A well operated by Chesapeake Energy Corporation experienced a fiery blowout on Thursday, January 30, 2020. The well, the Daniel H 1 H, is located in Burleson County, Texas near Deanville. The well is in an area where Chesapeake is drilling long lateral well bores to develop Eagle Ford shale deposits. Two of Chesapeake’s subcontractors, C.C. Forbes and Eagle Pressure Control, were operating a service rig to install new hardware on the well at the time of the accident. Unfortunately, three employees of these subcontractors were killed by the fire. News reports indicated that Boots & Coots, a well control company now owned by Halliburton, was hired to get the well under control and put the fire out.
The U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) is sending a team to the well to investigate the accident. The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the agency’s board members are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. According to the CSB website: “The CSB conducts root cause investigations of chemical accidents at fixed industrial facilities. Root causes are usually deficiencies in safety management systems, but can be any factor that would have prevented the accident if that factor had not occurred. Other accident causes often involve equipment failures, human errors, unforeseen chemical reactions or other hazards. The agency does not issue fines or citations, but does make recommendations to plants, regulatory agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), industry organizations, and labor groups. Congress designed the CSB to be non-regulatory and independent of other agencies so that its investigations might, where appropriate, review the effectiveness of regulations and regulatory enforcement.”
Oil wells are ubiquitous throughout Texas and it is easy to forget that drilling, servicing and maintaining wells can be a critically dangerous business.