Night settled across the Gulf of Mexico about 40 miles from the coast of Louisiana. A sliver of a moon rose above the shimmering water, reflecting off the translucent pillows of jellyfish that bobbed just below the surface. The calm water lapped gently against the giant gray steel pylons that kept the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig suspended above an oil well a mile below the surface.
The Horizon was a massive feat of engineering, a portable steel boomtown for 126 people. The rig had meandered from ocean to sea to gulf, from one oil hot spot to the next, chasing some of the largest deposits of crude and drilling some of the deepest wells of all time. Technically, she was a ship, with engines that could propel her at about four knots and eight under-water thrusters that kept her positioned over the wellhead when she was at rest. The platform was bigger than a football field, capped by a drilling derrick that towered 20 stories above the main deck. Her owner, Transocean Ltd., had spent a half-billion dollars building her, and she could float in as much as 10,000 feet of water and still drill some 30,000 feet below the earth’s surface—deeper than Mount Everest is tall. She was part city and part drilling machine, and she was about to become a flaming tomb.
Maybe 130 other vessels in the world could do what the Horizon did. She was special. Built in a Korean shipyard in 2001, she was one of the most advanced weapons in man’s insatiable quest for oil. In recent years, she had been working mostly in the Gulf for BP, the British oil company that was developing some of the deepest wells in these waters. She’d hit the Tiber field the previous fall, drilling the deepest well in history at more than 35,000 feet. She had also drilled wells in BP’s other two Gulf showcase fields, Thunder Horse and Atlantis, and since February, she’d been positioned over the Macondo prospect.
The Macondo was near a geological formation known as the Mississippi Canyon, an underwater crevasse in the central Gulf about 4 miles wide and 75 miles long. Companies had been drilling in the canyon since 1979, but BP was pushing the technological boundaries, moving to ever-greater depths. The government had issued a permit in March 2009, and one of the Horizon’s sister rigs had begun drilling in the fall. A late hurricane, though, had damaged the rig, so that it couldn’t complete the job. The Horizon had moved in to finish the drilling. At the end of a mile-long pipe that had been fed down from the derrick, a drill bit that looked like three metal softballs made from the soles of cleated baseball shoes, grinding in unison, had punctured the seafloor and churned through the rock beneath. The bit had ground its way through almost two and a half miles of earth until it struck an ancient graveyard of dinosaurs that had long since decomposed into a massive underground pool of petroleum. It had been a rough ride. The Macondo was fussy, like an infant after mealtime, and the pressure and gas rose like burps from deep in the ground, kicking at the drill pipe and causing shudders that could be felt on the rig above. One BP employee, monitoring the drilling process from back on shore, had referred to the well as a “nightmare.” Another described it as “crazy.”1 For BP, it was worth it. Macondo had the promise of being a prolific reservoir of oil, the type of huge find that’s referred to in the industry as an “elephant.” It was exactly the sort of high-risk, high-reward prospect that BP liked, even if the well’s crankiness had slowed the drilling process. Macondo and wells like it represent the best hope for finding new oil deposits in America. Unlike the harsh climates of the Arctic, the Gulf of Mexico is warm most of the year, and, aside from hurricanes, it is a relatively easy place to drill. That convenience and the discovery of finds like the Macondo were driving demand for more drilling. For decades, the offshore industry had coexisted with the fragile ecosystem of the Gulf, home to some of the world’s most prolific seafood production, without major problems. The last significant spill had been in the late 1970s, when a well in Mexican waters blew out and tainted beaches in south Texas. Tens of thousands of wells had been drilled since then, with ever-improving and safer technology. The need for new oil deposits in friendly waters, combined with the industry’s safety record, had eased public concern over offshore drilling. Less than two months after the Horizon arrived at the Macondo, President Barack Obama had opened vast new areas of the Gulf, parts of the eastern seaboard, and segments of offshore Alaska to new drilling. The deep water was about to get busier.
