Major stories and events
The Deepwater Horizon rig explodes, unleashing death and a massive spill.
The morning that news broke of an oil well’s fiery explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, petroleum engineer Paul Bommer didn’t know much more than what he could gather from a single photo.
And what he saw wasn’t good: The Deepwater Horizon rig was engulfed in flames, with plumes of smoke emanating upward and several boats spraying streams of water onto the platform.
“I just copied that picture and I emailed it around to all of my colleagues,” recalled Bommer, who later served on a National Academy of Engineering/National Research Council panel that studied the disaster. “I said, ‘I don’t think this is going to help our cause at all.’ ”
Looking back, Bommer recognizes the understatement. When the rig’s well blew out on April 20, 2010, it launched a catastrophic string of events and triggered one of the largest oil spills in U.S. history.
Eleven people died. Oil gushed into the Gulf at a rate as high as 62,000 barrels a day, according to one government estimate. Thousands of sea life perished. The oil industry temporarily stopped drilling in part of the Gulf by federal mandate.
And though the oil washed ashore largely in Louisiana and Mississippi, the disaster took its toll on Houston as well. BP’s operations in the United States are based in Houston, and a command center in Houston spearheaded multiple efforts to contain the spill.
“The best minds in the world have been brought here,” then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said on a visit to the command center. “We are confident and resolute that we will solve this problem.”
Workers on the rig — owned and operated by Transocean and under lease by BP — were preparing to temporarily abandon ship where they had just finished drilling about 40 miles off the southeastern coast of Louisiana. Planning to return at a later date, workers had sealed the walls of the Macondo well with cement and casing.
Crew members were resuming their regular duties when the outward signs of the explosion came. First, workers heard a hissing noise. Then came the boom.
“I thought the place was falling in the ocean, that the whole rig was collapsing,” Kevin Eugene, a rig steward from Slidell, La., told the Chronicle in 2010. “I mean it was the hugest, biggest fire I’ve ever seen. ... You could hear the gas gushing out.” The rig sank two days later. The National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council wrote in a report of “a series of questionable decisions in the days preceding the blowout that had the effect of reducing the margins of safety and that evidenced a lack of safety-driven decision making.”
“The actions, policies, and procedures of the corporations involved did not provide an effective system safety approach commensurate with the risks of the Macondo well,” the report added.
Pressure tests before the blowout did show some unusual activity. “When you boil it all down, the people who were examining the data from the test, they just missed it,” said Bommer, who specializes in cementing. “The next thing anybody knew, this thing is blowing out of control.”
The rig was evacuated, but of the 126 crew members, 17 were seriously injured and 11 were declared missing. After a few days, officials called off the search.
Two of the those killed were Texans. Arleen Weise, who lived in Yorktown in Southeast Texas, said she was notified her son, Adam, was missing and immediately knew he wouldn’t be found.
“Eleven families were, their lives were so tragically changed at that point, children growing up without dads, mothers and fathers losing their sons,” Weise said. “Families have been impacted in a way that they will never recover from.”
BP finally contained the spill about 87 days after the explosion, but it would be another two months before the well finally was declared “dead.”
“They were learning as they went along,” said Norman Guinasso, a research scientist at Texas A& M University’s Geochemical and Environmental Research Group. “That’s quite an engineering operation, trying to get in there when the thing is flowing and turn it off.”
By the time the well was capped, almost 4.1 million barrels had been released into the ocean, by government estimates. A New Orleans federal judge, who heard experts testify on behalf of BP and the Justice Department, ruled in January 2015 that about 3.19 million barrels of crude spewed into the Gulf.
Environmentalists almost immediately began studying the effects of the spill. Only a few tar balls washed up on Texas beaches, but oil slicks hit the shorelines and infiltrated the marshlands of Louisiana and Mississippi. Birds and sea animals — as small as shrimp and as large as dolphins — died, and coral reefs near the rig’s site were affected.
The spill’s long-term environmental effects are still largely unknown, according to Larry McKinney, executive director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies.
Smaller animals recovered well because of their fast reproductive abilities, but mammals with longer life spans might have trouble bouncing back. Oil that remains on the ocean bottom is still a big concern, he said.
The spill prompted nationwide debate about oil drilling in the Gulf. President Barack Obama placed a temporary moratorium on new deep-water Gulf drilling, costing tens of thousands of jobs during the halt. Drilling laws also became a heated topic in Washington.
And though BP capped the spill by the end of summer 2010, it fought in court for years after being sued by people and businesses affected by the spill, as well as local, state and federal governments.
BP also pleaded guilty to criminal charges, and the disaster eventually cost the company an estimated $61.6 billion. Some was allocated to an environmental settlement with the Department of Justice, which helped establish restoration projects and funded research in the Gulf.
The federal judge, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier, concluded that BP was 67 percent to blame for the disaster, Transocean was 30 percent to blame and Halliburton, the comapny that did the cement work, was 3 percent at fault.
Years later, Weise said her grief over her son’s death has only worsened.
“I can’t go to a wedding and watch the mother-son dance without crying,” she said. “There’s so many things I’m not going to have because of (BP’s) greed. ... They’ve taken away so much from me, so much from all of the families.”