The Sky is Falling

A long, long time ago … wait, I’ve already done that bit. Lemme try again.

Once upon a time … nope, done that one, too.

How about this? Come with me back to a simpler time, a time when you talked on phones instead of stared at them, a time when the Cubs had still not won a World Series since 1908, a time when your intrepid writer was a little less of a crotchety old man. (A little. I’ve been somewhat of a crotchety old man since high school.)

Young-engineer Grant was called by an offshore operator to an elevator & handling-tool service facility to witness the teardown of a hydraulic elevator from a drill ship. (I know, I could probably just use their names and most of you would say “oh, yeah, how is ol’ …,” but I couldn’t be bothered to get permission for all that.)

“Yeah, no problem,” greenhorn Grant said. “What happened to it?”

“We were tripping in and we latched on a joint of pipe, picked the string up out of the slips, and the elevator doors popped open about halfway up.”

Wide-eyed silence.

“Oh man, is everybody … ok?” (I find it very difficult to ask the question about whether anybody got hurt. I want to be delicate, and I know sometimes the answer is “yeah, it’s bad,” considering the fact that hundreds of thousands of pounds of steel that was being suspended by large machinery now suddenly falls from the sky. Basically, I don’t really want to know the answer, so I tend to be overly delicate.)

“Yeah, we were lucky. The pipe caught back in the slips. So after everybody unpuckered, we rigged it down and sent it to town.” Whew, thank goodness.

“You swapped out the slips and pipe, too, right?”

“Yeah, but that’s clearly collateral damage, so we’ll deal with that separately.”

“Ok. I’ll see you there.”

So that’s exciting. I mean, I know our customer has lots (and lots, and lots) of money that they’re out because of the equipment failure and the associated non-productive downtime. Just march through the steps needed in your mind: rig down a big hydraulic elevator on an offshore rig, rig up a new elevator, finally successfully pick the drill string out of the slips, swap out the slips around the hanging drill pipe string, trip that string out and rack it back, then pull and inspect everything that might have been shock-loaded during the event. All while paying half a million dollars a day. The mind boggles.

Me? I just get to figure out why. (Much more fun.) So I watched as the shop set up a quick functional test of the elevators … and hydraulic fluid started spilling out all over the place. Well, you know, maybe that came from the final break; let’s cast our eyes over the thing and see what we can see.

This paint’s in pretty bad shape; how long has it been since it was torn down and inspected? Here’s the ID plate … it says the last full rebuild was 6 years ago … surely it hasn’t been that long, let me write down the numbers and see if we can pull better records.

Well, it looks like something’s been off for a while. Look at all those hammer marks on the latch! Having issues getting the thing closed, were we?

What’s that? There’s supposed to be a safety flag there? That shows when the doors are fully latched? I mean, it’s just a hole right now …

Wow, that pin’s just broke slap off. It seems like you’d need that to, you know, hold onto the bushing.

That one is bent; I guess that’s better?

As we dig into it, things get worse. We notice that the whole row of retainer pins in the middle of the elevator are very loose, and they are supposed to be press-fit tight. In not too long we figure out why: they’re either very badly worn (see the crescent of wear on the retaining pin and the wonky shape of something that used to be cylindrical?) …

… or just broke.

Calling the hinges “sloppy” felt like calling Jeff Bezos “comfortable.”

And a peek into the nylon bushings (which were now just bent steel backings) and corroded hinge pins (grease was supposed to keep them from rusting) made it clear why.

I could go on; I’ll spare you every gory detail. Basically, the things that wear were gone; the things that don’t wear were worn.

Maybe more telling was the evidence (yes, I started to feel like Jessica Fletcher) that somebody’d been poking around inside this thing. To wit:

The hydraulic cylinder—which, by the way, was buried in the back of the cast-iron body of the elevator and could not be accessed without a concerted effort—had been taken apart and reassembled crooked with only one bolt (instead of 4). Unsurprisingly, the seal had blown out.

This is a piston for a safety switch. This side of it is not exposed when the elevator is operating; you have to at least partially disassemble the elevator to dig down to this face. And yet someone on the rig had done that … and hit it with a hammer. Like you do.

We found a door linkage arm that had been replaced at some point (the sticker was still on it), but it was also worn out and bent just like the others. We found a bolt on the bottom of the elevator that was the wrong kind of bolt, which represented a dropped-object risk even before you ask the question “why did they take off the old bolt?” We found cracks in critical spots on the elevator body.

Basically, it seemed like the only maintenance they’d done was stuff they shouldn’t do (like attempting hydraulic rebuilds); the stuff they should’ve done (greasing the hinges daily, for instance) they’d skipped. The rig treated that elevator like a rented mule, and it only got attention when it stopped working, and the “attention” generally involved a beating with a blunt object.

On the one hand, I do, in fact, want to demonize the rig in general and every worker on it in particular—lifting equipment is not a place to be half, er, hearted in your diligence. You’re going to hurt somebody, and even if you don’t you’re going to spend a metric boatload of money getting it fixed.

On the other hand … I get it. The elevators are one of about a hundred things that might kill somebody on that rig floor, and there’s the rest of the boat to think about (cranes, racks, lifts, engines …), and at eye-watering day rates the operator is handing out bonuses if you can cut your trip time. The stars are stacked against responsible preventative maintenance out there (and, really, everywhere).

Now, there’s a happy-ish ending to this story. Everybody on both operator and contractor sides felt very keenly how bad this failure was and the utter, epic disaster that it could have been. We all sat down in a room making lists of rig equipment and pulling maintenance logs to get a sense of where we were; then we went back to all the OEMs to see what they actually recommended. (Fun fact: even the OEMs didn’t always have good answers, so we pushed on them, too.)

The operator then started telling all their operator friends about it, drumming up enough support to cause API to rework Recommended Practice 8B with a requirement for daily, weekly, monthly, and six-monthly maintenance plans and records, ending with a yearly overhaul for all overhead equipment. The current pattern is not bad, but since it’s both generic and “recommended,” it needs you to give it teeth.

And that, my patient reader, is the real point of this old man’s story. One, I’m trying to scare the living wildcats out of you, that you might, through ignorance and apathy, be a contributor to a rig-floor catastrophe. Two, I’m trying to convince you to do some digging and see what kind of plan is in place on your rig (and whether anybody’s following it). There’s nothing all that hard about grabbing a grease gun at the beginning of every shift and tracking when things need to be inspected, but it has to be done, and everybody has to help.