As night settled in on April 20, though, none of the crew was thinking about new neighbors barging in on the Horizon’s solitude. A half-dozen BP and Transocean supervisors had arrived by helicopter earlier in the day to celebrate seven years of impeccable safety on the rig. BP was a company that knew the painful cost of ignoring safety. Just a month earlier, the company had marked a bleak anniversary—a refinery explosion five years earlier near Houston that had killed 15 workers and injured hundreds more. After that tragedy, and after the harsh findings of the investigations that followed, BP had enacted sweeping new safety procedures. A rig operating without an accident deserved special praise. By the time the helicopter ferrying the BP managers had landed, things were winding down on the drilling of the Macondo well. The Horizon crew had struck what appeared to be a sizable reservoir of oil, and it was now in the final stages of its task, preparing to cap the well and move the rig to another site. Once the Horizon was gone, BP would tie Macondo into a nearby underwater pipeline and begin pumping its oil toward shore. That, however, wasn’t the Horizon crew members’ concern. They just drilled the wells; they didn’t stick around for “first oil.” Both the Horizon crew and BP were ready to move on. The Macondo’s crankiness had set them behind schedule by a month and a half, and nowhere was lost time more costly than on an offshore rig. BP was spending about a half-million dollars a day for the Horizon, and the delays had pushed the project more than $20 million over budget in rig costs alone.
Stephen Stone was no drilling expert, but even he could tell that things weren’t going smoothly. Stone had joined the Horizon’s crew more than two years earlier, working as a roustabout, which means that he did a variety of jobs and specialized in none. Stone, whose dark beard framed boyish features, mostly assisted crane operators and helped to pump a heavy fluid of clay and chemicals known as “drilling mud” into the well bore. Stone was coming to the end of his two-week stint aboard the Horizon. In another day or so, he’d be back on shore and in the arms of his redheaded bride, Sara, whom he had married just six months earlier.
During most of Stone’s hitch, the drilling mud had been disappearing in the hole. That wasn’t helping the Macondo’s budget problems. Drilling mud may sound mundane, but it’s a highly specialized mixture designed to lubricate the well and tamp down the pressure. The recipes for mud are carefully guarded by the service companies that make it. For wells like Macondo, BP would be paying about $10 million just for the mud. When a well loses mud, it can mean only a couple of things, and neither of them is good: either the underground formation is unstable, or the well was drilled too quickly, cracking the formation. At least four times during Stone’s hitch, the crew had been forced to stop pumping in mud and shoot heavy drilling sealant into the hole, which was supposed to close up any cracks in the formation.
By early afternoon on April 20, the BP “company men,” supervisors who were onboard the rig to oversee the drilling operations, decided that it was time to finish the process of capping the well. The drilling crew began pumping mud out of the hole and replacing it with seawater. While not as heavy as the mud, the seawater would help hold back the pressure from the reservoir once the well was capped with cement. Mud was so valuable that companies reused it, and as it came out of the hole, the crew pumped it over to the Damon B. Bankston, a supply ship that had arrived that morning. By five o’clock, tests showed a possible pressure imbalance in the well, and the mud pumping stopped. While the supervisors tried to figure out what was wrong, Stone, who’d been working on a nearby crane, wrapped up his 12-hour shift and traipsed down the two decks to his cabin. He crawled into bed and fell soundly asleep.
At nine-thirty, Mike Williams was wrapping up his duties for the day. The chief electronic technician, Williams had spent most of his shift doing routine maintenance and inspecting a crane on the starboard side of the rig. Now, he was sitting at his desk in his small office, logging his maintenance reports and talking to his wife on the phone. Williams had risen through the ranks on the rig, starting as a roustabout like Stone three and a half years earlier. His phone conversation was interrupted by an announcement over the loudspeaker about gas levels on the rig. Did he need to go? his wife asked. No, Williams said. The balky well had been kicking back so much gas, as if it were fighting every step of the drilling process, that Williams had stopped paying much attention to the announcements unless the levels rose high enough that his crew members had to stop all “hot work”—welding, grinding, or anything else that might throw a spark.
As he continued the conversation, he heard a hissing sound that was growing louder, followed by a heavy “thump.” Williams’s shop was directly below the riser skate. The riser is a large steel tube that descends from the bottom of the rig to the top of the well and surrounds the drill pipe. It’s raised and lowered in pieces, and the skate is the device that feeds the pieces into the hole or pulls them out. They must be retrieving the riser, Williams thought, and they backed the skate up too hard. He assumed from the hissing that the force of the impact had ruptured a hydraulic line. He told his wife he’d better go check things out.
