“I understand the six well heads are used with directional drilling with attached cameras and sensors.
I would expect the different drill heads were taken in different directions out many miles from each other and many miles deep. When all well heads gushed (if truely reported), this would give credence to an ‘ocean of oil’.”
Even in horizontal drilling, they drill one hole at a time. You have a site pad that will hold up to 6 or 8 bores at the surface level but all are going out in different directions, like a star burst, below the surface. Because these bores are on the same site pad on the surface and in close proximity to each other, they only drill one at a time.
A wellhead is surface equipment that connects to the pipe put downhole. It regulates the well bore and allows products and pressure to be maintained.
There is not way IMHO that while drilling a well out in a particular direction mostly the opposite of all the other wells on that same site pad, could it blow the wellheads off of any of those other bores AND make them gush.
If that were to happen then possibly either an underground blowout occurred or a surface blowout occurred and that pressure knocked/blew those other wellheads off of the casings.
Slight correction here.
If those other wells were already producing, which they probably were since they had wellheads on them, a blowout of the well being drilled that knocked the wellheads off of the existing wells would made them gush because they were already producing and you just knocked their regulators off and left an open pipe to flow at will.
Bakken/Three forks wells are generally cased with intermediate casing to the target zone, generally 9500 to 10000 ft. down. By that time, the wellbores are separated by over 1000 ft. laterally, and usually about 1200 ft. The sort of six well 'gusher' described would require simultaneous failure of multiple casing strings and over a mile of formation. Now to add a little fun, on a single 1280 acre lease, the general pattern is to drill 4 parallel wellbores. Six wells on a pad, usually at least two are in the other (Bakken or Three Forks) formation. The exception, though would be to drill an adjacent 1280 acre lease from the pad, which would require even greater wellbore separation.