Fire on the Horizon (31 page)

Despite the “full responsibility” pledge in BP’s ad campaign, it became clear that the company’s strategy in the hearing was to blame Transocean for the malfunctioning BOP; Halliburton for the cement failure; and the Horizon crew for misreading the negative test and failing to spot the upwelling oil and gas in time to do anything about it. Transocean and Halliburton joined in the finger-pointing, focusing on BP’s suspect well design. Obama called the hearing a “ridiculous spectacle.”

Meanwhile, the growing oil slick, now visible from space, was spreading in a lopsided loop around the blowout site. The leading edge of the slick made landfall on uninhabited and environmentally sensitive barrier islands off the Louisiana coast. Soon oil would sully beaches in Alabama and western Florida. Unexplained deaths of marine wildlife began to escalate to many times the normal rate. Though only a small percentage of the carcasses were visibly oil-fouled, the high death rate was almost certainly related to the environmental degradation brought on by the flood of oil blooming in the Gulf.

On May 26, BP embarked on what they called a “top kill,” the company’s last real hope for ending the gusher sooner rather than later. Even the name of the maneuver had a kind of gunslinging swagger to it, as if John Wayne might come riding in from off screen to solve everything with one well-aimed bullet to the head.

A top kill, though, isn’t so much about precision as it is overwhelming force. BP was ready to throw the kitchen sink at the gushing oil, hoping to drown it in a high-pressure barrage of drilling mud and cement—50,000 barrels’ worth—pumped from barges on the surface. The technique had never been attempted a mile deep in the ocean, and after more than two days of trying, BP officials had to acknowledge that it had all been an expensive waste of mud. The force of the oil flowing out of the well simply blew away everything in its path.

On Saturday, May 29, BP announced the failure. When the stock markets opened the following week, BP shares plunged 17 percent, wiping out $23 billion of stock equity in a matter of hours. The day of the blowout, BP stock had been trading at $60 a share. By the end of June, the share price would fall to just above $26 a share, cutting the company’s value by more than 50 percent in just two months. Transocean’s stock price plunged by a nearly identical percentage, exactly 50 percent, from $92 a share at close of business on April 20 to $46 a share on June 30.

If that wasn’t a big enough dose of bad news for the two companies, U.S. attorney general Eric Holder announced within days of the top-kill failure that the Justice Department would conduct criminal and civil investigations into the rig explosion and the oil spill. The president wanted “to know whose ass to kick” over the disaster.

Two weeks later, the CEOs of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and the U.S. arm of Royal Dutch Shell took turns speaking before Congress. They all agreed on one thing: Their companies would never have designed a deepwater well the way BP had designed Macondo. This damning testimony was followed days later by a statement from Anadarko Petroleum, the minority partner in Macondo, that BP had “operated unsafely and failed to monitor and react to several critical warning signs during the drilling of the Macondo well. BP’s behavior and actions likely represent gross negligence or willful misconduct.”

BP’s Hayward and chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg met with White House officials and announced that the company, which had suspended dividend payments to shareholders, would set up a $20 billion fund for damage claims from the spill, and pay $100 million to workers put out of work by a federal moratorium on deep-sea drilling.

When the crew of the
Damon B. Bankston
, the Tidewater workboat responsible for saving so many lives on April 20, had returned to the Gulf in May for their next hitch, it was clear the world had changed. Every oil service port on the Gulf Coast was now full of boats idled by the moratorium. Some of the workboats and rigs in the Gulf would make occasional errand runs for the production platforms still in operation, but for the most part, crew members’ time was filled with maintenance chores, busywork. It was an unsettling coda to the heroics of April, though their spirits would be lifted six months later, when, their captain, Alwin Landry, representing all of them, was awarded the maritime industry’s top honor: Shipmaster of the Year.

The 98-ton cap was reinstalled in early June, but the 500,000 gallons of oil siphoned away each day seemed relatively insignificant compared to the amount still visibly spewing into the Gulf on the live feed.

By July, tar balls from Macondo began to wash up on the Texas coast, the only Gulf Coast state to have—until then—avoided the spill.

