From The Times-Picayune:
Oil spill hearings: Bypassed general alarm doomed workers in drilling area, technician testifies
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About five weeks before the accident, Williams was called to check on a computer system in the drill shack that was constantly on the fritz. Williams said the software was chronically bad, leaving a "blue screen of death" on the driller's interface and often causing the driller to lose crucial data about what was going on in the well. Once, when the Deepwater Horizon was drilling a different well, the computer froze up and the rig took a kick of natural gas while the driller was looking at "erroneous data," Williams said.
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Discussion on Today's TOD says the computer was running a Windows NT system...which is very much out of date .
Not aware whether Windows still supplies any kind of maintenance for it.
ecsimonson on July 24, 2010 - 2:05am
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From todays Coast Guard hearing testimony it sounds like the "A, B and C chairs all had problems with the BSOD" In other words they ran Microsoft Windows NT and the computers would crash and blue screen.
The last version of Microsoft NT was released in 1996. I work in IT so I see lots of old hardware and software but I can think of much more stable platforms to run such critical systems on. Anyone want to comment about what rigs usually use for OS on the chair computers. Mike Williams testified that if all chairs failed then the only option was abandon ship.
I can think of several OS's that I would trust about 1000X more than NT to run in such a critical job. Yes they would have to port and probably rewrite some software. I have had machines I managed that ran continuously for over 3 years, and got worked hard. Definitely not running NT.
There are millions of machines out there just chugging along on old outdated software... many of them likely still in mission critical situations. not surprising considering the range of applications that NT has been a platform of choice for years, from banking to journalism, from the military to ‘adult’ stuff.
It don’t get no worse than ‘Hard drive not found’ (a generic paraphrase of a message that makes the tummy go.. unngh)
Abort, Blow it up or ReDrill?
heckuva dialog box
Looking at the wrong data is pretty bad, and the BSOD should never be tolerated in a rig data package.
Still, 'older' hands would likely rely on gauges and pit levels by eyeball rather than believe a computer which tells them something different than their observations, just because they don't trust the computers anyway.
This might have led to the disagreements which were alleged to have occurred between crews and BP management, and I can see where someone might be inclined to blow off readings which indicated adverse conditions in the wellbore as a computer error or miscalibration.
The critical error would be in not verifying that either the computer readouts were in error or that the readings were indeed correct before proceeding, especially when considering the potential for disaster. While the driller's console is an important one, there should be multiple redundencies onsite (or on the rig), not just that one display.
I wonder whose program they were running?
A tragic comedy of errors and getting DC involved will only add to the tragedy.
Total negligence. No other way to look at it.