A Sea in Flames Read online

  ALSO BY CARL SAFINA

  The View from Lazy Point

  Nina Delmar: The Great Whale Rescue

  Voyage of the Turtle

  Eye of the Albatross

  Song for a Blue Ocean

  Copyright © 2011 by Carl Safina

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Safina, Carl, 1955–

  A sea in flames : the Deepwater Horizon oil blowout / Carl Safina.

  p. cm.

  1. BP Deepwater Horizon Explosion and Oil Spill, 2010—Environmental aspects. 2. BP Deepwater Horizon Explosion and Oil Spill, 2010—Social aspects. 3. Oil spills—Mexico, Gulf of. I. Title.

  GC1221.S24 2011

  363.738′20916364—dc22 2010051455

  eISBN: 978-0-307-88737-5

  Jacket design by David Tran

  Jacket photograph by U.S. Coast Guard/Getty Images

  v3.1

  To the memories of the people who died.

  To their families.

  To those who survived.

  To the creatures that suffered.

  To those who anguished.

  To those who did their best.

  And to those who continue asking what will come out of this well.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface: Know Before You Go

  PART ONE

  DISASTER CHAIN

  Blowout!

  April

  Déjà Vu, to Name but a Few

  PART TWO

  A SEASON OF ANGUISH

  Mayday

  Late May

  Early June

  High June

  Late June

  Photo Insert

  Like a Thousand Julys

  Late July

  PART THREE

  AFTERMATH

  Dog Days

  Late August

  Early September

  The New Light of Autumn

  References

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Preface

  Know Before You Go

  Crucial mistakes, disastrous consequences, the weakness of power, unpreparedness and overreaction, the quiet dignity of everyday heroes. The 2010 Gulf of Mexico blowout brought more than oil to the surface.

  This is not just a record of a technological event. It’s also a chronicle of a season of anguish and panic, deep uncertainties, and the emotional topography of the blowout. It is the record of an event unfolding, a synthesis of personal experience, news, rumors, and the rapidly shifting perspectives about how bad things were—and how bad they were not.

  There are roughly three parts to this event, and to this book: what caused this particular well to blow out; the varied technological, biological, and emotional responses during the months the oil was flowing; and a little more calmness, clarity, and insight after the flow of oil was stopped.

  I’ve chosen to convey my impressions as they occurred over a season that was intense, chaotic, and seemingly interminable. In the turmoil, it was easy to form the wrong impressions and follow blind alleys. And I did.

  Over the months, information and understanding improved significantly. Later, after the flow of oil was stopped, we calmed down, and those with cooler heads began to see more clearly.

  This book is not a definitive treatise; it’s a portrait. The story will continue unfurling. Some aspects, we’ll never fully understand.

  In trying my best to get it right, I am sure that nearly all of what I’ve written is reasonable, most of it is true, and some of it is wrong. It’s not less than that, and not more.

  It’s easy to criticize people in charge. It’s much harder to be the person in charge. I was angry at the Coast Guard for weeks, until I began to realize that its ability to respond was largely dictated by the laws that confined it. If officials such as Admiral Thad Allen rankled me at times, it may say more about me than about them. But it remains part of the portrait of this whole event.

  In truth, such people deserve not just our admiration but also a little slack. During the blowout, perfection wasn’t an available option. I’ve left my first impressions in place to show how my perceptions changed as my initial rage—and I felt plenty of rage—subsided. Admiral Allen, as the most visible federal official and the man in charge, gets the brunt of my exasperation. But he never fully deserved it. I could not have done the job he did.

  Admiral Allen, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, and others in our government gave us their very best under months of intense pressure, heavy responsibility, and public scrutiny. They were doing a nearly impossible job on behalf of us all. I didn’t always appreciate that right away, especially during my summer travels through the Gulf region, when I was often both angry and grief-stricken. In truth, they deserve our thanks and praise.

  But it’s not all about them. It’s about us. We all contributed to this event, and we’re all trapped in the same situation. We all use too much gasoline and oil, because we’ve painted ourselves into a corner when it comes to energy.

  For clarity I have lightly cleaned up or slightly condensed some of the verbatim testimony and quotes. Verbal exchanges during the hours leading up to and including the initial disaster on the drilling rig derive from recollections of those who endured that trauma. Because they are subject to the fog of crisis, some testimony conflicts; we may never know how to resolve those contradictory recollections.

  In the end, this is a chronicle of a summer of pain—and hope. Hope that the full potential of this catastrophe would not materialize, hope that the harm done would heal faster than feared, and hope that even if we didn’t suffer the absolute worst, we’d still learn the big lesson here.

  We may have gotten two out of three. That’s not good enough. Because: there’ll be a next time.

  Carl Safina

  Stony Brook, New York

  November 2010

  PART ONE

  DISASTER CHAIN

  BLOWOUT!

  April 20, 2010. Though a bit imprecise, the time, approximately 9:50 P.M., marks the end of knowing much precisely. A floating machinery system roughly the size of a forty-story hotel has for months been drilling into the seafloor in the Gulf of Mexico. Its creators have named the drilling rig the Deepwater Horizon.