As the oil spread, BP quietly prepared another experimental piece of equipment they called a “capping stack,” which engineers hoped might shut off the flow completely. The capping stack was a three-ram BOP, custom-designed to attach to the inoperative BOP left behind when the Horizon sank. The stack had been in the works since shortly after the blowout, but, following the earlier failures, BP managers didn’t want to raise too many hopes for what was essentially an experiment. After weeks of construction, the capping stack underwent more weeks of testing on the surface with equipment that mimicked what was still attached to the Macondo wellhead.

Some experts feared that shutting off the well at the top could force out the well walls farther down the shaft, allowing oil to escape into the formation and flow into the Gulf from dispersed fractures in the seafloor, a flow that, once begun, would be virtually impossible to stop.

On July 12, with a grave awareness that this new attempt could do more damage than good, the capping stack was installed on Macondo in a maneuver even more complex and painstakingly executed than the Horizon’s original latch-up to the well. Over the next three days, all openings and valves within the device were closed one by one under the watchful gaze of retired U.S. Coast Guard rear admiral Thad Allen, the federal government’s national incident commander. With each closure, the pressure inside the new device was carefully monitored.

BP engineers had projected that if the well were compromised, permitting oil to leak into the surrounding formation, the pressure within would never rise above 6,000 pounds per square inch, even with the new device completely shut. If the operation proved a success and the well were kept intact, with the oil flow captured by the stack, the readings would—in theory—rise to between 8,000 and 9,000 pounds per square inch and hold steady. In other words, they would know if the ruptured well had been truly contained only by the digital readout on a computer monitor.

The pressure followed neither predicted course. It rose to 6,700 pounds per square inch before stalling. Anxious watch was kept on pressure readings over the next few days. Seismic surveys of the area around Macondo were analyzed for evidence of seafloor breaches. Ultimately, officials concluded that the well had not been breached, and the lower-than-expected pressure might be explained by the extensive depletion of the oil reserve in the Macondo deposit. The new capping stack had finally stopped the flow
after eighty-four days, in which an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil—more than 205 million gallons—had issued from the blown-out well. Once the well was finally capped, on July 15, officials determined that the actual rate of oil leakage, per day, had been 5,000 times the initial estimate of 42,000 gallons a day.

Three weeks later, on August 4, government scientists reported surprisingly positive news: 75 percent of the spilled oil had been captured, evaporated, burned, skimmed, or dispersed by chemicals and surprisingly efficient natural processing by petroleum-eating bacteria.

But other, independent scientists disputed both the methodology and conclusions of the government study. One dissenter called the claims “ludicrous.” On August 16, University of Georgia scientists reported that they had analyzed the federal estimates and concluded that 80 percent of the oil said to be gone from the Gulf was in fact still there. The report cautioned that it was “a misinterpretation of data to claim that oil that is dissolved is actually gone.”

In any case, even if the government estimate was taken at face value, it meant that 50 to 60 million gallons of crude oil remained in the Gulf, with undetermined consequences.

The following day the controversy over the government report took a backseat to news that BP had completed a “static kill” by pumping cement through the capping stack to seal the well, though failure-weary officials stressed that Macondo could not be declared dead until the relief wells reached its base and sealed it from the bottom.

The relief well broke through on September 16. The next day, cement was pumped into the bottom of Macondo for seven hours straight. Two days later, the well from hell was finally issued a death certificate.

Meanwhile, evidence had accumulated that the rosy govern
ment report on the quick disappearance of most of the oil had seriously understated the continuing threat to the Gulf ecosystem. Controversy erupted over BP’s admitted use of 1.8 million gallons of an oil dispersant called Corexit—which critics called both ineffective and toxic to the environment in its own right, more so than other dispersants, but which BP officials said had been chosen for the job because it was available in the huge quantities required.

