Quinton gas rig explosion

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 Blast victim sues rig owners, operators

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  • Photo provided via Facebook A drilling rig burns after an explosion at an oil and gas lease near Quinton in 2018.
  • Photos courtesy Texas Fishing Forum and U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board The driller’s cabin, or dog house, at the Patterson-UTI drilling rig that burned in 2018. Both exits from the driller’s cabin were engulfed by fire.
  • One part of the driller’s cabin appears to be less affected by fire, evident by the paint remaining after the fire. There was no escape route near that location.
  • The most viable exit door was hinged such that when the door was opened, the door blocked the escape path to the ground.
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OKLAHOMA CITY – A Stephens County man injured in a “catastrophic” gas rig fire in eastern Oklahoma two years ago has sued the companies that owned and operated the rig.

Five oilfield workers were killed and several men – including Steven D. Wilson of Marlow – were injured when the drilling rig exploded in flames on Jan. 22, 2018, at an oil/gas lease near Quinton in northeastern Pittsburg County. It was the deadliest oil field mishap since the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, when a British Petroleum rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded and sank, killing 11 workers and causing the largest oil spill in the history of marine oil drilling operations. Wilson filed suit in Pittsburg County District Court on Jan. 22, 2020 – two years to the day after the fatal oilfield blowout. Defendants in the case are:

  • Patterson-UTI Drilling Co., LLC, a land-based drilling company headquartered in Houston, Texas, with offices in Oklahoma City and Woodward; Patterson-UTI Energy, Inc., also based in Houston; and Patterson-UTI Management Services, LLC, based in Snyder, Texas.
  • Red Mountain Energy, LLC, an investment company founded in 2013 by a former Chesapeake Energy Corp. geologist, and Red Mountain Operating, LLC, established in 2015. Both are Oklahoma City companies.
  • National Oilwell Varco (NOV), LP, a global company doing business in Oklahoma.

Wilson seeks a minimum of $450,000 from the defendants: $75,000 each from Patterson, Red Mountain and NOV for corporate negligence and for negligence per se, plus $75,000 from each of the three defendants for punitive or exemplary damages to deter them from “committing such recklessness and gross negligence in the future...” Wilson is represented by Tulsa attorneys Clark Brewster, Guy Fortney and Montgomery Lair.

‘UNCONTROLLED RELEASE’ OF GAS IGNITED FIRE

Red Mountain Energy was the leaseholder; Red Mountain Operating (RMO) was the operator of the well, Pryor Trust 0718 gas well #1H-9; and Patterson-UTI Drilling Co. was the drilling contractor hired by RMO, according to court records and the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB).

Red Mountain submitted an application to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission for an application to drill on the Pittsburg County lease; the application was approved on Dec. 4, 2017, and the commission issued a permit to drill. A drilling rig owned by Patterson-UTI was moved to the well site and drilling commenced on Jan. 11, 2018. By Jan. 21 the horizontal well had been drilled to a measured depth of 13,435 feet, the CSB reported. It targeted the Woodford formation, which contains natural gas, the CSB related.

National Oilwell Varco LP (NOV) was the drilling fluids contractor for “MUD” company, “responsible for development and monitoring of the mud program,” Wilson’s petition states. Drilling “mud” is thick fluid used to cool the drill bit and control pressure inside the well. At 6:30 a.m. on Jan. 21, while drilling at approximately 13,000 feet measured depth in the horizontal section of the well, “gas began entering the wellbore,” the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board’s (CSB) report states. An hour later gas started to reach the surface of the well and caused drilling mud to “spit out” of the well.

‘NUMEROUS INDICATORS’ OF GAS INFLUX IGNORED

For hours prior to the blowout there were “numerous indicators” that gas or formation fluids had entered the wellbore, Wilson alleges. “This warning sign must be recognized and acted upon to...prevent a blowout and regain well control.” When a well is flowing, or when other indicators suggest a problem, the drilling contractor (Patterson) and/ or the operator’s wellsite consultant (Red Mountain) “are obligated to take all remedial safety measures to shut in the well and prevent a blowout,” Wilson’s petition states.

This includes “increasing the mud weight (the primary barrier) and/or closing the blowout preventer.” Neither occurred, Wilson alleges, so the well “continued to flow, allowing an uncontrolled release of gas” that “found an ignition source, resulting in the fire...” The crew continued drilling on Jan. 21 until 3:35 p.m., when they stopped “so that they could remove the drill pipe from the well to change the drill bit,” the CSB reported. Graphic provided by CSB.gov The crew worked throughout the night. Between 4:51 a.m. and 6:07 a.m. on Jan. 22, 2018, natural gas was still leaking into the well but no one realized it, the CSB determined. Mud “started spraying out of the well” at 8:36 a.m., and soon after “the diesel oil-based mud and gas escaping [from] the well caught on fire.” Wilson said he was walking off the rig when the blowout occurred. “He was thrown off the stairway to ground, where he landed on his back and right shoulder,” his lawsuit says.

