Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill

Table of Contents

Also by Antonia Juhasz

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

Chapter 1 - The Explosion of the Deepwater Horizon

The Doghouse

The Macondo Well

The Well from Hell

Final Days

Kill This Well

Blowout

The Gas Attacks

Chaos

Mayday

Disconnect

Escape

Rescue

The Missing

Chapter 2 - What You Can’t See Can Kill You

Going Home

The Sinking of the Deepwater Horizon

The Fire

The Blowout Preventer and the Oil Leak

A Killer Is Released

The Cover-Up

The Reveal

A Spill of National Significance

The Pelican Cruise

Reality Bites

Chapter 3 - Body Count

Oil Can Kill You

Oil and Water

Boom and Skimmers

Carpet Bombing the Gulf

The Microbial Snot Highway

Armageddon

God Help Us All

Is the Air Safe to Breathe?

The Restricted

The Dead

The Count

The Long-Term Effects

Chapter 4 - When the Oil Kills the Fish, Can the Fishers Survive?

Pickin’ Crab

Shuckin’ Oysters

Headin’ Shrimp

Boat People SOS

Emotional Stress on the Rise

The Heart of Seafood

Are the Fish Safe?

The Future of Fisheries and Fishers

Chapter 5 - Making BP Pay

Cleaning Up after BP

The Claims Process

The Summer That Wasn’t: The Toll on Tourism

BP’s $20 Billion

Chapter 6 - Big Oil Plays Defense

BP: Beyond Propaganda

Hayward Takes the Helm

The Regulators

The George W. Bush Administration

Enter the Obama Administration

No Plan

Containment

Top Kills, Junk Shots, and Top Hats

Lightly Skewered

Closure

Bye-bye, Tony

Not Dead, Just Sleeping

Chapter 7 - Obama Steps Up

The Tyranny of Oil

The Administration Responds

Restructuring the MMS and the Now You See It, Now You Don’t Offshore Drilling Moratorium

Isolating BP

Attack by Proxy

The Disappearing Macondo Oil

The Seventy-fifth Annual Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival

Dead End

BP’s Future

A Better Future for All

Acknowledgments

Notes

Photo Credits

Index

Also by Antonia Juhasz

The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry—and What We Must Do to Stop It

The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time

Copyright © 2011 by Antonia Juhasz. All rights reserved

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the men of the Deepwater Horizon who gave their lives so that their crewmates might live: Gordon Jones, Dewey Revette, Jason Anderson, Shane Roshto, Stephen Curtis, Blair Manuel, Karl Kleppinger, Adam Weise, Don Clark, Roy Kemp, and Aaron Dale Burkeen.

To those who opened their lives to me so that I would tell this story with depth, honesty, and to the most lasting effect.

To my family: Joseph, Suzanne, Alex, Jenny, Christina, Linda, Emma, Simone, Gabriel, Eliza, Zoe, Paul, Branny, Skip, and Lucky.

We have gone to a different planet in going to the deepwater. An alien environment. And what do you know from every science fiction movie? The aliens can kill us.

—Byron King, oil industry analyst, May 2010¹

Introduction

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded fifty miles from the coast of Louisiana, killing eleven men and setting off the largest oil disaster in U.S. history. It would have been the world’s largest oil spill had Saddam Hussein not ordered his troops to impede the advance of U.S. soldiers in 1991 by opening the valves of Kuwait’s oil wells and pipelines.

I went to Louisiana after the explosion to measure the disaster for myself and to learn from those for whom time is now forever marked as before and after the BP oil spill.

Having written two books investigating the oil industry and the government agencies that are both at the heart of this catastrophe, and having also worked for advocacy organizations and for the federal government on the issues most relevant to the cause of the spill, I hoped to find answers to four central questions: Why did this disaster take place? Why was each failure compounded to create a tragedy of such massive proportion? What are the disaster’s impacts? Can we prevent another catastrophe of this magnitude from ever happening again?

My first trip to the Gulf ended with little in the way of answers. Instead, I came away with the realization that understanding and documenting this event would require much more than one visit or one article. It was clear that the tragedy involved far more than one company, BP, and was not limited to just one government agency or even one administration. Its impacts, moreover, would reverberate well beyond the Deepwater Horizon and the families of the eleven men who died, and even beyond the people and places of the Gulf of Mexico. I also learned that finding answers was going to be made all the more difficult by the lack of transparency—on the part of both corporations and the government—that kept many of the unfolding events out of the public eye and outside the reach of journalists.

