re: So, was there ever a disaster plan for a situation like this?

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No one ever considered that a BOP would not function as planned?

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This goes well beyond anything taught in well control school. There had to be a chain of events of epic failure. I have tried calculating hyrostatic pressure based on probables and rumors. I have given up on this. The whole bop stack had to be full of junk and blown pieces. Casing, seal asemblies, who knows. It is a nightmare to even think about what these people faced.

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you're dealing with an issue 5000 feet below sea water. man know's very little about the environment in this area.

something like this has never happened before. how are you going to plan for the unknown? what can you create to fight against an unknown environment that's 5000 feet below sea level?

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JMHO, but this is a total cop out. if a company has the capability to drill a hole 5k ft under the ocean's surface and drill another 8k ft into the seabed in order to extract hydrocarbons, they need to be able to foresee and stop events such as this.

keep in mind that the root cause of this is that the BOP didn't work. while the bad cement job could've contributed to the huge kick the rig took, and the explosion could've taken out the BOP control panel on the rig, unless they find out later that the explosion and sinking of the rig damaged the BOP enough to prevent it from operating then there's no excuse for this to happen.

BP's disaster plan in case of something like this happening was that the BOP would work. beyond that there's nothing. beyond that, to say that nothing like this has ever happened before is ludicrous. IXTOC I, beyond the details of the explosion, is nearly the same event.

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holy shite. how do you know this one before BP or the rest of the industry? you should really share this news because i know a bunch of people who would pay millions for this type of data.

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had the BOP worked, as the last line of defense usually should work, this spill wouldn't have happened. so, the cause of the disaster is not the explosion or the sinking of the rig, it's the failure of the BOP.

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no one knows what happened. the BOP is ONE OF THE FAILSAFES. many failsafes failed. when all of the failures line up, it creates catastrophe - like this one. the recovery mechanism is an unknown because the industry has never faced anything like this ever. you cannot always plan for the unknown.

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bullshite.

the recovery mechanism is a relief well just like IXTOC I & it seems like it will be here as well. you keep saying this has never happened as if this is the first Gulf of Mexico well blowout. many failsafe mechanisms did fail, however the END ALL/BE ALL of failsafe mechanisms, the last line of defense failed. besides that, BP has no plan to stop this from occurring again besides a relief well.

also, what other failsafes failed? near as i can tell the rig took a kick, blew up and sunk. at some point the BOP was either damaged or it was defective from the beginning. regardless, the fact remains that your last measure of defense against catastrophe is a mechanism that i assume cannot be tested in the environment that it would actually be used.

Not similar to ixtoc. The bop couldn't shear the drilling collars. In BP's case, the BOP didn't work at all. BOP's are tested every 14 days and functioned every 7 (been a few months since I worked drilling and I might have reversed the two methods). Plus, I'd think that in the 30 years since that happened, significant changes and advances have been made the equipment that is used offshore.

I agree that the story is the same; rig takes kick, has blowout and sinks, resulting in bad spill. But that's all the similarity there is.

The way that I see it, the BOP is not to blame, it's the total lack of a workable leak-stopping solution in 5,000 feet of water. They essentially don't have one and thus magnified the risk impact of BOP failure by a huge factor. if the BOP on a rig failed in 200' of water, this wouldn't be a problem and would have been solved quickly...but they are in 5,000 feet so now stopping the leak is much more difficult. Obviously BOP's existed before deepwater drilling, but the strategic mistake made here was applying the same risk mitigation strategy in 5,000 feet that they do in much shallower depths. While the likelihood of an uncontrolled blowout isn't greater at greater depths, the impact of that event is MUCH more severe, and as such they should have had additional redundant systems. Perhaps this could be some kind of apparatus that's already constructed and able to be deployed to contain a spill...something like the cofferdam but something that has been tested and works at that depth in those conditions. Instead, now they are "trying" lots of other ideas. I think that this is what the OP had in mind with his original question....if all the existing "fail-safe" systems that are part of any drilling project fail, then what do we have to fall back on...obviously that has not been contemplated for deepwater wells.

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The way that I see it, the BOP is not to blame, it's the total lack of a workable leak-stopping solution in 5,000 feet of water. They essentially don't have one and thus magnified the risk impact of BOP failure by a huge factor. if the BOP on a rig failed in 200' of water, this wouldn't be a problem and would have been solved quickly...but they are in 5,000 feet so now stopping the leak is much more difficult. Obviously BOP's existed before deepwater drilling, but the strategic mistake made here was applying the same risk mitigation strategy in 5,000 feet that they do in much shallower depths. While the likelihood of an uncontrolled blowout isn't greater at greater depths, the impact of that event is MUCH more severe, and as such they should have had additional redundant systems. Perhaps this could be some kind of apparatus that's already constructed and able to be deployed to contain a spill...something like the cofferdam but something that has been tested and works at that depth in those conditions. Instead, now they are "trying" lots of other ideas. I think that this is what the OP had in mind with his original question....if all the existing "fail-safe" systems that are part of any drilling project fail, then what do we have to fall back on...obviously that has not been contemplated for deepwater wells.

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THIS

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in 1979, an oil rig in the gulf of mexico took a kick, exploded and sunk. the BOP failed to stop the well from leaking oil resulting in a huge oil spill

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Did it have a BOP? the mexican government drilled that well. How do you know that?

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i understand that the basic circumstances of ixtoc and DWH are not the same. but let's not deal in semantics.

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We really aren't dealing in semantics. We're dealing with a known cause of an accident, and an unknown cause of an accident.

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in 1979, an oil rig in the gulf of mexico took a kick, exploded and sunk. the BOP failed to stop the well from leaking oil resulting in a huge oil spill.

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What it should read is that in 1979, an oil rig in the gulf of mexico took a kick, exploded and sunk. the BOP couldn't shear the drilling collars and the well took a kick, caught fire and sank, resulting in a huge oil spill.

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in 2010, an oil rig in the gulf of mexico took a kick, exploded and sunk. the BOP failed to stop the well from leaking oil resulting in a huge oil spill.

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The BOP, which had worked just fine in the few days before this, failed, as did multiple other failsafe systems.

Maybe it was the shaker hand not watching the pits, or returns well enough. Maybe it was cement inside the BOP, or parts got damaged during the kick, and left everything inoperable.

Maybe someone altered a safety valve on the BOP without consent or notifying anyone, and this is all the result of human error, and potentially someone that doesn't even work for BP.

There are a lot more facts than what you posted. To say that those two are the same because they both took a kick, caught fire, sunk, and leaked oil is the same as saying that the JFK assassination and the Abe Lincoln assassination were the same:

In 1963, a President of the US was shot in the head, in the United States, and died.

In 1865, a President of the US was shot in the head, in the United States, and died.

I don't know. maybe you are right. I've always tried to understand the "why you didn't we have a plan" philosophy. Like i said, we are dealing with something bigger than ourselves when it comes to our planet.

why did the space shuttle blow up, not once but twice? we can put a man on the moon but can't prevent mechanical failure? Why do planes crash? why haven't we cured cancer? why do boats sink and people die? why don't we have a plan to prevent this?

man is in places he wasn't intended to be and trying to defy the odds of nature. he never will. things are going to happen, no one has all the answers.

hindsight is always 100%. we can second guess all we want, the person second guessing has made mistakes as well, why didn't they have a plan? a lot of times things aren't what you thought or as they seem.