Blowout

by Rachel Maddow

  Five days after Rick Perry blamed God, an attempt to corral the leaking oil by placing a massive ninety-eight-ton containment dome on the well failed. Advice came in from around the globe after that; one Russian newspaper suggested detonating a nuclear bomb deep in the well. (This method was said to have worked in a couple of unfortunate but rarely talked-about offshore spills in the Soviet era.) BP and the Coast Guard Command passed on that particular plowshare, but they did execute a “junk shot,” which involved rifling golf balls and rubber tires into the wellhead.

  Didn’t work.

  Next they tried an operation called “top kill,” which sounded to the Tonight Show host, Jay Leno, like a “bad Steven Seagal movie.” BP’s Hayward, however, confidently said there was a 60 to 70 percent chance this new method would stop the flow once and for all. Engineers pumped 100,000 barrels of mud per day into the five-thousand-foot riser for three days and spiced the action with an occasional junk shot of more golf balls and rubber tires and, who knows, maybe even a Crock-Pot and a Chuck Taylor Converse tennis shoe or two.

  Didn’t work.

  The number of booms and skimmers available was not enough to stop the spread of the oil, and soon the little tar balls that first reached land were followed by big toxic oil slicks. Pictures of seabirds covered beak to talon in brown sludge, unable to take flight and suffocating to death, became a staple of the daily newsfeed. The only things that actually seemed to do much good were the absorbent pads, which the cleanup workers called “paper towels.” That’s certainly what they looked like, and that’s essentially what they were: flat sheets of material made from the same kind of stuff that’s inside disposable diapers, either shoved into a long thin link-sausage casing of a boom or just used by hand, to sop up the oil. A 580-page plan had been developed and adopted by all the major oil companies over the twenty years since the Exxon Valdez spill, and still the best cleanup tool they had at their disposal was diaper filling. Honestly. The most profitable corporations in the history of corporations. And the only thing their two-decade brainstorm produced was fancier paper towels.

  At the end of May, after more than five weeks of unmitigated ongoing disaster, the Obama administration instituted a six-month deepwater drilling moratorium, which shut down thirty-three current drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico. By June 2, 2010, the administration had closed more than a third of the federal fishing zone in the Gulf because of the spill.

  By then, it was clear the math just wasn’t adding up. BP had rigged up a two-prong system capable of capturing or burning off something near twenty-five thousand barrels per day; if five thousand barrels a day were leaking, the size of the disaster should have been not only contained by then but drastically shrinking every day. And yet it was only getting worse. Somehow, the twenty-five-thousand-barrel-a-day effort was not enough to keep up with the daily flow from the leaking well.

  By the time Rex Tillerson and four other Big Oil bosses were summoned to appear before Chairman Ed Markey’s subcommittee in early June, estimates of daily leakage had been revised up from five thousand barrels per day to as much as forty thousand per day. This back-of-the-envelope estimate was still far short of the true flow—which would be something nearer sixty-five thousand barrels per day at its worst, for a total of nearly five million barrels dumped into the sea. “The most difficult challenge confronting the whole industry at this point,” Tillerson told reporters who buttonholed him after a shareholder meeting not long after he was summoned to Washington, “is regaining the confidence and trust of the public, the American people, and regaining the confidence and trust of the government regulators and the people who oversee our activities out there.” How paper towels fit into that plan, he did not say.

  Composure and patience were at a premium in the House subcommittee hearing on June 15, 2010. Rex Tillerson had to sit through an hour and twenty minutes of long opening statements by angry and disappointed and frustrated and nervous and embittered congresspeople. Tillerson was appearing with the heads of BP’s North American operations, Shell’s North American operations, and CEOs from Chevron and ConocoPhillips. The worst of the criticism was directed at the BP prez, who was instructed at various points to apologize, or resign, or consider committing hara-kiri. But Tillerson took plenty of heat. In fact, he got Chairman Markey’s first question out of the box: “Mr. Tillerson, like BP, on page 11-6 of your plan, ExxonMobil’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill response plan lists walruses under sensitive biological and human resources. As I am sure you know, there aren’t any walruses in the Gulf of Mexico; and there have not been for 3 million years. How can ExxonMobil have walruses in their response plan for the Gulf of Mexico?”