To get to the truth would require time, deep investigation, and, most important, the voices, experiences, and knowledge of those at the heart of the Gulf oil disaster.

During the next eight months, I traveled countless miles across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia and then to Washington, D.C. I was awed by the incredible generosity of people whose lives had been forever changed by these events and who, at the time of greatest personal tragedy and turmoil, opened their hearts and homes to a stranger. They trusted me with their pain, sorrow, rage, exhaustion, anger, secrets, research, insights, revelations, frustrations, and heartbreak. They introduced me to their children, wives, husbands, and colleagues—and to their enemies. They invited me to their churches and workplaces, onto their boats and into their homes, to their protests and festivals, and to their most cherished beaches, wetlands, and waterways.

I interviewed hundreds of people, including family members of those who died aboard the Deepwater Horizon, as well as oil workers, fishers, crabbers, beach cleaners, oceanographers, government officials, lawyers, environmentalists, doctors, veterans, and countless others. They shared their lives with me so that I might share this story with you.

These people were my guides as I uncovered who set the oil loose and multiplied its deadly effects and as I tracked the oil on its rampage through the Gulf.

I was also led by the heroism of those working to stem this black tide and ensure that such a tragedy never occurs again. For this was not an isolated incident, and BP was not a lone actor. Rather, this tragedy was the predictable outcome of an industry that has pushed well beyond its own technological capacity and beyond the government’s ability to regulate it. Nor is the oil gone or the cleanup complete. BP’s oil monster continues to move through the ocean, sometimes washing up on beaches and sometimes content to lurk on the ocean floor, waiting for the next best moment to strike. It hides in the eggs of shrimp, the habitats of pelicans, and even the blood cells of people all along the coast.

The first time I held BP’s oil in my hands, I was standing on a beach on Dauphin Island, Alabama. The oil had mixed with sand on its long journey from deep below the seafloor to form thick, brown gooey patties that covered the beach for as far as the eye could see. A warning immediately came to mind, uttered long ago by Carlos Andres Perez, the oil minister and then president of Venezuela and a father of the modern oil industry: Oil is the devil’s excrement.

Unless both the oil and those who crave it can be tamed, hell will surely once again come not only to the Gulf but also to the many other places where oil lies just beneath the earth’s surface.

1

The Explosion of the Deepwater Horizon

This event was set in motion years ago by these companies needlessly rushing to make money faster, while cutting corners to save money. When these companies put their savings over our safety, they gambled with our lives. They gambled with my life. They gambled with the lives of 11 of my crew members who will never see their families or loved ones again.

—Stephen Lane Stone, Transocean roustabout, Deepwater Horizon survivor, May 27, 2010.¹

At 9:49 p.m. on April 20, 2010, as a gas bubble raced up 18,360 feet of steel pipe on a deadly collision course with the Deepwater Horizon, a group of BP executives were at its helm, playing captain. The rig had arrived earlier that day with two Transocean executives for what was supposed to be a twenty-four-hour visit. BP would later tell reporters that the trip was arranged to celebrate a major achievement, that the Deepwater Horizon was the first rig to go seven years without a lost-time accident.² Testimony would later reveal not only that the rig had not gone seven years without a lost-time incident but also that the trip had the far less celebratory purpose of applying senior-level pressure on the crew to finally complete the well.³

BP, the fourth-largest corporation in the world, was spending $2 million a day for a job that was more than fifty days behind schedule and nearly $100 million over budget and counting. At a rate of approximately $500,000 a day, BP leased the Deepwater Horizon from Transocean, the rig owner and operator. BP then paid an additional $500,000 a day in operating costs. BP’s internal costs were another $1 million a day.⁴

Transocean is the largest deepwater driller in the world. In the Gulf of Mexico, it operates nearly half of all the rigs that work in more than 3,000 feet of water. All the major oil companies use its services: contracting out rigs, related equipment, and work crews at a day rate to drill oil and gas wells. According to the company, We specialize in technically demanding segments of the offshore drilling business with a particular focus on deepwater and harsh environment drilling services.⁵

Of the 126 people on board the Deepwater Horizon on April 20, 79 worked for Transocean, and only 8 were BP employees.

