Tragedy hangs over families, industry, Gulf
Offshore rig’s deadly explosion a decade ago still stains environment, sector’s reputation
GALVESTON — Shortly before 10 p.m. on April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig was working 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana when a sudden burst of natural gas — one executive would later describe it as the equivalent of a “550-ton freight train” — shot thousands of feet up a drilling pipe to the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.
The gas ignited almost immediately, sending an explosion ripping through the rig, killing 11 men and injuring scores of others. And when the 400-ton blowout preventer that was supposed to seal off the well failed, 3.2 million barrels of crude began flowing into the Gulf.
For three months, the world watched some of the largest and richest companies in the world — the British oil major BP, the Swiss drilling contractor Transocean and the Houston oil field services company Halliburton — struggle to bring the damaged well under control. It was located a mile beneath the Gulf ’s surface.
Ten years later, the tragedy hangs not only over the lives of the families whose men were lost and an industry whose reputation was forever damaged but also the region that has long relied on the vast oil and gas deposits buried beneath the Gulf to drive its economy.
Sitting in his office on the Galveston waterfront, looking out over an old drilling rig that serves as an offshore oil museum, Nick Gutierrez, the manager of a seafood market and fishing company, said the Texas fishing
industry was left relatively unscathed by Deepwater, but he couldn’t help but worry about a repeat closer to their fishing grounds.
“It’s all tied together here. A lot of people’s jobs are in the oil industry, and we rely on them to come over here and buy fish,” he said. “But I think about it, that it could happen around here.”
The events leading to the explosion that April night began years earlier, as companies pushed farther and farther out into the Gulf as shallower and easier-to-drill oil and gas deposits ran their course. Macondo, as BP dubbed the well, was not only located a mile underwater but also stretched another 3½ miles beneath the sea floor, where the weight of the overlying rock puts incredible pressure on the oil and gas deposits.
High-wire act
Controlling that pressure is a high-wire act, requiring oil crews to pump huge volumes of drilling fluid and cement into the hole to counterbalance the pressure below. It’s a highly technical process honed over decades, but according to a federal commission assembled by former President Barack Obama after the explosion, the companies drilling the well made a series of seemingly small but critical errors that effectively turned Macondo into a ticking time bomb.
“There are recurring themes of missed warning signals, failure to share information, and a general lack of appreciation for the risks involved,” the presidential commission said in its report. “Though it is tempting to single out one crucial misstep or point the finger at one bad actor as the cause of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, any such explanation provides a dangerously incomplete picture of what happened.”
In the days and weeks after the blowout, the full scale of the disaster would slowly come to light.
BP’s attempts to kill the well from the surface — through underwater robots and a containment dome placed on the sea floor — all failed. That forced the companies to lay their bets on drilling a relief well that would take months to complete. In the meantime, tar balls started washing up on Gulf Coast beaches.
Kara Fox, now an ecologist with the environmental group Audubon Society, joined the cleanup, running boat crews setting up floating booms along the Alabama coastline, to protect plants and wildlife from the crude as it came in on the tides.
“As we saw in Louisiana, when the oil gets into the wetlands it’s devastating,” she said.
“One day we flew up and those beautiful beaches were absolutely orange, and I thought, this is never going to be the same again,” Fox said.
For the oil industry, the Deepwater Horizon explosion represented perhaps the largest public relations crisis in its history. Two decades earlier, the Exxon Valdez made international headlines when it hit a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, ripping open its hull and spilling 250,000 barrels of crude into the pristine waters.
Deepwater Horizon was not only a much larger oil spill, but one that threatened some of the nation’s most visited tourist areas and prime fishing grounds.
In the days after the explosion, the Obama administration ordered a moratorium on deep-water drilling and set government regulators in motion to overhaul federal rules governing oil and gas operations in the Gulf, the first wave of which were in place by the following February.
But the reputational damage was done. Obama, who had run on an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, announced a month before the explosion that his administration would move ahead with plans to expand offshore drilling along the Florida Gulf Coast and the Eastern Seaboard.
Those plans were later abandoned amid protest from coastal communities worried about a repeat of Deepwater Horizon in their waters.
