Absence of fatalities in blowouts encouraging

WELL CONTROL OPERATIONS are critical in pro-tecting the safety of the employees and the environment. Loss of well control incidents (blowouts) are known to be expensive and cause delays in bringing important production online. Blowouts may also lead to fires, explosions, injuries, property damage and pollution. It is important for industry to minimize the occurrence of these events by implementing safety pro-grams and procedures that will prevent and reduce the sever-ity of blowouts during drilling operations. This article summarizes information about blowouts that occurred during drilling operations on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) from 1992 through 2006 and compares this infor-mation with the previous study conducted for drilling blowouts that occurred from 1971 through 1991. The paper utilizes data collected from incident reports submitted by OCS oil and ga