defense—the 450-ton, 5-story-tall blowout preventer, sitting on the bottom of the ocean floor. Equipped with powerful pincerlike devices called shear rams, it was meant to slice into the pipe and seal the well, containing any potential blowout of surging oil and gas. It was the fail-safe device if all else failed, the final impregnable line of protection. The blowout preventer was activated. The unimaginable happened. The pincers failed to fully cut into the pipe—by 1.4 inches.
At about 9:47 p.m. there was a terrifying hissing sound. It was the worst sound that the crew could possibly hear. It meant that gas was escaping up from the well. The gas encountered a spark. At 9:49 a thundering explosion rocked the rig, and then a second blast, and a series more. The rig lost all its power. It heaved and shook violently. Whole parts of the structure were blown to pieces; stairways crumbled and disappeared altogether. Workers were tossed this way and that. The entire rig was engulfed in fierce flames.
Some crew members dove directly into the sea. Many piled into the two lifeboats, some dreadfully injured and in awful pain, and eventually made it to the Damon Bankston. Others were pulled from the sea. The Coast Guard arrived just before midnight and began a search-and-rescue mission. On April 22, two days after the accident, the Deepwater Horizon, gutted and deformed, sank. The next day the search for additional survivors was called off. Eleven of the 126 crew members had perished.6
THE RACE TO CONTAIN
At the time of the accident, no established methods existed for staunching the flow of a deepwater accident, other than the proper operation of the blowout preventer. If it failed, the only option was to drill a relief well that would intercept the damaged well so that it could be sealed. But that would take three months or more. Both industry and government seem, in retrospect, to have assumed that a catastrophe of such dimensions was impossible. It was an accident, said BP’s then chief executive Tony Hayward, that “all our corporate deliberations told us simply could not happen.”7
Over recent decades, a handful of serious accidents and major blowouts had occurred. The worst in terms of loss of life was a fire on the Piper Alpha platform in 1988, off the coast of Scotland, that took 167 lives. That disaster had led to major reforms in North Sea regulation and safety practices. The last big blowout in the Gulf of Mexico was a Mexican well in the Gulf of Campeche, off the Yucatán, in 1979. In August 2009, a well in the Timor Sea between Australia and Indonesia spilled up to 2,000 barrels a day for ten weeks. But no noteworthy blowouts had occurred in U.S. waters since Santa Barbara in 1969. Between 1971 and 2009, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior, the total number of barrels of oil that had spilled in federal waters as the result of blowouts was a miniscule 1,800 barrels—an average of 45 barrels a year.8
But now the unthinkable had happened, and the flow had to be stopped. The result was an overdrive process of high-tech engineering improvisation by BP, its contractors, other companies, outside specialists, government experts, and government scientists who knew little about oil to begin with but quickly became experts.
A whole host of approaches for stemming the flow were tried. They all failed. Finally, in mid-July, eighty-eight days after the accident, a newly designed capping stack was put in place. That ended the spill. No more oil was leaking out of the Macondo well. Two months later, on September 19, after the relief well connected with the original well, the government pronounced Macondo “effectively dead.”9
“FIGHTING THE SPILL”
In the Gulf itself, the fishing industry, whose boats could not go out, was hardest hit economically, along with tourism at beach resorts. The marshy coastal waters of Louisiana were among the areas worst affected.
As with the blowout itself, both government and industry were unprepared to deal with the environmental consequences. The Oil Pollution Act and the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund had been established two decades earlier, in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, to respond to an accident involving a tanker. But the loss of oil from a tanker, however serious, was a finite affair. A tanker only held so much oil.
The response to a blowout on this scale had to be invented. A vast navy of ships of all sorts, 6,700 in all, were deployed to intercept and