“It was awful,” Erik Milito, president of the offshore drilling trade group National Ocean Industries Association, said of the
Deepwater Horizon tragedy. “That’s not the industry we want the public to think we are.”
Blow to confidence
The oil sector prides itself on its technological acumen and ability to manage risk, presenting its development of oil fields as as more science than business.
But in the months after the explosion, a series of lapses came to light that would challenge offshore oil companies’ confidence.
Six weeks behind schedule and $58 million over budget, BP was at the time of the tragedy under pressure to finish Macondo, which had proved difficult to drill and was dubbed by the Deepwater Horizon crew “the well from hell.” Federal investigators found that BP and Halliburton, which provided engineering services on the drilling operation, potentially failed to adequately test the cement they were pumping down the well.
According to the report, Halliburton rushed to finish the cement work before the 48-hour waiting period for testing was complete. And while the company performed a second test, the results of which suggest the cement was “stable,” it was “unclear
whether Halliburton had results from that test in hand before it pumped the job,” the report read.
“Halliburton did not send the results of the final test to BP until April 26, six days after the blowout.”
When the Deepwater Horizon crew tested the strength of the well around 5 p.m. on the day of the blowout, they encountered unexpected pressure.
Wyman Wheeler, a toolpusher on the crew, was “convinced that something wasn’t right,” said one supervisor on the platform, according to the report. But then Wheeler’s shift ended and a new crew came on and decided to abandon that testing method in favor of one that produced the result they were looking for.
What that second, unconventional test failed to catch was that the cement at the bottom of the well was cracking, allowing highly pressurized natural gas into the well.
When the crew began pumping seawater down the well to shut it down — to maintain pressure before the drilling rig moved to its next job — they unknowingly set off a chain reaction that would take the lives of 11 of the 126 men onboard.
‘My heart sank’
Alicia Cochran, the daughter of Transocean driller Dewey Revette, was away at college, expecting her father was on his way home to Mississippi, when she got the call from her mother about the explosion.
“It wasn’t until later that we found out my Daddy was unaccounted for and missing. I remember asking, ‘Well what does that mean? Maybe he took the other boat, or maybe he’s still on the rig waiting to be rescued. Where is he?’ ” she said in an email. “When a room full of people with sad eyes looked at me, not knowing how to answer my question, it hit me like a ton of bricks and my heart sank to my feet.”
BP ended up paying more than $60 billion in criminal penalties, civil claims and cleanup costs following Deepwater Horizon. “The accident and spill forever changed BP,” The company said in a statement.
“The lessons we’ve learned and the changes we’ve made — from tougher standards, to better oversight — are at the core of becoming a safer company,” the company said.
A decade later, the consequences of Deepwater Horizon still linger, not just for the families of those lost or the oil industry but for the Gulf itself.
A report by the National Wildlife Federation in 2018 found that many marine species were still suffering the effects of the oil spill. Bottlenose dolphins are experiencing high rates of lung disease and anemia, and their populations could take decades to recover. More than a thousand oiled dolphin carcasses were found along the Gulf in the four years after the explosion.
Laughing gulls, known for their high-pitched cries, lost almost two-thirds of their population following the spill and have yet to rebound.
A study by scientists at the University of Miami earlier this year found that toxins related to the oil spill traveled much farther through the Gulf than previously understood, suggesting scientists still have a long way to go to understand the full environmental consequences of Deepwater Horizon.
Push and pull
Some good did come of the spill. Billions of dollars from the penalties paid by BP flowed to coastline restoration projects that have allowed species including the Gulf oyster and the brown pelican, which were already threatened before the spill, to rebound.
For those along the Gulf Coast, it’s part of the push and pull of life next to one of the world’s largest offshore oil fields, which provides livelihoods for tens of thousands of workers and their families.
“Oil drilling is something we live with,” said Bob Stokes, director of the nonprofit Galveston Bay Foundation. “Is it a positive for the environment? Probably not. But it is economically. It’s part of our culture. It’s who we are.”
“Oil drilling is something we live with. Is it a positive for the environment? Probably not. But it is economically.”
Bob Stokes, director, Galveston Bay Foundation