University of South Florida researchers concluded that much of the oil that had been considered “dispersed” had actually fallen to the seafloor in “a blizzard” of oil particles. The University of Georgia research team announced it had discovered a thick layer of oily sediment covering several hundred square miles of Gulf sea bottom. In some places, the oil was more than 2 inches thick. In October, other researchers reported a plume of oil more than 20 miles long at a depth of about 3,500 feet. Perhaps as disturbing as the existence of the plume was the fact that over several months of observation, it had barely degraded at all.

By this time, BP had unveiled an extensive and highly technical report on its internal investigation into the disaster. Just as BP executives had testified before Congress, the report focused on the misread negative-pressure test, the malfunctioning of the blowout preventer, the faulty cement seal job, and the failure of the rig crew to recognize that gas was surging up the well. Once again, the missteps were attributed primarily to employees of Transocean or Halliburton. The report brushed aside the significance of the BP engineering decision not to use more centralizers in the final cement job, concluding that the fatal inflow of hydrocarbons occurred at the bottom of the well, not along the sides, where the lack of additional centralizers might have played a role in weakening the cement seal. Officials from both Transocean and Halliburton called the BP report unconvincing and self-serving.

Buddy Trahan, the Transocean VIP critically wounded when the exploding well threw a steel door on top of him, arrived at a more personal conclusion. He was suing BP and Halliburton for his injuries, even as Transocean continued to pay his salary and medical expenses, which had exceeded $1.5 million by late summer, around the time that he could finally walk on his own to feet without the aid of a walker.

“The more I learn about this well, the madder I get,” he told a reporter for Bloomberg news service in August. The Transocean crew and equipment were not at fault, he concluded. “It’s pretty clear to me now it was a screwed-up plan.”

Janet Woodson, the sister of Horizon crane operator Dale Burkeen, who died after falling to the deck of the burning rig, had none of Buddy Trahan’s intimate knowledge of offshore drilling. But she nonetheless felt rage at the accusations against the drill crew.

Janet heard about the heavily appended 193-page BP report through the local news in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The nuances of the conclusions were all but lost on her. Statements from the report that parceled out blame for the disaster among “multiple companies and work teams” meant, to her, that the drill floor crew, who had spent their final breaths doing whatever they could to react to the emergency, was being saddled with ultimate responsibility.

In late December, as the disastrous year 2010 was finally at an end, almost four months after the BP report was issued, Janet was still struggling with the idea. Just thinking about it made her teary.

“How can somebody sit there and blame the victims when they’re not here to defend themselves?” she implored. “That’s heartless. I know my brother wasn’t to blame. He was on the crane, trying his best to come down and come home.”

Like many family members of Deepwater Horizon victims, Janet has perceived in the aftermath of the blowout a kind of abandonment, as public attention almost immediately shifted from the lives lost on the rig to the spreading cloud of oil and its impact on the environment. “Sometimes I feel like we’re nothing more than a fish in the ocean to some people,” she said.

Every day since April 20 has been a challenge for Janet, but Christmas, the first without Dale, had been harder than most.

“When Dale went off on the rig,” she said, “we may not have had Christmas on Christmas Day, but we always had it as a family, whether a week early or late. He always felt bad we had to work it around his schedule, but I always told him, ‘It wouldn’t be Christmas without you.’”

In 2010, much of Christmas Day was spent visiting Dale’s grave with her mother and father. “Last year at this time we never dreamed this could happen. I still can’t believe it did happen. I believe it in my mind, but my heart still can’t accept it.”

Dale is buried among family in a small churchyard cemetery.

“Dale always said if he died that’s where he wanted to be buried at,” Janet said. “But before it had no meaning to talk about things like that. You don’t ever think you’re going to put that in action. Dale always told me brothers and sisters needed to be there for each other, that you can’t take nothing for granted because you’re never promised a tomorrow.”

Doug Brown had a tomorrow, for which his wife, Meccah, was profoundly grateful, even as it made her hurt whenever she saw interviews or heard about a widow of one of Doug’s less fortunate rig mates. And she knew Doug couldn’t stop wondering why he made it out when others didn’t. He couldn’t stop feeling that, in
some logic-defying way, his luck in surviving came at the expense of a friend’s death.