  “Congressman Markey,” Tillerson began obfuscating while at times somewhat nervously twirling a paper clip, “those response plans incorporate a number of broad-based studies, marine mammal studies, many of which are part of the EIS and EIA statements that are put together by the MMS; and much of the response plan and what is contained in it is prescribed by regulation, including the models that are used to project different scenarios for oil spills; and many of the statements and representations that are in the plans—”

  “These are regional oil spill response plans,” Markey said, cutting him off. “How can walruses be in a response plan for the Gulf of Mexico? This is a regional response plan that the company has put together.”

  Tillerson conceded the point: it was embarrassing that walruses were included. To Exxon. Not the walruses. But he tried to defend the inclusion of one Dr. Lutz, an expert in marine mammal biology, who was cited in the report as a reliable expert and a resource for technical support in case of an offshore spill. Lutz had died four years before the ExxonMobil response plan was filed.

  “The fact that Dr. Lutz died in 2005 does not mean his work and the importance of his work died with him,” Rex argued, twiddling that paper clip.

  “I appreciate that,” Markey said. “It just seems to me that when you include Dr. Lutz’s phone number in your plan for a response that you have not taken this responsibility seriously.”

  Tillerson, to his credit, took the shot and kept his calm. He used most of his time to testify to ExxonMobil’s long history of safe practices and excellent environmental stewardship and to point out how this BP event, awful as it was, was a one-off. “This incident represents a dramatic departure from the industry norm in deepwater drilling,” he said. “We are eager to learn what occurred at this well that did not occur at the other 14,000 deepwater wells that have been successfully drilled around the world.” He allowed that deepwater drilling was a risky proposition and a delicate science, but he made sure that everybody tuning in to the hearing that day understood that this was a BP problem, specifically; ExxonMobil would never have allowed this to happen in the first place. “We would not have drilled the well the way they did,” Tillerson said. The testifying execs from Chevron, Shell, and ConocoPhillips agreed, but none piled on BP like Rex. “We would have run a liner, a tie-back liner,” Tillerson explained. “We would have used a different cement formulation. We would have tested for cement integrity before we circulated the kill-weight mud out. We would have had the locking seal ring at the casing hanger before proceeding. And leading up to all of that, though, there was clearly—and this is just based on what has publicly been made available—there were clearly a lot of indications or problems with this well going on for some period of time leading up to the final loss of control. And why those—why—how those were dealt with and why they weren’t dealt with differently I don’t know.”

  Even when one of the Democrats on the subcommittee lambasted him for other walrus and dead-scientist embarrassments in ExxonMobil’s disaster response plan, like devoting forty pages to media strategy and only nine pages on contingencies for oil removal, Rex Tillerson kept up his merit-badge level of calm. “We are not well equipped to handle [major spills],” Tillerson explained. “And we’ve never represented a
nything different than that. That’s why the emphasis is always on preventing these things from occurring, because when they happen, we’re not very well equipped to deal with them. And that’s just a fact of the enormity of what we’re dealing with.”

  We’re not very well equipped to deal with major spills. But no one else is either. How can your industry be the only entity on earth capable of causing a giant tanker spill or a blown-out deep-sea oil rig or a pipeline leak or a bomb-train oil railcar explosion, and not also be the entity responsible for coming up with ways to respond to that kind of problem? If not you, who?