As he hung up the phone, he could hear beeping from the engine control room next door as the panels lit up in a chirping choir of warnings and alarms. He tried to make sense of the sounds—the hissing, the thump, the warning lights. What the hell was going on up there? He pushed back from his desk and realized that the onboard diesel engines, which generate power for the rig, were starting to rev. Given where the sound was coming from, he could tell that it was Engine Number Three, and it kept accelerating, revving way beyond anything he’d ever heard. Suddenly, the computer monitor on his desk exploded, and then the light bulbs in the shop began popping in succession, like a chain of firecrackers. As he grabbed the door to his shop, he heard Engine Number Three whining at a higher and higher pitch, rising to a crescendo that heralded disaster. Then it simply stopped. The silence hung in the air, like the moment when a diver first plunges into the water, and then it was ripped away by an earsplitting explosion.
Moments earlier, and not far from Williams’s office, Chad Murray had stepped out of the pump room, which houses the huge machines used to pump mud from the well. Murray, the chief electrician, had been isolating power to one of them so that four other technicians could switch out a valve. The other men were working nearby, between two of the pumps. Murray stepped through the watertight door and latched it behind him. As he returned to his shop, he heard what sounded like a high-pressure noise, a hissing. He walked back to the pump room, and as he reached the door, the rig was shaken by a massive explosion. He scrambled to his feet, grabbed a flashlight from his shop, and spun open the latch on the pump room door. Black smoke billowed out, enveloping him like a shroud. Everything inside was dark. The thick smoke swirled across the beam of his flashlight as if he were driving in fog. All he could see was devastation. Though he couldn’t see them, he knew that the four men he’d been speaking with just moments earlier were most likely dead.
Miles “Randy” Ezell was lying in his bunk watching television when the telephone rang. Ezell was a toolpusher, a senior member of the drilling team, and one of the Horizon’s original crew members. He’d spent 33 years working on offshore rigs, and the last 8 on the Horizon. Ezell had gone off duty a few hours earlier. The call was from Steve Curtis, the assistant driller on the drilling floor. “We have a situation,” he said. “The well is blown out. We have mud going to the crown,” which meant that the drilling fluid was shooting from the top of the derrick. Ezell was horrified. He’d left the drill floor earlier in the evening after getting reassurances from his relief that everything was fine. Curtis told Ezell that they were trying to shut in the well. “Randy, we need your help.” Ezell grabbed his coveralls and stepped into the hallway. His boots and hard hat were in his office just across the corridor. People were standing around, but he barely saw them. He was riveted by tunnel vision—a singular focus on the danger that he knew faced them all. As Ezell stepped into the doorway of his office, an explosion wracked the room and threw him 20 feet into a wall.
Stephen Stone awakened with a start. At first, he wasn’t sure what had rousted him, only that it had been loud. Then the sleep cleared from his mind, wiped away by the cold realization that the noise had been an explosion. As that thought startled him fully awake, another blast hit. This one shook the platform, and it sounded as if the upper decks were collapsing. Ceiling tiles rained down in a storm of dust and debris. The force blew open the door of his cabin, and, in the hallway, his crewmates were running in the halls, screaming. Stone bolted through the door and made for the stairwell that would take him to the lifeboat deck.
He knew the drill. Everyone on board did. They practiced it every Sunday. Offshore drilling companies trained their crews incessantly on safety and evacuation procedures, yet the entire rig seemed to be gripped in panic. When Stone got to the stairwell, he found that it had collapsed, crumpled like paper discarded in a trash can. He ran back to his room and grabbed a life vest and his shoes, and then, instinctively, snatched his wedding ring.
Back in the electronics shop, the first explosion blew the three-inch-thick steel door off its six hinges, knocked Mike Williams across the room, and slammed him into the far wall. The door followed and struck him in the head. A line containing carbon dioxide ruptured and began spewing gas into the room, clouding his vision. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t breathe. He crawled along the floor, knowing that oxygen would be more prevalent there, and made it back to the opening where the door had been. As he scrambled through, he pulled a penlight from his pocket, turned it on, and carried it in his mouth, hoping to see where he was crawling. The lights in the next room, like those in his shop and all over the rig, had exploded. Everything was dark. He crawled through the control room, feeling his way, and made it to the door on the far side. As he grabbed the handle, another explosion shook the room.
