Testimony being taken at the hearing being conducted by the Coast Guard and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, in the latest installment, focused on functions that keep a rig afloat and in place above a well, and the command structure.

The attorney representing the rig's chief mechanic, noted that the rig's captain, Curt Kuchta, earlier had testified that he had not been trained to disconnect the rig from the well in an emergency- the rig's last line of defense in case of a blowout.
An audit by BP marine safety personnel identified about 70 problems on board the rig. Testimony was that 63 of the problems had been addressed.

US Coast Guard Captain Hung Nguyen, co-chair of the (Macondo) Deepwater Horizon Joint Investigation, criticised the separation of navigation and drilling decisions aboard floating drilling rigs, a management structure commonly used throughout the oil industry.
"The fact that ship captains do not have oversight over drilling "is one of the problems we have here," Nguyen said in a Dow Jones Newswires report.
From Upstreamonline.com, a weekly international oil news source, 24 Aug 2010.

The BOP was lifted by a semi-submersible vessel operated by Helix Energy Solutions.

An article in the same source, Aug. 30, covering the probe, said BP engineers made mistakes, including mis-reading tests of the well's stability.
"The managers decided the test results confirmed the well was in good shape, clearing the way for rig workers to begin replacing drilling fluid in the well, which is heavier than oil and natural gas, with seawater.
"The seawater was too light to prevent the natural gas that had begun leaking into the well from shooting up the pipe to the rig, where it exploded and killed 11 workers."
BP will issue findings of its internal probe by Sept. 10.

Bloomberg copies some of Upstream Online reports, a weekly journal that charges subscription fees, but these items are taken directly from the journal.

The dispute over cement jobs on the rig intensifies, is another article in Upstream Online, but I can't access without subscription.




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