  After more than four hours of back-and-forth with this Democrat-run committee, after taking a few direct shots particularly from Chairman Markey, Tillerson must still have felt as if he’d dodged one particular bullet: nobody said a thing about Africa. Just ten days after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, an aging ExxonMobil pipeline in the Gulf of Guinea, near a series of coastal villages in Nigeria, had ruptured. The breach was not discovered right away and not halted for a full week, according to The Guardian. The newspaper’s man on the scene had just reported that almost a million gallons of oil (or twenty-five thousand barrels) leaked into the delta in those seven days. ExxonMobil insisted the spillage was only a small fraction of that figure, but this did little to placate the people who depended on those waters for their livelihood. “We can’t see where to fish,” one local man told a reporter. “Oil is in the sea.” And this was not an uncommon experience in Nigeria. A 2006 study found that an average of 11 million gallons of oil per year, or 546 million gallons over the preceding fifty years, had leaked into the Niger delta. That’s one Exxon Valdez–sized disaster every year, and the government there didn’t even require the oil producers to have paper towels on hand. But this being in far-off Nigeria, the news had not yet washed up on U.S. shores. At least not to the extent that anyone in Congress was ready to bug Exxon about it.

  Since Rex Tillerson never had to answer to any of that, he had a clean pass to talk about how ExxonMobil continued to be “dedicated to being good corporate citizens wherever we operate.” The top of his pre-drafted opening statement sort of said everything about his performance that day. “As someone who has spent his entire career in the energy industry, it truly is deeply saddening to see the loss of life, the damage to environmentally sensitive areas, the effect on the economic livelihoods, and the loss of the public trust in the energy industry that has resulted.” Truly. Deeply. Saddening.

  More than anything else, Teodorin Nguema Obiang Mangue wanted a simple white cotton glove bejeweled with clear Swarovski Lochrose crystal beads. Actually, you could say, he needed it—along with other apt and related accessories. Sometimes, when a guy is really truly down in the dumps, a garden-variety shopping spree is insufficient to improve the mood. Sometimes, those happy frissons that attend the purchase of hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of sartorial splendors from Versace, and Dolce & Gabbana, and Gucci, or a sleek Nor-Tech speedboat (top speed 100 miles per hour), or a $2 million Bugatti Veyron (top speed 250 miles per hour) cannot cut through the torpor of melancholy. In June 2010, Teodorin, who was turning forty-one that month, was suffering that kind of a pall.

  A dogged journalist named Ken Silverstein and a slew of federal investigators were already beginning to reveal the extent of Teodorin’s psychic doldrums. The army of staff on hand to serve the heir apparent to the presidency of Equatorial Guinea (Teodorin’s father had held that office for more than thirty years by 2010) would describe to them a man whose daily habits and schedule suggested a very definite lack of mission, or purpose. The boss rarely emerged from the bedroom suite of his $30 million mansion in Malibu before late afternoon and often required a bowl of shark fin soup from Hop Li Seafood Restaurant to take the edge off his hangover. Teodorin spent the waning hours of daylight playing video games, watching movies, or noodling around on Facebook. He was more likely that summer to stay home and allow a regular staff driver to escort one of his girlfriends to the shops on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Teodorin set limits for each of them, but he liked to be seen by his paramours as a generous man. So even when he wasn’t there with his valise a-bulge with bank-fresh shrink-wrapped $100 bills, his driver was often in possession of a Nike shoebox full of cash—and able to make good on up to $80,000 worth of purchases in a single outing.

  There had been a time a few years back when Teodorin would spend real business hours at his hip-hop label, TNO Entertainment, trying to launch the next big act. But after every artist in the meager TNO Entertainment lineup flopped, Teodorin had lost interest. He had also once enjoyed spending the afternoon and early evening riding roller coasters at a nearby amusement park, but these days Six Flags Magic Mountain was ready to close its gates by the time Teodorin got himself out the front door of his Malibu mansion.