In the hallway outside his cabin, Stephen Stone spotted a crane operator he worked with who was running toward the other end of the living quarters. Stone followed him. Together, they made their way up the stairwell at the far end of the rig from Stone’s cabin. They were now one deck below the rig’s surface, but the lifeboats were at the opposite end. They raced through the upper deck of living quarters, and as they reached the other side, a collapsed ceiling blocked their path. The air was thick with black smoke and grit, as if someone had turned on a fan in an ash bin. Debris was strewn everywhere. Still following the crane operator, Stone picked his way through the rubble, and together they pushed through onto the lifeboat deck.
As he stood up on the deck, Stone turned around and looked up. The towering derrick was ablaze, a forest fire of metal soaring skyward and turning the night sky to day. He stood mesmerized by the flames until his reverie was shattered by a call to muster. Someone was trying to rally the crew and get a head count before they moved into the lifeboats. That, too, was a well-rehearsed procedure. Many of the crew members gathered on the lifeboat deck, though, continued to stare at the burning derrick, unable to move, unable to look away as the horror slowly sank in. The nightmare well, with its mile-long conduit into the belly of the earth, seemed to have tapped into hell itself.
Chad Murray was supposed to report to the engine control room on the other side, but with the inklike smoke filling the pump room, he knew he’d never make it there. Besides, the explosion had come from the engines. There probably wasn’t anything left back there. This wasn’t an emergency drill; this was outright crisis. Murray knew that the rig had to be evacuated. He began making his way forward toward his muster station, where he was supposed to gather for an evacuation. He picked his way through the galley. The floor was littered with broken ceiling tiles. Blown-out wall panels were scattered everywhere. It looked like the scenes on the news after a tornado had ravaged a trailer park. As he made his way across the galley and down a corridor, he came upon four of his fellow crewmen huddled on the floor.
The first thing Randy Ezell remembered after the blast was that he was covered by parts of the ceiling and other debris that had rained down on him after he hit the wall. He tried to get up, but he couldn’t move. He tried again, but he lacked the strength. He told himself, “Either you get up or you’re going to lie here and die.” He summoned a burst of adrenaline and pulled himself free. He stood up and sucked in a lungful of smoke, which was billowing through the room. Remembering his safety training, he dropped back to the floor and began to crawl. He tried to remember the direction of the door. He thought he felt a puff of air and headed toward it. It must be the way out. He clambered over the shattered remains of his office. As he made it to the door, he realized that what he had thought was air was actually methane. He could feel the droplets on his face. Everyone was in danger. Another explosion could doom them all. As he crawled down the hallway, he came across Wyman Wheeler, another toolpusher, who was covered in debris. As he cleared it off, a flashlight approached, bobbing around like a bouncing ball of light. It was Murray. The hallway was chaos. A few people came and went; several people were injured, and others were trying to help them. Ezell and another worker tried to lift Wheeler, but he was in too much pain. Ezell asked Murray to go to the bow and get a stretcher. Ezell promised Wheeler he’d stay with him. Somehow, they’d get him out.
Mike Williams was angry. He shoved the door aside. At that moment, he hated doors. Two of them had hit him in the head and pinned him against walls. “They were beating me to death.” He couldn’t see anything. Something was in his eyes, but only later would he realize that it was blood running down his forehead. He couldn’t move one arm, and his left leg was useless. He was choking on the CO2 that was still flooding the room. He knew he had to get outside, to fresh air, if he was going to survive. The explosion had blown him back 30, maybe 40 feet. He began to crawl once again toward the doorway.
The control room had an elevated floor, like a computer room. The floor tiles were suspended a few inches above the subfloor to allow cabling and wires to run underneath, connecting all the control panels that lined the room. The explosion had shaken the floor panels out of their supporting grid, and as he crawled, Williams had to pick his way through the mesh of supports, like a football player doing tire-training drills in slow motion. As he crawled, he came upon the bodies of at least two men. They weren’t moving, and they weren’t responding. He assumed that they were dead. Even if they weren’t, in his condition, he was unable to help them. He wasn’t even sure he could help himself. As he continued to make his way across the room, he saw a dim light and headed toward it. Eventually, he pulled himself outside. He still couldn’t breathe, and as he got to his feet, he turned toward the starboard side of the rig. Earlier in the day, when he had been working on the crane, he recalled that the wind had been coming across the starboard side. His training had taught him to stay upwind of smoke and fire. His vision began to clear, and he started to move forward. As he was about to take a step, he realized that there was no walkway in front of him, no handrails. “One more step and I would have been in the water.” The exhaust stack, the housing for Engine Number Three, and the walkway that went past it were all gone. He turned around and headed in the other direction, toward the lifeboat deck. Realizing that the situation on the rig was worse than he’d expected, and not knowing how many others were alive, he thought about getting into the lifeboat and launching it himself.