The visiting executives were BP’s vice president for drilling and completions for the entire Gulf of Mexico, Patrick O’Bryan, who had never been on an offshore rig before, and managers for performance and operations from BP and Transocean. They spent the afternoon and evening of April 20 in sometimes heated meetings and on tours of the rig. Around 9 p.m. they were ready to call it a night but instead decided to head up to the bridge, where they were greeted by Transocean captain Curt Kuchta, master of the Deepwater Horizon.

Master Captain Kuchta is not quite as imposing as his title. It may be the slight stutter when he speaks or his small and somewhat pudgy frame. But when the executives arrived, Captain Kuchta became more tour guide than master and showed us around a lot of stuff up there, recalled O’Bryan.⁶ Captain Kuchta asked if they wanted to use the bridge simulator. A joystick at a computer station allows the user to imitate steering the entire rig. The executives eagerly agreed and began taking turns.

They were basically playing a video game, Captain Kuchta later explained.⁷ And what a video game it must have been!

At 320 feet high, the Deepwater Horizon had an additional 50 feet on the Brooklyn Bridge. It was 369 feet long and 256 feet wide—the size of an entire NFL football field, including end zones, coaching boxes, and team areas. There was enough space to house 130 people, along with a gymnasium, movie theater, lounge, laundry, kitchen, and helicopter pad, with room left over for the actual work of the rig: drilling for oil.

It was also one of the most famous offshore rigs in the world. Just six months earlier, in September 2009, it had set the record for drilling the deepest oil and gas well in history at BP’s Gulf of Mexico Tiber field. At nearly 40,000 feet below the ocean surface, the well is farther down than Mount Everest is up.

It was an honor to be chosen again for that rig. Gordon was proud. When Keith Jones speaks about his son Gordon, his love is obvious. But when he talks about Gordon’s job as a mud engineer, the only word that adequately describes his emotion is restrained. Gordon was part of the Deepwater Horizon drill team, but he wasn’t supposed to be. He got into the oil business because of his communication skills and scratch golf game, both of which lent themselves to sales, the job Gordon was headed for after putting in his time on the rigs.

His father looks bewildered as he recounts the story. The Joneses are lawyers and teachers, not oilmen. Even more bewildering is how Gordon ended up in the business: Keith got his son the job through a lucky encounter with an old fraternity brother.

When I ask if Gordon liked his job, Keith replies, He liked being home. It is a common response. Offshore work is typically 21 on, 21 off—twenty-one days working on the rig and twenty-one days off work at home. Rig workers talk about having two families and two lives: one on the rig, one off. On the rig the work is intense: twelve-hour around-the-clock shifts, called tours (pronounced towers). While one team is on tour, the other sleeps; while the first team sleeps, the other is working. The payoff for many, in addition to the sizable paycheck, is the long period of downtime at home.

As on all offshore rigs, work on the Deepwater Horizon was exhausting. It was also uniquely complex. In contrast to older rigs and those in shallower waters that attach to the seafloor with cables or anchors, the Deepwater Horizon, built in 2001, was dynamically positioned. A satellite provided the coordinates used by Transocean dynamic positioning officers, Yancy Keplinger and Andrea Fleytas, to determine the rig’s location. Using computers, they then directed the twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week efforts of eight 7,375-horsepower thrusters that kept the rig floating on two giant pontoons on the water precisely above the wellhead some four miles below.

On April 20, the two officers held the ship steady while the drill team ran pipe through 5,000 feet of ocean, 13,360 feet of earth, and into the Macondo oil well. The only thing attaching the rig to the floor was the drill pipe and the blowout preventer.

As offshore drilling has gone ever deeper in the last twenty years, experts have increasingly come to liken it, and the dangers involved, to space travel. We have gone to a different planet in going to the deepwater. An alien environment, oil industry analyst Byron King told the Washington Post. And what do you know from every science fiction movie? The aliens can kill us.⁸

We can only imagine the thrill for the visiting executives who got to steer the rig. They even tried to intensify the experience by simulating increasingly rough conditions. We loaded into the simulator about 70-knot winds and 30-foot seas and two thrusters down and then you switch it into the manual mode and see if the individuals can maintain the rig on location, explained visiting Transocean executive Daun Winslow, operations manager-performance for the North American division. For BP vice president O’Bryan, the newbie on the rig, we loaded up with the most environment, Winslow said.⁹

