Showing human toll of environmental disaster
Deepwater Horizon pays tribute to the many victims of the 2010 oil rig tragedy
For a long time after the disaster, Mike Williams was haunted by the sound of helicopters.
On the night of April 20, 2010, Williams, the chief electronics technician on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, barely survived a devastating blowout that claimed the lives of 11 of his co-workers. Trapped on the burning rig after a series of explosions, badly injured, Williams leaped nearly10 stories into the Gulf of Mexico and was eventually medevaced to safety by a Coast Guard helicopter.
For months afterward, just hearing the whirring of helicopter blades would bring back traumatic memories.
“I had this deathly fear of helicopters for probably another two years after the accident,” Williams, 44, said by phone from Dallas. “I could hear a helicopter in my sleep and wake up screaming. That was kind of a trigger mechanism that took me back there every time.”
Another Deepwater Horizon survivor, Caleb Holloway, working as a floorhand on the rig’s drill crew, says one of his triggers in the intervening years has been the Christian hymn “How Great Thou Art.”
Arriving in movie theatres just six years after the tragedy, director Peter Berg’s Deepwater Horizon sets out to dramatize the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, leveraging all the cinematic bells and whistles Hollywood can buy.
“It has those elements of a disaster movie, but it’s a true story,” said Mark Wahlberg, who plays Williams in the film.
For Williams, Holloway and the other 113 men and women who lived through the catastrophe, the film represents something more personal: A way to pay tribute to their fallen co-workers and perhaps get some closure.
“I didn’t go looking for this,” said Williams, an on-set consultant during filming. “But I did accept the challenge of bringing this to the screen and getting it right to speak for my11brothers who can’t speak . . . We need to tell the story the way it happened. If one single family member objects to this project on the merits — not on the emotional part of it but the merits — then we’ve failed.”
While real-life disasters have formed the basis for many Hollywood movies, bringing the story of the Deepwater Horizon to the screen presented its own unique challenges.
Explaining the cause of the blowout requires conveying a large amount of highly technical information and specialized jargon to mainstream moviegoers who may have only the vaguest idea of how oil is extracted from beneath the ocean floor.
“It’s like the inside of an NFL locker room,” said Williams, who has left the oil industry since the Deepwater disaster and now runs a couple of small businesses with his wife. “You kind of know what’s going on in there, but you don’t really know.”
At the same time, the intense government investigation, litigation and political debate that followed the disaster make it more than a simple tale of survival and individual heroism. For 87 days after the blowout, millions of barrels of oil flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, causing wide- spread and lasting harm to wildlife as well as the tourism and the fishing industries from Texas to Florida.
BP, which was found primarily responsible for the spill by a federal judge in 2014, has been subjected to billions of dollars in penalties and settlements on top of billions in cleanup costs.
Some survivors and family members of victims initially regarded the prospect of a film about the Deepwater Horizon with a degree of wariness.
“I realize that somebody was bound to make a movie of it,” Patrick Morgan, who was an assistant driller on the rig, told the Tampa Bay Times last month. “I just don’t want to see politics and political correctness and all that crap play into it.”
But Berg says his aim from the start with Deepwater Horizon was to keep the focus squarely on the human sto- ry. “To this day, when people think of Deepwater Horizon, they only think of an oil spill; they think of an oil spill and dead pelicans,” said Berg, who took on the film after original director J.C. Chandor stepped away over creative differences.
“Obviously that oil spill was horrific,” he continued. “But the reality is 11 men died on that rig and these men were just doing their jobs, and many of them worked hard trying to prevent that oil from blowing out and it was certainly not their fault. As it pertains to the families of those men who lost their lives, I want them to feel as though another side of that story was presented.”
While highlighting the management decisions that led to the disaster, the film deliberately tries to steer clear of any simplistic depiction of corporate villainy, according to producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura.
As a crew member most familiar with the workings of the rig — and one of the last to make it off of it alive — Williams was an invaluable resource, said Wahlberg. “Once I met Mike, I just insisted that they bring him on as a consultant,” he said. “I wanted him to be there with us and make sure we were getting it as accurately as possible.”
Looking back on the tragedy, Williams, whose head smashed into a door when the rig was rocked by explosions, says it’s a miracle more people weren’t killed, himself included.
“Just bad weather would have increased the fatality rate by who knows how much,” he said. “I’m under no illusions. I should never have come out of my shock. After that door hit me in the forehead, I should have still been in there, laying on the bottom of the ocean. But I was too hard-headed, I guess.”