A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [1]
Admiral Allen, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, and others in our government gave us their very best under months of intense pressure, heavy responsibility, and public scrutiny. They were doing a nearly impossible job on behalf of us all. I didn’t always appreciate that right away, especially during my summer travels through the Gulf region, when I was often both angry and grief-stricken. In truth, they deserve our thanks and praise.
But it’s not all about them. It’s about us. We all contributed to this event, and we’re all trapped in the same situation. We all use too much gasoline and oil, because we’ve painted ourselves into a corner when it comes to energy.
For clarity I have lightly cleaned up or slightly condensed some of the verbatim testimony and quotes. Verbal exchanges during the hours leading up to and including the initial disaster on the drilling rig derive from recollections of those who endured that trauma. Because they are subject to the fog of crisis, some testimony conflicts; we may never know how to resolve those contradictory recollections.
In the end, this is a chronicle of a summer of pain—and hope. Hope that the full potential of this catastrophe would not materialize, hope that the harm done would heal faster than feared, and hope that even if we didn’t suffer the absolute worst, we’d still learn the big lesson here.
We may have gotten two out of three. That’s not good enough. Because: there’ll be a next time.
Carl Safina
Stony Brook, New York
November 2010
PART ONE
DISASTER CHAIN
BLOWOUT!
April 20, 2010. Though a bit imprecise, the time, approximately 9:50 P.M., marks the end of knowing much precisely. A floating machinery system roughly the size of a forty-story hotel has for months been drilling into the seafloor in the Gulf of Mexico. Its creators have named the drilling rig the Deepwater Horizon.
Oil giant BP has contracted the Deepwater Horizon’s owner, Transocean, and various companies and crews to drill deep into the seafloor forty-odd miles southeast of the Louisiana coast. The target has also been named: they call it the Macondo formation. The gamble is on a volume of crude oil Believed Profitable.
Giving the target a name helps pull it into our realm of understanding. But by doing so we risk failing to understand its nature. It is a hot, highly pressurized layer of petroleum hydrocarbons—oil and methane—pent up and packed away, undisturbed, inside the earth for many millions of years.
The worker crews have struck their target. But the Big Payback will cut both ways. The target is about to strike back.
A churning drill bit sent from a world of light and warmth and living beings. More than three miles under the sea surface, more than two miles under the seafloor. Eternal darkness. Unimaginable pressure. The drill bit has met a gas pocket. That tiny pinprick. That pressure. Mere bubbles, a mild fizz from deep within. A sudden influx of gas into the well. Rushing up the pipe. Gas expanding like crazy. Through the open gates on the seafloor. One more mile to the sea surface.
The beings above are experiencing some difficulty managing it. A variety of people face a series of varied decisions. They don’t make all the right ones.
Explosion.
Fireball.
Destroyed: Eleven men. Created: Nine widows. Twenty-one fatherless kids, including one who’ll soon be born. Seventeen injured. One hundred and fifteen survive with pieces of the puzzle lodged in their heads. Only the rig rests in peace, one mile down. Only the beginning.
Blowout. Gusher. Wild well. Across the whole region, the natural systems shudder. Months to control it. Years to get over it. Human lives changed by the hundreds of thousands. Effects that ripple across the country, the hemisphere, the world. Imperfect judgment at sea and in offices in Houston, perhaps forgivable. Inadequate safeguards, perhaps unforgivable. No amount of money enough. Beyond Payable.
Deepwater exploration had already come of age when, in 2008, BP leased the mile-deep Macondo prospect No. 252 for $34 million. By 1998