The thrill of the game very quickly turned to real-life terror around 9:50 p.m., just as O’Bryan took his turn. All of a sudden, the rig started shaking, he later testified. And I remember I believe it was Captain Kuchta that went over to the door and opened it.... He closed the door and said everybody stay inside. And then soon thereafter I don’t know how quickly but pretty quick I heard a hissing sound. And that’s when I heard the first explosion. . . . And you could actually see the rig floor, and the rig floor was on fire. And it was just right there, after there was a larger explosion. And that’s when all the power on the bridge went out.¹⁰

The Doghouse

If the rig floor is the operational heart of a drilling rig, then the doghouse, the driller’s shack, is its soul. The doghouse looks like a giant airplane cockpit. Two large chairs dominate the room, each with its own joystick, telephone, microphone, and set of two computer screens. A large window above the screens provides the crew with a view of the rig floor, where the giant 242-foot-tall derrick resides.

Work on a drilling rig largely breaks down into two categories: that done on a computer and that done in the mud. The doghouse is the cord that ties the two together. Inside the doghouse, the crew is comfortably dressed in T-shirts and pants. Outside, they are in bright yellow coveralls, thick rubber boots, and hard hats. Using their computers, those in the driller’s shack direct all the drilling operations, while those in the mud make sure that the pipes and the rest of the physical equipment behave as they should on their many-miles-long journey down to the well.

The mud is the lubricant that keeps the equipment flowing. It’s called mud because that’s what it looks like, but it is actually a toxic chemical cocktail more formally known as drilling fluid. The chiefs on the Horizon are the mud engineers: Gordon Jones, Blair Manuel, Greg Meche, and Leo Linder. They work for contractor M-I SWACO. Instead of working with the mud, they were, in Keith Jones’s words, technicians who slipped off to the lab, came up with a formula, and handed off the final product to the floor hands. The mud is composed of rock that is ground to a fine powder on shore, which is then mixed with chemicals and water on board, depending on the frequently changing needs of the rig and the well. Among its other functions, the mud provides a weight to counter the pressure down in the well, preventing gas or water from coming up through the pipe.

The Deepwater Horizon’s job, like that of any drill ship, was to look for a good hole in a well and then prepare the hole for a production vessel to follow. The crew does this by drilling a pipe into the well, hitting oil, sealing the pipe with cement (like a cork on a champagne bottle), disconnecting from the pipe, and moving off. A production vessel then moves in, uncorks the pipe, and removes the oil. At 9:50 p.m. on April 20, the crew was nearly ready to cork the pipe and move on. This may sound simple; however, it is anything but.

Drilling in deep water is an acrobatic dance with pressure. The deeper you go, the greater the pressure. Imagine a giant bag of popcorn, fresh from a microwave oven, waiting to be opened. Now bury it under 5,000 feet of ocean and 13,500 feet of earth. Instead of ripping the bag open, you insert an 18,500-foot straw in the form of the pipe and then place your thumb over the top to keep the contents from exploding out. The air in the bag is the gas, the popcorn is the crude oil, and the thumb is the cement job temporarily sealing the hole.

Managing the pressure so that oil and gas can be brought to the surface in a controlled manner is called well control. A well-control event or incident—also known as a kick—occurs when there are problems with managing this pressure. A loss of well control is called a blowout.

Thirty-year oil industry veteran Bob Cavnar described the difficulty this way: I often think of deepwater drilling as like driving a car from the backseat; you can reach the steering wheel, but it’s hard to control and you can’t get your foot on the brake pedal very easily. Because the distance between man and well is so far in the deepwater, the technology must be the link between those two. As we’ve been made painfully aware, when the technology fails, or people fail, the consequences are catastrophic.¹¹

The technology on board the Horizon was far from perfect. Just one example of hundreds of unattended repair issues on the rig was described as the blue screen of death in testimony by Transocean chief electronics technician for the Horizon, Mike Williams. There are three drilling chairs: A and B in the drill shack and C in the assistant drill shack. The computer screens locked up—regularly on the A chair, and occasionally on the B chair, according to Williams. When a screen locked up, it would just turn to a blue screen, he testified. You would have no data coming through. While waiting for a replacement system, the Horizon crew members were limping along with what we had.

