A TransOcean employee testified yesterday that a safety alarm was inhibited on management orders. This was to keep the alarm from sounding in the crew quarters at 03:00.

There are not many things that can get you fired from any BIG oil job as experienced people are just too hard to replace, but telling a lie to management or inhibiting a safety connected alarm will normally result in termination. It just depends on the company policy.

Having been in situations like this I would like to offer what our solution was: To get the safety people to support their decision to put an alarm where one does not need to be. This is either easy or impossible, and it is hard to justify a Klaxon in the crew quarters that alarms for reasons that do not deal with human life.

And if the alarm is false then the source of false alarms need to be determined and corrected.

There are two sides to every story, and I am interested in hearing TransOceans', but on the surface this does not look good for their case of 'We did nothing wrong'. Hopefully TransOcean had an alternate plan for alerting the off duty workers of a human life event. If not then I can see at least one new regulation coming out of all of this.