Then Williams remembered the emergency procedures. He had responsibilities. He was supposed to gather at an emergency station, but his station was the room he’d just left. His secondary muster point was the bridge, on the opposite side of the rig, and, strapping on a life vest, he decided to make his way toward it. As he crossed the main deck, the hissing sound he’d first heard when he was on the phone with his wife had grown to a full-blown roar. As he picked his way through the debris, making his way forward, he could see that the derrick and the driller’s shack—the derrick’s control room—were engulfed in flames. He knew then what had happened. It was the worst thing that could occur on any well, but especially on one that was being drilled 40 miles from shore. One word echoed through his mind: blowout.
As Stephen Stone stared up at the flaming derrick, it seemed to intensify, burning more brightly as if someone had thrown another log on a giant campfire. The heat rose in intensity from ovenlike to an uncontrolled blast furnace. Workers who had been too shocked to move flipped into full-blown panic, scrambling for the lifeboats. Stone strapped himself into Lifeboat Number Two, but nothing happened. The red boat stayed on the deck while the voice that had been calling for muster was still hoping vainly for a head count. The lifeboat, which was more like an enclosed metal pod, began to fill with smoke. Strapped in and frozen in time, Stone realized that he was about to die. The flaming derrick above him would melt and crumble, raining molten death down on him. Or the entire rig would simply explode in one last, cataclysmic blast, a final inferno enveloping them all.
At the moment when he thought death was upon him, Stone felt the lifeboat lurch as it was lowered on its cables toward the water. The sea, too, was on fire by then. The Horizon had begun to break apart, and bits of it were tumbling into the water, spreading over the surface like a sense of dread. The lifeboat was still under the platform, floating in a flammable sea surrounded by burning debris. Finally, the boat was cut from its cables and motored toward the nearby supply ship, the Damon B. Bankston.
Mike Williams reported to the bridge and told the rig’s captain that the vessel had no propulsion and no electronic control. Engine Number Three was gone, and the others might have blown, too. The bridge was a nest of controlled confusion as the rig’s leaders tried to figure out what was happening.
Jimmy Harrell was the Horizon’s offshore installation manager, essentially the senior officer when the rig was connected to the well. Harrell had spent the better part of the day talking to the visiting managers from BP and Transocean; then, after doing some paperwork on the bridge, he’d returned to his quarters and was taking a shower when the first explosion hit. His quarters were blown apart by the blast. He stumbled from the remains of the shower, grabbed a pair of coveralls, and headed into the hallway without any shoes. Randy Ezell was kneeling beside Wyman Wheeler, moving debris off him. Harrell managed to crawl through the debris, making his way to the main deck and eventually to the bridge. As he got there, he heard the subsea engineer telling the rig captain that he was disconnecting from the well.
By the time Williams arrived, other workers had begun to reach the bridge. Noticing the blood pouring down Williams’s head, a supervisor told him to sit down. Williams kept repeating his assessment of the damage he had seen. “We need to abandon ship now” he said. The supervisor looked for a medical kit to treat the gash on Williams’s forehead, but all he could find was a roll of toilet paper to stop the bleeding. Several people gathered around Williams began talking about the standby generator. If they could get that running, they could get lights and some minimal functions back. But reaching the generator meant heading back toward the fire.
The supervisor turned to leave. Williams stood up. If this had any chance of working, it would take more than one person. They couldn’t send a man back into the maw of the flames alone. Williams grabbed the supervisor by his shirt and told him that he wasn’t going by himself. Paul Meinhart, a motor-man who’d joined Transocean just three months earlier, went with them. The three men headed back across the main deck and into the generator room. For 10, or perhaps 15, minutes they frantically tried to start the generator. The generator had a battery starter, and Williams was reading a 24-volt charge on the battery, but the engine wouldn’t start. Were they doing something wrong? They fumbled around the darkened room and found an instruction manual. By flashlight, they read the starting procedures. They were doing everything right. After five or six futile tries, they gave up and headed back toward the bridge.