In questioning, Williams was asked, Well, if the driller is sitting there trying to manage the well, and the blue screen of death shows up, how is the driller supposed to be able to manage the well? Williams answered, He’s going to have to go to B Chair.

And if B Chair isn’t functioning properly?

He’s got to go to C chair.

And if that’s not functioning properly?

Abandon ship.¹²

Although corporate executives are obsessed with oil, everything on a rig is focused on gas: how to keep the gas out while bringing the oil in. The Gulf of Mexico has many unique attributes, including being one of the most methane-rich production areas in the world, which also makes it one of the most dangerous places on earth to drill.

Gas kicks are routine. Even blowouts occur far more often than the industry would have us believe, and with increasing frequency. From 2005 to 2010, twenty-eight blowouts occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, four of which took place in the eighteen months preceding the blowout of the Macondo well.¹³ From 1999 to 2004, there were twenty blowouts, and from 1993 to 1998 there were just eleven.¹⁴

Most of these blowouts were in shallow waters, because that’s where the vast amount of drilling takes place. Of the 565 productive wells in the Gulf of Mexico, 488 are in water depths of less than 300 feet; only 37 wells are located at depths greater than 1,000 feet, but these wells account for nearly 70 percent of the oil produced in the Gulf.¹⁵ As more drilling moves to ever deeper waters in search of richer fields, we can expect more deepwater blowouts.

Blowouts in deep water can be far more serious than those in shallow water because of the increased difficulty of reaching the blown-out well; the oil industry’s lack of experience, technology, and equipment in deep water; and the potential for much greater amounts of oil to be spilled.

Each misstep made by BP, Transocean, Halliburton, and others on the Deepwater Horizon’s fateful journey opened a new door that allowed the gas from the Macondo well to enter and ultimately explode the rig.

The Macondo Well

The Deepwater Horizon wasn’t supposed to be at the Macondo well. It was a replacement, taking over for Transocean’s Marianas.

The U.S. government owns the land where the Macondo well resides, Mississippi Canyon Block 252, and the hydrocarbons within it. In 2008, BP, with minority partners Anadarko Petroleum (25 percent) and MOEX Offshore (10 percent), paid $34 million for a ten-year lease to the area. In exchange for the lease payment and the royalty fees on each barrel recovered, the hydrocarbons essentially became BP’s. Estimates of the amount of oil in the well vary greatly, from 50 million to 1 billion barrels, worth as much as $86 billion in today’s market.¹⁶

BP originally leased Transocean’s Marianas to work the well, and it began drilling on October 6, 2009. Mechanical failures on the Marianas were intensified by the kicking well, which kicked so hard that it literally blew out the rig’s blowout preventer. The blowout preventer shuts in a well in the event of a serious kick, in order to prevent a kick from becoming a blowout.

On November 1, the Marianas was forced to unlatch from its blowout preventer in one of the singularly most costly events in the drilling of a well if it occurs, according to rig experts WEST Engineering Services.¹⁷ When Hurricane Ida came through on November 7, the Marianas was already sitting idle.¹⁸ It then sustained further electrical wiring damage from the storm, was sent to shore for repairs, and was later decommissioned.

Such problems on a Transocean rig are not unique. In fact, since 2008, 73 percent of incidents that triggered federal investigations into safety and other problems on deepwater drilling rigs in the Gulf have been on rigs operated by Transocean. This rate is out of proportion to the percentage of rigs the company operates in the Gulf: less than half.¹⁹

The Deepwater Horizon arrived at the Macondo well on January 31, 2010. It began drilling on February 15 and was supposed to be done just three weeks later, on March 8, for a total cost of $96 million. From the start, the well was kicking, and the crew lost control of it several times. In March, the drill pipe became so irrevocably stuck that it was left there while the crew moved on to try a new spot.

The reason, explained Mike Williams, was pressure to get the job done fast. A BP manager ordered a faster pace, telling the driller, Hey, let’s bump it up. Let’s bump it up. Going faster caused the bottom of the well to split open. We got stuck so bad we had to send tools down into the drill pipe and sever the pipe, Williams said. BP told the crew that it lost two weeks and some $25 million in the process. And you always kind of knew that in the back of your mind when they start throwing these big numbers around that there was gonna be a push coming, you know? A push to pick up production and pick up the pace, Williams explained.²⁰

As the operation grew further behind schedule and over budget, BP was cutting costs, Transocean’s and other subcontractors’ shoddy practices were put into heightened relief, and government regulators rubber-stamped each cumulatively more dangerous move.

