S. Kim Hatfield, a former Durant resident and president of Crawley Petroleum, got a very interesting phone call a few weeks ago.

Hatfield was in town on Wednesday to speak at the monthly Kiwanis Club luncheon, held at the the Roadhouse in downtown Durant.

The caller claimed to be acclaimed film director James Cameron, (Avatar) and he wanted to talk to Hatfield about the oil spill in the Gulf.

“Yeah, right,” he said, needing some convincing from the man before he realized he was indeed who he said he was.

Cameron has experience as a deep sea explorationist, having been a part of exploration operations for the Titanic, and the German battleship Bismarck, among others.

He had gone to British Petroleum (BP) after the explosion on the rig in the Gulf, and had offered his personal submarines and scientists to help with the problem.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” was the reply.

Cameron did not stop there, and his inquiries to the Department of Energy in Washington D. C. led him to Hatfield, a former Durant resident and president of Crawley Petroleum.

The following Monday, Cameron was in Hatfield’s Oklahoma City office, getting a crash course on deep water drilling from Hatfield, and the next day they flew to D.C. and Hatfield spoke to a group of deep water scientists and engineers brought together by Cameron to discuss the problem.

“These were all heavy weights in the field of deep water exploration,” Hatfield said.

Cameron introduced Hatfield and he spoke for over three hours on what was known at the time.

“We didn’t know much at the time,” he said. “There was a lockdown on the information.”

The group made some educated guesses from the information they had and came up with a few potential courses of action.

Hatfield was then invited to be on Larry King Live on CNN when King asked Cameron about his involvement with the spill three weeks ago.

Since that time, Hatfield has been part of a review committee for the relief well, the kill procedures and the submitting procedures along with other industry engineers.

“The leak was really caused by a combination of bad luck and bad decisions made by engineers at the sight,” Hatfield explained.

“It’s been played up as a huge technological failure,” Hatfield said, “but at the end of the day, this was caused by pilot error.

“Were there some mechanical problems, ‘yes’, but this was avoidable.”

He added that he thought BP has done a good job of trying to fix a very technologically difficult problem.

“We were lucky that we had equipment that could be positioned rather easily at the well sight,” he said.