Blowout in the Gulf: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America

Prologue: The Deep-water Horror Zone

Prologue:TheDeep-waterHorrorZone April 20, 2010, had been a pretty good day for the friends on the 26-foot craft, Endorfin. Fishing for blackfin tuna, they had caught their limit, and as night fell, they headed toward the Deepwater Horizon—a gigantic drilling rig that had been enjoying a pretty good day as well. Just seven months earlier, the big rig had set an all-time record for deepwater drilling, completing a well nearly six miles deep. The day before, one of the platform’s key contractors— Halliburton—had finished cementing the current well’s final casing, a key step in the process of getting the platform ready to move to a new location. Topping things off, April 20 was the day when important corporate bigwigs had come on board, celebrating the fact that the Deepwater Horizon had just completed seven full years without a single lost-time accident—the first such rig ever to do so.1 As would befit its record-setting status, the Deepwater Horizon was a marvel of technology. In many ways, it was more of a ship than a drilling platform—two submarine-like hulls, floating below the surface, where waves had little effect, plus a deck up above the waves that provided living and working space for the crew. In other ways, though, it was more of a city than a ship—a complex of steel and machinery, served around the x Prologue clock by a crew of 130, and with a deck as big as two football fields, floating side by side. Also like a city, the Deepwater Horizon was intended to stay in one spot, at least once it reached a drilling location, using global positioning technology so precise that the its drills could hit a specific spot on the ocean floor, just inches in diameter, but located nearly a mile below. The earliest exploratory offshore drilling rigs had a much easier task of lining things up; they sat in one spot or stood on tall steel “legs” firmly attached to the bottom of the sea. As the drilling moved to ever-deeper locations, though, it became impossibly expensive to build rigs that could support themselves from the sea bottoms, thousands of feet below. Instead, oil companies shifted to new technologies—“semisubmersible” rigs or drill ships, floating on the surface rather than standing on the bottom. Early semisubmersibles were tethered in one spot by using a set of cables and anchors. Those cables continued to work well, even as water got deep enough to crush a Navy submarine, but in the spot where the Deepwater Horizon was drilling—an area known as Mississippi Canyon block 252—the water was almost a mile deep. A tethered drilling rig in that location would have required an almost prohibitively heavy, expensive, and complicated set of anchors, connected with cables that would have needed to be miles long. Instead, the drilling rig used a set of eight massive thrusters—each one capable of producing over 7,000 horsepower—in a complex choreography that kept the rig precisely aligned. On the Endorfin on April 20 were Albert Andry III, a student in Marine Biology, and three of his high-school friends. Fishing and oil drilling had a long history of coexistence in the Gulf, and the friends intended to idle through the night at the massive drilling operation.When they first got to the rig, things looked particularly serene—the sea was as calm as the surface of a mirror—and they started catching bait for the next day’s The Deep-water Horror Zone xi fishing. Just after 9:30 that night, though, things suddenly got anything but peaceful. Water came gushing down so fast that Andry thought the Deepwatwer Horizon crew was dumping its bilge water to keep from capsizing, and the friends’ eyes started to burn. One of them who had experience working on rigs, Wes Bourg, knew that they needed to move fast, shouting to his friend to“Go, go, go, go, GOOOOO!”Andry gunned the throttle and headed for open water as fast as his boat could go. The Endorfin was about 100 yards away when the platform exploded into flames.2 By the narrowest of margins, the friends on board the Endorfin all survived. Above them, though, the crew members of the Deepwater Horizon were not so fortunate—and neither were the wildlife or the other human inhabitants of...