ON THE GULF OF MEXICO — Fly by helicopter above the patchy wetlands along the Mississippi River Delta and past the floating boom and skimmers that have failed to protect the Gulf Coast from the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Keep following the fingerlike oil slicks speckled orange and brown that threaten it still.
About 40 miles from the coast, a fleet of ships appears. They look like toys packed in a 2-mile-square patch of dull water. It’s easy to see the approaching drill rig with its 200- foot derrick, offering what is likely the best chance for permanently stopping the nation’s worst environmental disaster.
Transocean’s Development Driller II is one of two rigs slowly grinding their drill bits 13,000 feet below the sea floor until they intersect the well damaged April 20 when another Transocean rig exploded, killing 11 workers and triggering the massive oil leak.
A group of reporters that included The Associated Press had a rare chance to tour the rig Saturday.
Once one of the two relief wells intersects the damaged line, BP plans to pump heavy drilling mud in to stop the oil flow and plug the blown-out well with cement.
“It’s really not a tough thing to do,” said Mickey Fruge, the well-site leader aboard the DDII for BP, which was leasing the rig when it blew and is responsible for stopping the oil.
But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. For starters, Fruge’s team must hit a target 7 inches across, or roughly the size of a salad plate, about 3 miles below the ocean surface. If the DDII or its sister rig DDIII fails, misses or just moves too slowly, oil will keep gushing into the sea. A pair of relief wells took months to stop an undersea gusher in Mexico that started in the summer of 1979.
And no one on the rig has done it before because these deep-sea interventions are so rare. That includes Wendell Guidry, Transocean’s drilling superintendent, who has been in an oil field for 27 years and worked his way up from a clothes washer. But he insists that the job is business as usual.
“We try to keep the guys focused,” he said. “We’re just treating this like we treat any other well that we drill.”
Meanwhile, a boom attached to a drill ship called the Discoverer Enterprise flares off natural gas taken from a containment cap that is sucking up oil from the well head. The distant flames are a constant reminder that crude and gas are leaking beneath the feet of those aboard the DDII as they walk across the see-through grating on its floor.
The Enterprise sits where the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded.
Some of Guidry’s crew knew the Transocean workers who died. It’s “always, always on our mind,” Guidry said.
BP has said a relief well should be ready by August, and the DDIII is farther along, having reached a depth of nearly 11,000 feet below the sea floor. Still, Guidry said, it is unclear which rig will hit the target first.
