent ones made by the senior BP man onboard, Don Vidrine, would matter more than just about anything that had ever happened in the lives of the crew.

If there is the possibility of a gas bubble, or “kick,” in the well, often the procedure is to recirculate all the mud in the pipe from bottom to top to clear out the gas, a process that takes hours. Instead Harrell, not sensing a crisis, chose a quick fix. He told them to bump up the pressure going to the blowout preventer, or BOP, a five-story stack of valves that sits on top of the wellhead on the seafloor and that is supposed to be able to stop a runaway well in an emergency. In a “well control situation,” as the oilmen refer to it, when pressurized oil and gas rush to the surface through the well, any one of the different valves in the BOP is supposed to be able to shut off the flow, the way the valve under a sink might be employed if the main faucet is broken. Harrell’s solution to the problems Wheeler and his crew were having didn’t really address why there might be an abnormally high amount of pressure in the well; it just cranked the faucet tighter, forcing the pressure back down the pipe, from 1,500 psi, which is normal, to 1,900 psi, which was high, but not dangerously so.

Harrell’s solution worked — for half an hour, anyway, which was long enough for him to consider the test a success and for him to rejoin the visiting executives.

Not everyone was sure that the problems with the pressure test had been solved, however — especially not Wheeler.

“Wyman was convinced that something wasn’t right,” Christopher Pleasant, a subsea supervisor, recalled later. Pleasant had just arrived on the rig floor for the beginning of the night shift. “Wyman, he was still, like, shaking his head, he couldn’t believe it.” In part because of Wheeler’s unease, Vidrine and another BP rep agreed to repeat the pressure test. But as Wheeler had reached the end of his shift, this new test fell to Jason Anderson, one shift away from his 7 am helicopter transfer to another rig. Ezell asked if Anderson needed any help.

“Why don’t you go eat,” Anderson told Ezell. It was now past 6 and Ezell was due in yet another meeting with the visiting execs at 7.

“I can go eat and come back,” Ezell said.

“Man, you don’t need to do that,” Anderson said. “If I have any problem at all with this test, I’ll give you a call.”