Back on the bridge, alarms were shrieking, and the captain knew that they were running out of time. The subsea engineer had hit the emergency disconnect for the well, and although the control panel showed that the rig should be free, it wasn’t. The hydraulics were dead. Fire continued to shoot from the top of the derrick. The rig had no power, and without power, it had no pumps for the firefighting equipment, no way to shut off the flow of gas from the well, and no way to disconnect the rig from the flaming umbilical that had it tethered to the wellhead. All they could do was leave. The captain gave the order to abandon ship.
As they made their way back toward the bridge, Williams felt a sickening feeling wash over him. Lifeboat Number One was descending from the rig. Without power, there’d be no way to raise it again. Meanwhile, Chad Murray and Randy Ezell emerged from below deck, carrying Wyman Wheeler on a stretcher. They joined up with the group, as did David Young, the chief mate who’d been helping to get other crew members to the lifeboats. By the time the bridge crew got to the lifeboat staging area, the second one was gone, too. There were about 10 of them in all, probably the last crew members still aboard. They stood in stunned silence as the heat from the flaming derrick swatted at them and debris swirled around them. All the lifeboats on their side of the rig were gone. Someone suggested that they try to make it to the aft boats. Williams looked up at the derrick, an inferno of twisted metal. Flames were now shooting out of the top, fueled by the flow of gas rushing up from a mile below them. Little explosions were going off everywhere, and things were popping and shooting past them. Projectiles were flying in every direction, but it was impossible to tell what they were. Trying to reach the other lifeboats would get them all killed for sure.
Young grabbed for the only option they had left: an inflatable life raft. Like the lifeboats, the rafts were covered, with a small opening for people to climb through. The rafts were hooked to a winch with an arm like a small crane that swung over the side of the rig and lowered the raft to the water. As the raft inflated, it became entangled with the arm of the boom. A blizzard of smoke whipped around them, and heat seemed to be coming from below the rig. Williams feared that the fire was creating a backdraft that was wrapping around under the vessel, between the legs of the giant rig, and coming back up the other side. So much heat was rising from below that he feared the raft would pop or melt and cook the people who were getting inside.
Young climbed in, followed by Murray and Ezell. Once they were inside, they guided Wheeler’s stretcher through the opening, then several other members of the group jumped in. Watching from the deck, Williams worried that the raft would swing out and dump the stretcher into the water 100 feet below. They waited for breaks in the swirling heat before scrambling into the raft a few people at a time. Then, when it came Williams’s turn, the raft inexplicably deployed before he could get in. He was left on the deck with two members of the bridge crew, a woman named Andrea and Curt Kuchta, the captain.
To steady the raft as people climbed in, one of the lines securing it had been tied off to a handrail. As the raft descended, the line pulled taut, jerking the raft sideways in midair and causing everyone inside to tumble to one end. The force of the impact pulled the line loose, and the raft snapped back, flinging the crew back against the opposite side. As they hit the water, disoriented from being tossed around and trying to work around Wheeler’s stretcher, they knew that they had to get free of the rig. Murray and several others scrambled out of the raft, hoping to pull it through the water and away from the flaming platform above them. The raft wouldn’t move. The line on which they’d been lowered was still connected, holding it in place. Transocean, the Horizon’s owner, had a policy prohibiting crew members from carrying pocketknives. In the cramped, darkened interior, the frantic occupants of the raft couldn’t find the cutting tool that was stowed inside. Overhead, the flames shot ever higher into the night sky. Flames licked the surface of the water, moving closer to the raft.
Back on the deck, Mike Williams looked up at the derrick. It was burning hotter than ever, like a giant funeral pyre. Given his injuries and the time it had taken to wrestle with the life raft, he knew that they didn’t have time to inflate a second one. They had a choice: They could stay on the rig and die, or they could jump.
Jumping, too, was something that they had trained for. It was the last-ditch survival technique: Wrap your hand around your life vest, step off, cross your legs, look straight ahead, and fall. But if they fell straight down, they would probably hit the life raft that had just descended. They and the people in the raft would all be lucky to survive such an impact. Williams turned to the woman beside him and told her that they’d have to run and jump. She said she couldn’t. She couldn’t jump. She couldn’t. Kuchta ran and jumped over the edge. Come on, Williams urged. He just did it. You’ve got to do it. She couldn’t, she said. She just couldn’t.
