CONFIRMED
Deepwater Horizon: The Largest Marine Oil Spill in History
On the night of 20 April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, a massive offshore drilling rig working for the oil company BP in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, was finishing an exploratory well when a surge of high-pressure gas blasted up from the seabed, engulfing the rig in fire. Eleven workers were killed in the explosion and the inferno that followed; the rig burned for a day and a half and then sank, and the well a mile below on the ocean floor began to hemorrhage oil into the sea. The safety device meant to seal the well in just such an emergency — the blowout preventer — failed to work, and for eighty-seven days the broken well gushed crude oil into the Gulf as the world watched a live video feed of the plume billowing from the seabed and a succession of attempts to stop it failed. By the time the well was finally capped, an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil had been released, making it the largest marine oil spill in history. The slick spread across the Gulf and fouled the coastlines of five states, killing birds, sea turtles, dolphins, and fish, devastating the fishing and tourism economies of the Gulf Coast, and inflicting ecological damage that would persist for years. The disaster was not, the investigations concluded, a freak accident or an act of nature, but the preventable result of a cascade of failures and cost-cutting decisions by BP and its contractors — a catastrophe born of choices that put schedule and expense ahead of safety. This is the story of the blowout, the spill, and the reckoning that followed.