VICTIMS WERE TRAPPED

The five men killed that day died in the “dog house,” also called the “driller’s cabin.” It is the steel room on the rig floor from which the drilling operation was controlled. All were determined to have died from burn injuries, smoke and soot inhalation, the CSB reported.  The victims “had no safe escape route from the driller’s cabin once the drilling mud and gas ignited,” the CSB determined. They were “effectively trapped once the fire started.”

A Dallas-based attorney for the family of one of the victims said, based on testimony presented during court depositions, that the route of escape from the control room was impeded by a poorly designed door that was partially blocked by an air conditioner, journalist Mike Soraghan of E&E News wrote. Boots & Coots Services, a Halliburton Co. subsidiary known for containing well fires, was summoned to the site, Soraghan reported. Fire officials said they contained the blaze but decided not to try to extinguish it for fear of spreading hazardous materials and causing other problems, Soraghan wrote. As a result, the inferno raged for eight hours. 

JURY AWARDS $20M

Wilson’s lawsuit was filed five days before a Pittsburg County jury returned a verdict against Red Mountain Energy, Crescent Consulting (which provided contract managers for the site), Patterson-UTI and National Oilwell Varco in a lawsuit filed by families of two of the men who were killed in the fire. The jury determined NOV was 10% responsible for the fire and explosion, and awarded $2 million to the families of Josh Ray, 35, of Fort Worth, Texas, and Cody Risk, 26, of Wellington, Colo. NOV supplied the drilling mud for the well and manufactured the “dog house.”

Although the other companies and families of the men killed had already settled out of court, the Jan. 27 verdict still apportioned blame for the disaster, E&E’s Soraghan wrote. At the conclusion of a 10-day trial, “the jury deemed well owner Red Mountain Energy LLC and its consultant 60% responsible and rig owner Patterson-UTI Energy Inc. 30% responsible,” Soraghan wrote. “Neither Red  Mountain nor Patterson got to argue or present evidence in the case” because they had already settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.

Since NOV’s 10% share of responsibility means it is liable for $1 million for each of the two families, that means the other defendants are liable for $9 million each, Soraghan pointed out. However, he wrote, the remaining $18 million liability “has no real effect” because Red Mountain and Patterson-UTI had already settled. “Zero blame was assigned to any of the workers who died,” Soraghan noted. The families of the three other men who were killed – Matt Smith, 29, of McAlester; Parker Waldridge, 60, of Crescent; and Roger Cunningham, 55, of Seminole – settled before the trial.

ERRORS, LAPSES CAUSED FATAL GAS RIG EXPLOSION

The CSB investigated the fatal blowout and fire and attributed the cause to two events:

  • Failure of both the primary barrier (hydrostatic pressure produced by the drilling mud) and the secondary barrier (human detection of the gas influx and failure of the blowout preventer). Both barriers “were intended to be in place to prevent a blowout,” the CSB wrote.

Several other factors contributed to the disaster, the agency found. Among them:

  • An alarm system that could have warned the crew was turned off by both the day and night drillers, “contributing to both drillers missing critical indications of the gas influx and imminent blowout.”
  • Surface pressure was not identified two separate times before the blowout preventer was opened during operations prior to the well’s blowout, “when there was evidently pressure at the surface of the well.” Consequently, that contributed to the large gas influx.
  • The blowout preventer (BOP), located directly beneath the rig floor, failed to close when activation of the device was attempted after the fire erupted. The CSB determined that the BOP – which Soraghan described as “a combination of valves and machinery designed to cut off the flow from the well” – did not function “likely because the control hoses that supplied hydraulic fluid” to the device “had burned in the fire and leaked the hydraulic control fluid...”

Attorneys for the families “found indications that Patterson managers had been warned the device that drives the blowout preventer was in disrepair,” E&E News reported. Two days before the blowout and fire, the rig superintendent received an emailed report warning him the blowout preventer was in poor shape, Soraghan wrote. A skull and crossbones highlighted the alert that a key part was in disrepair – but the supervisor didn’t see it because he didn’t open the email. The Oklahoma Corporation Commission found that Red Mountain violated the state’s oil spill prevention rules but decided not to impose a monetary fine after the company cleaned up the site, Soraghan reported.