  Oil giant BP has contracted the Deepwater Horizon’s owner, Transocean, and various companies and crews to drill deep into the seafloor forty-odd miles southeast of the Louisiana coast. The target has also been named: they call it the Macondo formation. The gamble is on a volume of crude oil Believed Profitable.

  Giving the target a name helps pull it into our realm of understanding. But by doing so we risk failing to understand its nature. It is a hot, highly pressurized layer of petroleum hydrocarbons—oil and methane—pent up and packed away, undisturbed, inside the earth for many millions of years.

  The worker crews have struck their target. But the Big Payback will cut both ways. The target is about to strike back.

  A churning drill bit sent from a world of light and warmth and living beings. More than three miles under the sea surface, more than two miles under the seafloor. Eternal darkness. Unimaginable pressure. The drill bit has met a gas pocket. That tiny pinprick. That pressure. Mere bubbles, a mild fizz from deep within. A sudden influx of gas into the well. Rushing up the pipe. Gas expanding like
crazy. Through the open gates on the seafloor. One more mile to the sea surface.

  The beings above are experiencing some difficulty managing it. A variety of people face a series of varied decisions. They don’t make all the right ones.

  Explosion.

  Fireball.

  Destroyed: Eleven men. Created: Nine widows. Twenty-one fatherless kids, including one who’ll soon be born. Seventeen injured. One hundred and fifteen survive with pieces of the puzzle lodged in their heads. Only the rig rests in peace, one mile down. Only the beginning.

  Blowout. Gusher. Wild well. Across the whole region, the natural systems shudder. Months to control it. Years to get over it. Human lives changed by the hundreds of thousands. Effects that ripple across the country, the hemisphere, the world. Imperfect judgment at sea and in offices in Houston, perhaps forgivable. Inadequate safeguards, perhaps unforgivable. No amount of money enough. Beyond Payable.

  Deepwater exploration had already come of age when, in 2008, BP leased the mile-deep Macondo prospect No. 252 for $34 million. By 1998 only two dozen exploratory wells had been drilled in water deeper than 5,000 feet in the Gulf of Mexico. A decade later, that number was nearly three hundred.

  With a platform bigger than a football field, the Deepwater Horizon was insured for over half a billion dollars. The rig cost $350 million and rose 378 feet from bottom to top. On the rig were 126 workers; 79 were Transocean employees, 6 were BP employees, and 41 were subcontractors to firms like Halliburton and M-I Swaco. None of the Deepwater Horizon’s crew had been seriously injured in seven years.

  Operations began at Macondo 252 using Transocean’s drilling platform Marianas on October 6, 2009. The site was forty-eight miles southeast of the nearest Louisiana shore and due south of Mobile, Alabama. As the lessee, BP did the majority of the design work for the well, but utilized contractors for the drilling operation. Rig owner Transocean was the lead driller. Halliburton—formerly headed by Dick Cheney, before he became vice president of the United States under George W. Bush—was hired for cementing services. Other contractors performed other specialized work.

  The initial cost estimate for the well was approximately $100 million. The work cost BP about $1 million per day.

  They’d drilled about 4,000 feet down when, on November 8, 2009, Hurricane Ida damaged Marianas so severely that the rig had to be towed to the shipyard. Drilling resumed on February 6, 2010, with BP having switched to Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon rig.

  By late April, the well would be about $58 million over budget.

  Being a deepwater well driller—what’s it like? To simplify, imagine pushing a pencil into the soil. Pull out the pencil. Slide a drinking straw into that hole to keep it open. Now, a little more complex: your pencil is tipped not with a lead point but with a drilling bit. You have a set of pencils, each a little narrower than the last, each a little longer. You have a set of drinking straws, each also narrower. You use the fattest pencil first, make the hole, pull it out, then use the next fattest. And so on. This is how you make the hole deeper. At the scale of pencils-as-drills, you’re going down about 180 feet, and the work is soon out of sight. As you push and remove the pencils, you slide one straw through another, into the deepening hole. You have a deepening, tapering hole lined with sections of drinking straw, with little spaces between the hole and each straw, and between the sections of straw. You have to seal all those spaces, make it, in effect, one tapering tube, absolutely tight.

  And here’s why: the last, narrowest straw pokes through the lid of a (very big) pop bottle with lots of soda containing gas under tremendous pressure. As long as the lid stays intact and tight, there’s no fizz. But only that long. Everyone around you is desperate for a drink of that pop, as if they’re addicted to it, because their lives depend on it. They’re in a bit of a hurry. But you have to try to ignore them while you’re painstakingly working these pencils and straws. And you’d better keep your finger on the top of the straw, or you’re going to have a big mess. And you’d better seal those spaces between sections of straw as you go down, or you’re going to have a big mess when you poke through that lid. And before you take your finger off the top of the straw, you’d better be ready to control all that fizz and drink all that pop, because it’s coming up that straw. And if, after poking a hole in this lid that’s been sealed for millions of years, you decide you want to save the soda for later, then you’d better—you’d better—have a way to stopper that straw before you take your finger off. And you’d better have a way to block that straw if the stopper starts leaking and the whole thing starts to fizz. If it starts to fizz uncontrollably, and you can’t regain control, you can get hurt; people can die.