Time was running out, literally burning away. The deck was getting hotter, as if they were standing on a griddle that was getting warmer by the minute. Finally, Williams said, “Well, watch me, then,” and he jumped, plunging 10 stories into the water below. He hit the surface and sank deep, coming back up to find that calamity had followed him from the rig above. The water was coated with something: oil, hydraulic fluid, diesel fuel—he couldn’t tell what it was, but it was covering him and burning his skin. What had he done? The deck might have been a raging inferno, but at least he hadn’t been swimming in acidic sludge. He looked at the flames nearby. The fire, he realized, would come across the water and burn him up just as surely as if he’d stayed above. He was under the rig now, its massive legs rising above him like darkened skyscrapers. Fire rained down, and flames danced along the surface of the water.
Williams began to backstroke, using his one good arm and one working leg. He kept pushing himself forward until he felt no pain and the heat subsided, fading into blackness. He was just conscious enough to think that he might be dead, that the flames had caught him and he’d burned up. Another explosion above him jolted him back. He was still in the rig’s shadow, and he could see the glow from the fire raging on the deck from which he’d jumped. He told himself that he had to swim, willing his broken body forward. He heard something in the distance—a voice calling, “Over here! Over here!”
He swam as hard as his one exhausted arm and leg could move him, floundering forward until the pain and the heat once again began to fade and the blackness returned like a blanket. Suddenly, he was being lifted out of the water. He flipped over into a small orange rescue boat, and as soon as he could speak, Williams tried to tell anyone who could listen that they had to get away.
But there were others in the water. The boat operators could see the flickering of the emergency lights from their life vests. Instead of leaving, they headed closer to the flaming rig, back toward the inferno that now loomed above them. They stopped and pulled in another survivor floating in the water. It was Andrea, whom Williams had been unable to coax from the deck moments earlier. Finally, he thought, the ordeal was over. She had been the last one off as far as he knew. Now they could make their way to the Bankston.
Lying in the boat, though, he could feel the heat intensify. They weren’t pulling away, they were heading closer to the rig. Williams protested, but the boat driver told him that there was a life raft under the rig. The bridge crew was still stuck there, bobbing in the underbelly of the flaming giant above. The raft was drifting farther under the rig, toward the fire. The rescue boat crew threw a line over in hopes of towing the raft, but as it tried to pull the raft away, Williams could feel the rescue boat moving sideways. Something was holding them back. As they looked at the raft, it was tilted at a 45-degree angle, pulled taut against the line that was still connected to the rig. Kuchta, the captain, who had jumped just before Williams, was in the water near the raft. He swam to the rescue boat, got a knife from the pilot, and swam back to cut the raft free. The rescue crew hauled him into the boat, and they all headed toward the Damon B. Bankston.
Eleven men aboard the rig, many of them on the drill floor or working near the engine room, didn’t survive. The roll call for the dead would come later: Jason Anderson, Dale Burkeen, Donald Clark, Stephen Curtis, Gordon Jones, Wyatt Kemp, Karl Kleppinger, Blair Manuel, Shaun Roshto, Dewey Revette, and Adam Weise.
About half an hour after Stephen Stone was pulled aboard the supply boat, the Coast Guard arrived and began flying the injured to a triage station on another rig 14 miles away. Some were flown directly to hospitals on shore, depending on the severity of their injuries and whether they could handle the helicopter flight to land. The Bankston stayed at the scene all night as the remaining Horizon crew members watched their floating city burn. “That was one of the most painful things we could have ever done—stay on location and watch the rig burn,” Ezell said. “Those guys that were on there were our family. It would be like seeing your children or your brothers or sisters perish in that manner.” Ezell wished the Coast Guard had allowed the Bankston to move away from the disaster site to some place where they wouldn’t have had to keep staring into the burning maw of death that had been the Deepwater Horizon. Not until eight o’clock the next morning did the Bankston finally make for shore.
Four hours later, the ship pulled alongside another platform and Coast Guard investigators came aboard, interviewing survivors. Everyone had to give a written statement before leaving, they were told. At one-thirty, about 28 hours after the explosion that had awakened him, Stone stepped on shore, but he wasn’t going anywhere. By then, Transocean had amassed a response team, and as the survivors disembarked from the Bankston, they were told to line up for a drug test. Battered, exhausted, and overwhelmed by the events of the past day, Stone had survived a disaster only to be made to feel like a criminal by the very company that had put him in harm’s way.