  He even seemed to staff a little less enthusiastic about entertaining at home. The annual “Nguema Summer Bash” had been a notable Malibu party a few years earlier, with beautiful people from the entertainment world sashaying around the edges of his fifteen-thousand-square-foot mansion to find the best spot for ogling the skyline of downtown Los Angeles and no expense spared on the comestibles or the rented eye candy prowling in cages. “The food was great, the drinks were better than great, the house, the view, the DJ, the white tiger were all SO COOL!” one of the attorneys who was helping Teodorin move millions of dollars of suspicious money through the U.S. banking system wrote to him after the 2007 bash. But the summer of 2010 seemed different, and the staff wasn’t sure if the Summer Bash would happen at all.

  Teodorin would usually leave his house only after it was already dark, his security “chase team” on his tail, in whatever luxury ride he might choose. He had his pick of a fleet—Ferraris, Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, Lamborghinis, and Maybachs. “I’m wearing the blue shoes,” he would say to one of his drivers, “so get me the blue Rolls.” After a bit of pre-gaming in a rented suite at Raffles L’Ermitage, Teodorin would head out to the clubs, where he would spend thousands on champagne for would-be actresses and models draped with titles like “Playmate of the Month, October 2009.” At the end of the night, if he was in a particularly surly mood, Teodorin might grab the wheel of the car from his professional driver and leave the chase team to earn their keep by chasing their drunken charge west on the Pacific Coast Highway and then up winding roads toward his estate, running red lights, speeding around hairpin turns. “Like a maniac” as his minders would describe it.

  None of it seemed to make him much happier that summer.

  It had been, to be sure, a pretty rough year for Teodorin—which kicked off on his birthday near the end of June 2009 with the sad, premature death of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, whom Teodorin had just been trying to get to know through Jackson’s sister Janet and his brother Jermaine. Word among the L.A. celebrity-watching crowd was that Teodorin had offered the family his Rolls-Royce Phantom for Michael’s funeral but was distraught at losing the chance at a real friendship with the world music icon—the Gloved One. Teodorin’s monthlong trip to Maui a few months later was something of a disappointment, too. He flew across the Pacific in his private Gulfstream V, which was trailed by a separate charter jet carrying his security team, drivers, household staff, and two chefs. Then he took up residence in a $7,000-a-night villa and installed his factotums, along with what Silverstein called a “revolving cast of escorts,” at a mansion perched on the beach. Four of his favorite cars—Bugatti, Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Rolls-Royce—along with three motorcycles, were shipped over and garaged nearby to be at his disposal 24/7. Alas, his Nor-Tech 5000 speedboat had been banged up in a fall off a trailer en route to Maui and did not arrive until the final week of the stay.

  The much-anticipated first ride on the repaired speedboat was further delayed while staff arranged for the proper fuel—at $600 a barrel—to be shipped over from Oahu. And the first fifteen-minute speedboat ride off Maui turned out, sadly, to also
be the only one of the trip. The damage the boat had suffered in transit was apparently not properly fixed and Teodorin’s half-million-dollar nautical toy capsized and sank just a few hours after that first brief jaunt. He spent a part of the few final days of the trip watching as a helicopter and a number of trucks retrieved the soggy Nor-Tech from the Pacific Ocean.

  Things just got worse after he returned from that bust of a trip, thanks largely to the intrepid journalist Silverstein, who had been rooting around the Obiang family for nearly a decade. In November 2009, Silverstein published a long investigative piece on the Harper’s website revealing the existence of a multiyear federal investigation into Teodorin’s finances. The burning question of the U.S. government inquiry was this: How could a man whose position as Equatorial Guinea’s minister of agriculture and forestry paid him about $60,000 a year move $75 million through U.S. banks in order to buy a sixteen-acre Malibu estate with a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a four-hole golf course, a $38.5 million private jet, and an armada of cars insured at a value of $10 million? “It is suspected that a large portion of [Teodorin] Nguema Obiang’s assets have originated from extortion, theft of public funds, or other corrupt conduct,” read a Justice Department memorandum Silverstein had got hold of.