  The real details beggar the imagination of what’s humanly and technologically possible. Rig floor to seafloor at the well site: 5,000 feet of water, a little under one mile. Seafloor to the bottom of the well: about 13,360 feet—two and a half miles of drilling into the seabed sediments. A total of 18,360 feet from sea surface to well bottom, just under three and a half miles.

  Equally amazing as how deep, is how narrow. At the seafloor—atop a well 2.5 miles long—the top casing is only 36 inches across. At the bottom it’s just 7 inches. If you figure that the average diameter of the casing is about 18 inches, it’s like a pencil-width hole 184 feet deep. Nine drill bits, each progressively smaller, dig the well. The well’s vertical height gets lined with protective metal casings that, collectively, telescope down its full length. At intervals, telescoping tube of casing gets slid into the well hole. The upper casing interval is about 300 feet long. Some of the lower ones, less than a foot across, are 2,000 feet long. The uppermost end of each casing will have a fatter mouth, which will “hang” on the bottom of the previous casing. You will make that configuration permanent with your cementing jobs. The casings and drill pipes are stored on racks, awaiting use. Casings are made in lengths ranging from 25 to 45 feet; the drill pipe usually comes in 30-foot joints. They are “stacked” in the pipe racking system. You assemble three at a time and drop approximately 90 feet in, and then repeat. When you get ready to put the casing in, you pull all the drill pipe out. Rig workers also remove the drill pipe from the hole every time the drill bit gets worn and needs changing or when some activity requires an open hole. Pulling the entire drill string from the hole is called “making a trip.” Making a trip of 10,000 feet may take as long as ten or twelve hours. When you want to start drilling some more, you have to reassemble the drill pipe and send it down.

  On drillers’ minds at all times is the need to control the gas pressure and prevent gas from leaking up between the outside of the casings and the rock sides of the well. At each point where the casing diameter changes, the well drillers must push cement between the casings and the bedrock wall of the well. This cements the casings to the well wall. It controls pressure and eliminates space.

  Drillers continually circulate a variety of artificial high-density liquid displacements or drilling fluids, called “mud,” between the drill rig and the well. The circulating fluid is sent down the drill pipe. It causes the drill bit to rotate, then leaves the drill bit and comes up to the surface, carrying the rock and sand that the drill bit has ground loose. Because the well is miles deep, the fluid creates a miles-high column of heavy liquid. (The drilling fluid is heavier than water. Imagine filling a bucket with water and lifting it; then imagine that the bucket is three miles tall. It’s heavy.) That puts enormous downward pressure on the entire well bore. As the drill digs deeper, the drilling “mud” formulation is made heavier to neutralize the higher pressures in the deepening depths. But that heavier fluid can exert so much pressure on the shallower reaches of the well (where the ambient pressure is less) that it can fracture the rock, damage the well, seep away, and be lost into the rock and sand. Steel casings can protect weaker sections of rock and sand from these fluid pressures.

  Because things fail and accidents happen, a 50-foot-high stack of valves sits on top of the well on the seafloor
. Called a “blowout preventer,” it is there to stop the uncontrolled release of oil and gas when things go wrong in a well. If something goes seriously wrong below, the valves pinch closed, containing the pressure. The blowout preventer is relied on as the final fail-safe.

  Designs vary. This rig had a 300-ton blowout preventer manufactured by Cameron International. A blowout preventer’s several shutoff systems may include “annulars,” rubber apertures that can close around any pipe or on themselves; “variable bore rams,” which can seal rubber-tipped steel blocks around a drill pipe if gas or oil is coming up outside it; “casing shear rams” or “super shear rams,” designed to cut through casing or other equipment; and “blind shear rams,” designed to cut through a drill pipe and seal the well. Blind shear rams are the well-control mechanism of last resort. Though often designed with redundant equipment and controls, blowout preventers can fail. On occasion, they have. Neither casing shear rams nor blind shear rams are designed to cut through thick-walled joint connections between sections of drill pipe. Such joints may take up as much as 10 percent of a pipe’s length. So having redundant shear rams ensures that there is always one shear ram that is not aligned with a tool joint.

  The drilling fluid is the primary stopper for the whole well. If you’re going to remove that stopper, you’d better have something else to hold the pressure. Usually, that something else is several hundred feet of cement. On the night of the explosion, as rig workers were preparing to seal the well for later use, drillers were told to remove the drilling fluid and replace it with plain seawater—in essence, to pull out the stopper. The cement did not hold. And in the critical moment, the blowout preventer failed. The consequent gas blast was the blowout.

  That’s what went wrong. But so many things had gone wrong before the blowout that assistant well driller Steve Curtis had nicknamed it “the well from hell.” Curtis, thirty-nine, a married father of two from Georgetown, Louisiana, was never found.