Federal Test Track

Final Report on Gulf Oil Spill Disaster Shares the Blame

A key US report released today says poor risk management, last-minute changes to plans and faulty cement work were responsible for the massive Gulf of Mexico rig explosion and oil spill. The report gives shared responsibility to BP, Transocean and Haliburton for the deadly rig explosion on April 20, 2010 that killed 11, injured 16 others, and spilled more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. 

These findings come from an investigation conducted by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, formerly the Minerals Management Service, who oversees drilling operations in US waters.

The panel found that the central cause of the blowout was “failure of a cement barrier in the production casing string.” The panel did say that the reasons for the cement failure were unknown but were likely caused by the swapping of cement and drilling mud in the shoe track; containment of the show track cement; or pumping the cement past the target location in the well.

The report identifies BP as ultimately responsible for conducting safe operations at the Macondo well – including protection of personnel, equipment, natural resources, and the environment. Transocean was identified as being responsible for protecting personnel onboard the Deepwater Horizon rig and conducting safe operations onboard. Haliburton was indentified as being responsible for the cement job and monitoring the well. And Cameron was responsible for the design of the blowout preventer.

The panel found that a series of decision led to the complicating of cement operations and added to the risk and contributed to the ultimate failure of the cement casing. The panel identified the decision as follows:

• The use of only one cement barrier.  BP did not set any additional cement or mechanical barriers in the well, even though various well conditions created difficulties for the production casing cement job.

Board seeks cause of lower test scores | Citizen's News

NAUGATUCK — An analysis presented last week to the Board of Education shows the same group of students tracked over six years generally performed better on the Connecticut Mastery Test each year until last year.

Last year’s eighth-graders took the current version of the CMT for the first time in 2006 as third-graders, Assistant Superintendent Brigitte Crispino said. Six years ago, 70.9 percent achieved proficiency in math, 61.8 percent in reading and 73.1 percent in writing. Those scores increased about 7 percentage points in writing, 17 in math and 25 in reading until last year, when they dropped 1 point in writing, 6 percent in reading and 8 percent in math.

Last year’s eighth-graders could have performed worse because of the merger between Hillside and City Hill Middle Schools, Crispino said.

“It was an unsettling year,” Crispino said. “They may not have been as comfortable taking the tests. … We are trying to find the underlying causes of why something like that would happen in the district.”

Those students, this year’s ninth-graders, cannot be tracked in the same manner this year because they do not take the CMT. They will take the Connecticut Academic Performance Test as 10th-graders, but that is too different from the CMT for comparison, Crispino said.

The state and federal governments do not track standardized test scores by cohort, instead looking at the same grades year after year to help determine whether a school is making “adequate yearly progress” under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The state has not yet released which schools met that benchmark after tests were given in the spring.

More than 2,000 students in the borough between the third and eighth grades took the Connecticut Mastery Test in March.

The district plans to focus especially on minorities, poor and special education students to improve CMT and CAPT scores, Crispino said.

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