Deepwater Horizon hero Mike Williams has a message for Calgary oil executives

The oil sector is particularly vulnerable to accidents now because it’s on the rebound, which means many inexperienced people are brought in with little training

Within two weeks of surviving the Deepwater Horizon disaster, barely functioning physically or emotionally, Mike Williams was picked up on his release from the hospital and driven to a hotel where 28 lawyers were waiting to grill him.

Barefoot, still in a hospital gown because his own clothes were so badly damaged, Williams was seated in the middle of a large room. A legal team representing his bosses wanted to hear his account of what led to that devastating blowout on April 20, 2010, in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, which resulted in the largest marine oil spill in history.

On the same day, his rig, owned by Transocean Ltd. and leased by BP Plc, had received a big safety award for operating seven years without a lost-time incident.

As TV sets across America and beyond showed a live feed of oil gushing from the damaged well, the lawyers “asked very pointed questions that I wasn’t prepared to answer because I didn’t know what my legal jeopardy would be,” Williams, 45, said in an interview . “I was released from that room and transferred back to Dallas and called an attorney to represent me. I didn’t want the death of 11 men to be placed on me.”

Williams, the chief electronics technician on the rig who was portrayed by Mark Wahlberg as the main character and hero of the Deepwater Horizon disaster movie released last year, was in Calgary this week to offer his insights to senior Canadian oil and gas executives about what led to the blowout — a sudden surge of oil and gas that burst out of the well — and offered suggestions on what needs to be done to improve industry safety.

In 2014, a federal judge found BP was primarily responsible for the spill and had to pay billions of dollars in penalties and settlements, on top of billions in clean-up costs. More than four million barrels of oil flowed from the well over an 87-day period, before it was finally capped on July 15, 2010.

As uncomfortable as Williams’s account was to hear, John Rhind, CEO of the newly formed Energy Safety Canada, said his perspective was important to help prevent a situation like that occurring in Canada, whether in oilsands facilities, refineries or petrochemical plants. While Williams’s story is particularly tragic, workers who lived through an accident are often put in front of staff or executives to promote learning from mistakes and make changes, he said.

Williams, who knew every aspect of the rig because he was in charge of all its computer systems, said offshore drilling at the time was focused on getting to production as quickly as possible.

“It’s about how fast can you go, how deep can you go, how quickly can you get to the next one,” he said. “We had been commended and rewarded for our production capacity. We could drill faster than everyone. That mentality was rewarded by Transocean and BP all the way down to the lowest guy. We would get well bonuses for completing wells ahead of schedule, on schedule or with no lost-time incidents.”

It meant that proper maintenance wasn’t done, he said. “Our rig was so broke and in such a state of disrepair, ultimately that is what led to the disaster,” he said. Indeed, the Macondo exploratory well was supposed to be the rig’s last job before heading to a dry dock to be fixed. When the rig blew up, it was in the final stages of shutting down the well.

Industry needs to empower people on the front lines to design effective safety procedures, rather than mandate measures that can easily be manipulated, Williams said.

For example, once he watched a rig worker badly injure his hand who was flown ashore for surgery and immediately flown back to work so it wouldn’t count as a lost-time incident that would have impacted compensation, he said.

It didn’t help that people were often hired for their connections and weren’t held accountable for bad decisions, or that workers themselves had become complacent about safety, he said.

“Most of these accidents are not accidents,” he said. “They are decision problems. Someone made an incorrect decision or incorrect assumption or incorrect data analysis and believed what they were doing. We need to train people to make better decisions.”

Rhind, who ran the Albian oilsands project for Royal Dutch Shell PLC before joining the new industry safety organization, said major accident can and have happened in Canada’s oil and gas sector, usually when facilities are in start-up mode.

Energy Safety Canada was created this month from the merger of Enform Canada (Enform) and the Oil Sands Safety Association (OSSA) to create industry wide standards and accelerate safety improvements.

But operations on land are not as likely to experience such devastation, Rhind said. The Deepwater Horizon was effectively a floating island that was hard to reach and from which it was hard to escape. Canadian inland facilities are generally constructed behind a blast zone so an explosion doesn’t hit a populated area, he said.

The sector is particularly vulnerable to accidents now because it’s on the rebound, which means many inexperienced people are brought in, he said.

It is human to look for someone to blame, Rhind said, but it’s been proven time and again that it’s rarely once person’s fault when accidents happen.

“In my experience, I have not found one yet where it was one person who screwed up,” Rhind said. “It was generally circumstances like failures in process, failures in execution, failures in training, or we don’t know what we don’t know.”

Williams’s story became famous after he was featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes about what happened on that horrible night, when he suffered multiple injuries, helped fellow workers to safety and was one of the last to leave the scene, jumping the equivalent of ten stories into oil covered waters below.

Eventually Williams agreed to become a consultant to the movie. He said he wanted to ensure it was true to events and that it told the stories of the workers who lost their lives.

Williams speaks regularly to prevent such tragedies in an industry that is inherently dangerous because it deals with so many explosive substances. While remaining an industry supporter and acknowledging that things have changed for the better since the disaster, Williams now works in his own heavy construction company east of Dallas. He says he’ll never go back to work on an offshore rig.

[Top photo: This file photo taken on April 22, 2010 shows a U.S. Coast Guard image first released on April 22, 2010 of fire boat response crews as they battle the blazing remnants of the off shore oil rig Deepwater Horizon April 21, 2010.AFP PHOTO / US COAST GUARD /]