Sorry Buck, I'm frustrated by this mess. My first thoughts were those guys missing are dead, no doubt about it, then I can't believe they lost the whole rig.After that I can't believe they had no good backup plan to stop the flow. Nobodys talking about what happened to cause this because of liability.Even when they do there will be some spin on it. Basically blowouts are caused by not controling the pressure of the gas you drilled into. This is done by the drilling fluid (mud) that contains ground up barite to make it heavy.This wt, is varied to meet the demands. Last resort is the blowout preventor which will seal off the casing even with the drilling pipe still in the hole. This certainly isn't the first time one has failed. The first line of defense against a blowout is to anticipate a possible gas reservoir be fore you hit it.This was one of my jobs.I would draw the charts of the rock strata and plot the gas if any. This data came from the rock chips pumped back up and sepparated from the drilling mud as well as gas samples from the same mud run through a gas chromatigraph. This would show all the different gases. I would also plot the specific gravity of the shale which normaly increases with depth. If youre near gas the sp. gr. starts a reverse trend showing its getting lighter and more porous. The gas ppm will start to go off the charts and its time to weight up the mud. If you don't the fluid starts rising at the drilling floor and things get a little hairy. Sometimes a blowout is triggered when you pull the entire drill string to change the drill bit if you don't keep the hole completly full.Nobody wants a blowout, the pressure can push the drill pipe out of the hole and smash into the top of the derrick and its not long before the big diesel engines set the gas on fire. Nobody wants to die and nobody wants to loose many millions of dollars in equipment. This is what I did in the mid 70's.People will never look at drilling the same after this. As for the future of enery, thats another topic. I think we need a miracle there. Oh yeah, that top shot to me was just a pr stunt.I didn't think it had a chance of working, wish I was wrong.Also I think I heard this well was completed and they lost control trying to cap it, not sure.

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