NEW ORLEANS: The BP/Transocean disaster is already being felt by the wider deepwater oil industry, with the Obama administration ordering immediate inspections of all deepwater drilling rigs and platforms in the Gulf of Mexico to determine if risks of any further spills are on the horizon.

The rigs are to be examined first, with the blowout preventor stacks a particular focus. Authorities want to know whether equipment tests have been done and the records are there to prove it. In addition, Washington wants to ensure operators are performing emergency well control exercises.

Given the scale of production in the Gulf, and the high tech equipment deep out and under the ocean, this will be a time consuming process. There are 30 drilling rigs operating in the deepwater Gulf and 47 deepwater production facilities.

One of the most important jobs on an oil rig is that of ballast control operator. It is an arguably tedious task in good times. But in bad times, it becomes an extremely challenging exercise of keeping hundreds of men alive and tens of thousands of tonnes of steel, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, upright.

In December 2005, I had the chance the step into a simulator at Transocean’s training centre in Aberdeen, Scotland. The facility trains offshore workers heading to the rough, cold, medium-depth waters of the North Sea, rather than those working on the deep water rigs in the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico. On ultra deep water rigs, such as Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon, which exploded last week in the Gulf of Mexico, the ballast control operator’s job is done by dynamic positioning operators. There are other differences too, not least because the training I got was five years ago. But the scenarios I was put through ran the gamut, from Gulf Coast hurricanes to floating icebergs in Arctic waters.

The trip came shortly after Hurricane Katrina whipped through the rigs and platforms of the Gulf of Mexico and highlights the dangers and pressures of the life and death decisions made on a rig in trouble.