Unfortunately, none of these events was unique to the Macondo well or the Deepwater Horizon. It was simply an unlucky cumulative impact that led this rig and not others to such catastrophic disaster. The enormity, extreme difficulty, and relative newness of deepwater drilling regularly puts production wells off schedule, which always means mammoth cost overruns. In response, companies cut corners.

I spoke with many offshore oil workers for this book; all of them are currently employed, so few would speak on the record. A typical response was provided by a completions engineer who has worked on many Transocean rigs as a subcontractor and is currently at work on one of BP’s Macondo relief wells.

When you start a new job, it’s all about safety, he tells me. But after you’re out there for so long, you find you can save $2 million here or $3 million there, and they start cutting corners, save whatever money they can. I’ve seen ’em all cut corners they shouldn’t cut. They all do it. Shell, Chevron, they all do it. They hit a comfort zone, get complacent, could do it a little cheaper, a little differently, and, yeah, eventually the worst happens. But, you know, we’re paid to go out there, and you have confidence in the decisions they make. Doesn’t do no good to worry and stress about it, because there’s nothing you can do about it, anyway.

The Well from Hell

With seventeen years of experience in the oil industry, assistant driller Stephen Curtis knew a tough well when he worked one. He christened the Macondo the well from hell because it reminded him of another wicked well, Devil’s Tower.

The Macondo well is not unique. It is, rather, a tragedy of foreseeable errors left uncorrected that has set its place in history. Mike Williams worked both wells with Curtis. The wells exhibited a lot of [the] same characteristics, Williams explained, where we lost circulation, we’re getting tons of gas back all the time, we got stuck, we had to sever the pipe. It was just—it was déjà vu all over again.²¹ With Devil’s Tower, however, the well had its way without loss of life. The oil company in charge, Italy’s ENI, gave in, severed the pipe, and drilled in a different spot.

Floor hand Adam Weise was calling his girlfriend, Cindy Shelton, before and after every shift—unusual for him. He was frustrated with the problems on the project. Everything that could go wrong was going wrong, she said. Every time he’d call me, he’d say, ‘This is a well from hell.’ ²²

Shane Roshto shared the same worries. Just twenty-two years old, he tried to explain the dangers of offshore drilling to his twenty-one-year-old wife, Natalie. Baby, Shane told her, the earth is . . . like blowing up a red balloon and taking a pin and just pushing it and pushing it and pushing it as far as it could go and it just blowing. On his last trip home before heading back to the Macondo, Shane told Natalie, Mother Nature just doesn’t want to be drilled here.²³

Dad, I know what they’re trying to do is unsafe, and I know it’s not right, thirty-five-year-old Jason Anderson, the leader of the Deepwater Horizon drill team, told his father on his last trip home before the disaster. Like many other members of the crew, Jason had been with the Horizon since its birth, bringing the rig to the United States from Korea, where it was built. He was proud to be on the team that drilled the world’s deepest well.

Nonetheless, he was worried. Before he left, the father of two young children, ages five and one, gave his wife, Shelley, a will and a list of things that he wanted handled if something happened to him.²⁴ This was his last tour on the Horizon. He had recently been promoted, and his new job as senior toolpusher on Transocean’s Discoverer Spirit was to start on April 14, but the manager of the Horizon asked him to stay on for an extra week.²⁵

On April 14, BP drilling engineer Brian Morel e-mailed a colleague, saying, this has been [a] nightmare well which has everyone all over the place.²⁶

Final Days

On April 15, the Deepwater Horizon was some forty-five days behind schedule and $90 million over budget. In response, BP was cutting corners. BP changed its well design three times within one twenty-four-hour period. Each new design was approved by government regulators, sometimes within minutes of the request being submitted. The design ultimately utilized was, according to BP, $7 to $10 million cheaper than an earlier plan, the tie-back.²⁷ On March 30, BP’s Brian Morel wrote, not running the tie-back saves a good deal of time/money.²⁸

The final design was one long tube running through the center of the well. The design was doable, according to Halliburton, the subcontractor hired to do the cement job to secure the pipe, as long as BP used twenty-one devices called centralizers to help hold the pipe in place while the cement set. The Horizon had six such centralizers on board, so BP drilling operations engineer Brett Cocales ordered an additional fifteen out to the rig.