As the survivors arrived, they were ushered into a big room, told that they couldn’t contact families or attorneys, and presented with a paper that they were supposed to initial and sign before they could leave. One of the statements said: “I was not a witness to the incident requiring the evacuation and have no firsthand or personal knowledge regarding the incident.” Finally, Stone was allowed to call his wife, Sara. She’d flown from Houston to New Orleans and had gotten word that Stephen was safe, but she’d been frustrated at not being allowed to speak with him. After another three hours, Stephen was taken to the Crown Plaza hotel in New Orleans, where he finally was reunited with her, given a room, and allowed to sleep—the first sleep he’d had in more than 30 hours.
A week and a half later, a Transocean representative met Stone at a Denny’s restaurant and again urged him to sign a waiver saying that he wasn’t injured. In exchange, he would receive a check for $5,000 that was supposed to cover personal possessions lost on the Horizon. After 10 days of nightmares, memory loss, and flashbacks of the blast, he refused to sign anything saying that he’d suffered no injuries.2
Hours before the sun rose on the flaming wreckage of the Deep-water Horizon, news of the disaster had crossed the Atlantic, reaching the inconspicuous brick building on London’s tony St. James’s Square. The building lacked the ostentation that might be associated with Britain’s most prominent company and one of the world’s biggest oil producers. In his fifth-floor office, Tony Hayward, the short, slight chief executive with a tangle of black hair, was in shock, stunned by the reality that was slowly beginning to sink in. Hayward, just three years into his tenure as chief executive, was supposed to be the reformer, the leader who understood BP’s internal problems and was leading it to a new era of safe operations. He wanted to make the company’s operations an example for the entire global energy industry.
His record had reflected that. His time as chief executive had been marred by none of the calamities that had plagued the final years of his predecessor, John Browne. In fact, BP had largely faded from the headlines, which had been Hayward’s plan. He didn’t court the spotlight the way Browne had. He was determined to run things smoothly, and if operations ran smoothly, they weren’t newsworthy. Now, the flaming rig in the Gulf of Mexico would draw headlines and television cameras to BP like moths to headlights.
BP didn’t own the rig, but regardless of what had happened, it owned the problem. Under its lease agreement with the U.S. government, it was responsible for any oil that leaked from the well. That was true even if Transocean’s equipment had failed— the equipment that was supposed to prevent this sort of thing. Whatever the cause, Hayward and BP would be forced to face the consequences. This would become BP’s crisis, and it was BP that would have to fix it. Hayward, who’d managed for years to avoid getting caught in BP’s fatal legacy, was now fully ensnared. The company’s past, which he thought he had buried, had come roaring back.
He’d gotten the job after the disasters of 2005 and 2006, which included the deadly refinery explosion in Texas City and oil spills from BP-operated pipelines on the Alaskan tundra. When he took over, Hayward vowed sweeping changes, and he’d been making them. Safety had improved. He could cite the numbers to prove it. He’d slashed BP’s bloated bureaucracy, clearing out offices throughout the building in which he now paced. Had he instead been simply an errant guide, leading his company in circles as if lost in a wilderness of its own failed culture? How the hell could this happen? That was the question the entire world asked as the Deepwater Horizon burned, then sank, breaking off the riser pipe and unleashing a flow of oil that in a week would already create a slick the size of Delaware off the Louisiana coast. For three months, the well would spew oil and the slick would grow, staining not just one of the world’s most important bodies of water but the reputation of the company that Hayward now ran. For Hayward, the end was beginning. He didn’t realize it yet, but his 28-year career with BP was descending rapidly into disgrace. Like his predecessor, he would be forced from the company, knocked from the highest pedestal of British business. His name would never be forgotten, forever linked with one of the industry’s greatest failures. Few remembered who ran Exxon when the Valdez tanker ran ashore and sullied the coastline of Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989. But few would forget who was running BP when the Deepwater Horizon exploded.
How the hell could this happen? Hayward demanded. Left unspoken was the final word of the question, the word that put the latest and largest of BP’s disasters into its fatal context: again. How the hell could this happen again?