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There was a significant amount of damage to facilities.  113 platforms were destroyed. 461 pipeline segments were damaged. But you have to consider that over 3,000 platforms were exposed to hurricane force winds.  And 22,000 miles of pipelines were exposed to hurricane conditions -- 2/3 of the total. So the damage was significant, but the consequences weren’t severe.

Well the offshore operators do a very good job in monitoring hurricanes from the time they are first indicated as a tropical depression normally well out in the Atlantic. They have sophisticated weather services. And they make sure that if the trajectory is toward their platform that they have time to get everybody off well in advance of the hurricane.  So it is an ongoing process throughout the hurricane season constantly watching the weather and making the calls early enough to get people in safely.

Well we’ve been very busy working with the industry, working with our regulatory partners, particularly the U.S. Coast Guard. The Secretary of Interior led the initiative to make sure that mobile drilling units would be better designed and prepared to stay on location during hurricanes. During Katrina and Rita, 19 mobile drilling units broke loose from their location. And they can cause significant damage when they drag anchors or if they hit a structure.  So our focus was primarily on upgrading the designs and mooring standards for mobile drilling units. That was all done in a record amount time. The jack up rigs – and those are rigs that float to the location and jack their legs down to the seafloor – those rigs have a new standard that provides for them to survive 100-year storms. The mobile drilling units have a new mooring standard that increases their mooring capability by 40-50%, in other words 40 to 50 % stronger than they were prior to that. There has also a lot of work been done on design standards for offshore structures, topsides equipment, and pipelines. And we're doing some research to better understand the mechanisms that caused some of the failures.

We work very closely with other agencies.  The Coast Guard is going to have a Coast Guard officer embedded in our continuation of operations plan office when we do have a hurricane, so we can work very closely with them.  We work the Department to Energy to make sure we’re going to get them data in a timely manner when there is a hurricane. We work with the offshore operators on better procedures for reporting damage, reporting shut-in information.  We are in regular communication at the district level with the offshore facilities. We have mechanisms for contacting all operators in a very quick way electronically.  And we are constantly coordinating hurricane issues and all of our regulatory issues with the Offshore Operators Committee, which is the industry organization that interfaces mostly with us on regulatory/safety issues.

One of the key things from the standpoint of pollution prevention and well control is that we require that there be subsurface safety valve at least 100 feet below the seafloor on every well. And prior to evacuation, those subsurface safety valves are shut such that if the platform is damaged, the top of the well, the pipelines are damaged; those wells are not going to continue to flow. Our regulations are geared toward preventing the big failure, the big incident, and the big problem.

E-well is extremely important. It is a mechanism for operators to obtain approvals for different operations in an electronic manner, and in a timely manner. And it is a great mechanism that they are currently able to use to report production shut-in, so it is a very important tool for us in monitoring hurricanes.

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Last Updated: 08/22/2007, 02:11 PM Central Time