On April 16, the centralizers arrived, but BP well team leader, John Guide, chose not to use them. In an e-mail that day, Guide argued that the new centralizers were not ideal for the job, and it will take ten hours to install them.²⁹

On April 18, Halliburton ran a new computer model of a cement job using fewer than seven centralizers. It showed that such a job entailed a severe risk of gas flow.³⁰ Nonetheless, the decision to go with six centralizers stuck.

On April 19, Halliburton completed the job to BP’s specifications. Not only did Halliburton perform a substandard job, it also used the wrong cement. Halliburton used a nitrogen foam, common in offshore drilling generally, but not for deep high-temperature, high-pressure zones such as the Macondo well.³¹ An investigation by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, known as the National Oil Spill Commission, found that Halliburton and BP both had results in March showing that the cement mixture would be unstable, but neither acted on that data.³²

On April 20, more than fifty days late and $100 million over budget, the Horizon was running a series of tests to make sure that Halliburton’s cement job was holding. Tensions were high, and disputes appear to have been taking place all over the rig. One such fight took place at the 11 a.m. pretour meeting.

Douglas Brown, Transocean chief mechanic, described a scrimmage taking place at the meeting among Robert Kaluza, the so-called company man, the highest-ranking BP employee assigned to the rig; Jimmy Harrell, the offshore installation manager (OIM), the most senior Transocean position on the rig; and Dewey Revette, the toolpusher.³³

Forty-eight-year-old Dewey Revette had been working offshore for nearly thirty years. He was on the Horizon when it broke its world record, but he nearly missed it. About four years earlier, he told his wife, Sheri, that he wanted to quit offshore and maybe start consulting. As Sheri recounted the story to me, she said no. The economy was in a tailspin. They had one daughter in high school and another in college. There was too much security in sticking with Transocean.

"I told him he could wait ’til it was time to retire, get his full benefits, and then go into consultin’ if he wanted, Sheri tells me in her heavy Mississippi accent. It was the last [work] decision we made. He would keep goin’, then retire. Sheri’s voice trails off. Dewey wasn’t tired, she emphasizes. He just liked bein’ home. He liked huntin’, fishin’, playin’ on his tractor. . . . He wanted to do ’round here and be with his family. Her voice trails off again. We were gonna get my son-in-law offshore; this was about a year ago, but my daughter, she said no."

At the 11 a.m. meeting, Dewey was outlining his plans for the displacement test to be run that evening. The test, which displaces heavy mud in the drill pipe with lighter seawater to test the stability of the cement job, was one of the final procedures before moving off from the well. BP’s company man, Robert Kaluza, stood up and said, No, we have some changes to that. The changes were even more shortcuts and cost savings. The displacement would be faster and cheaper. Two tasks would also be performed at once: the displacement and the second negative test to measure upward pressure from the shut-in well.

According to Douglas Brown, the company man was basically saying, ‘Well, this is how it’s going to be.’And the toolpusher and the OIM reluctantly agreed.

Kaluza later told investigators that he was just following BP’s orders. They decided we should do displacement and the negative test together; I don’t know why, he said. Maybe they were trying to save time. At the end of the well sometimes they think about speeding up.³⁴

The risks involved appear not to have been lost on Jimmy Harrell, the Transocean OIM, who seemed to think that all was now resting on the rig’s last line of defense, the blowout preventer. Brown testified that as Harrell left the meeting, he grumbled, Well, I guess that’s what we have those pinchers for, referring to the blowout preventer’s pinchers that close in on the pipe, cutting it off from the rig and shutting in the well in case of a blowout.³⁵

Weighing some 325 tons and standing nearly fifty feet high, the blowout preventer (BOP) sits at the bottom of the ocean on top of the wellhead. The riser is the portion of the drill pipe that descends from the rig into the top of the BOP. The pipe then passes through the BOP and descends into the well. Inside are a series of mechanisms that can, when activated, sever the pipe, thereby locking in the well. Activating the BOP is like sucking on a straw and then pinching the middle of it with your fingers to stop the fluid from moving, breaking off the top portion of the straw, and sticking a cork in what’s left.