by Tom Shroder
The funeral was on Sunday, May 2, the day before what would have been Tracy and Karl’s eighteenth wedding anniversary.
Shortly after the funeral, Transocean CEO Steve Newman asked to meet with all of the decedents’ families. Steve arranged a meeting between Newman and Tracy and her parents in Natchez. Newman apologized to them for what had happened, then he cried, and they all cried together.
When they formally canceled the search and rescue mission at 5 p.m. on April 22, Dale Burkeen’s family still couldn’t accept that he was gone. His sister, Janet, couldn’t stop thinking that Dale would have found some way out. His favorite song was “A Country Boy Can Survive,” by Hank Williams, Jr., and his favorite TV show was Man vs. Wild, featuring a former British special forces operative demonstrating survival techniques in some of the world’s most forbidding locales. Dale was always watching that show.
Janet remembered when she’d tease him about it, and say, “Bubba, when ever can you put that into action?” He’d say, “Sis, you never know what’s going to happen to me on the rig. Don’t ever give up on me. I’m a survivor. I’ll find me something to hold on to and paddle to an island and survive.”
So Janet kept thinking the searchers had to have missed him somehow. She just knew he was going to turn up on some little island in the Gulf, sitting under a palm-thatched hut eating bugs and coconuts to survive.
On the grounds of the small-town elementary school Dale attended, there is a small monument to a first-grader who died in an accident on the school playground. A child fell off the sliding board and hit his head. Six-year-old Dale Burkeen was coming up right behind that boy. One of the teachers got rattled and in the confusion of the moment thought it was Dale who’d hit his head. The school called Dale’s mother, Mary, and told her that Dale had fallen and “was unresponsive.” She rushed up to the school to discover that it was not her son headed for the morgue after all. But the incident sent a chill through the family. It somehow marked Dale as vulnerable, at risk of premature death.
“It just wasn’t Dale’s time,” was how they always told the story in the years to come, as Dale grew into a big, strong country boy who knew how to survive. “It wasn’t Dale’s time.”
Somehow, and God only knew how, they were going to have to learn to accept that April 20, 2010, was.
Alyssa Young was dropping her second child off at school at 9 a.m. when her phone rang.
It was Dave’s mother.
“Have you talked to Dave?” she asked. “His rig blew up.”
“Are you sure it was his rig?” Alyssa asked, trying to hold down her panic. It had to be a mistake. It had to be.
Alyssa drove to the oral surgery office where her mother-in-law worked. In streaming video on her computer screen, the Deepwater Horizon burned and burned and burned. Dave’s mother was pacing and listening to Alyssa make one phone call after another. In spite of everything, she called the rig. It rang busy. She called the Transocean number flashing on the screen. They told her they were still waiting for an update from the Coast Guard.
She looked back up at the computer screen and that unquenchable torch that had been Dave’s rig. How could Dave have survived that?
She got a ride home—there was no chance she could drive—and got online. She made serial calls to hospitals in three states, cried on and off, then called more hospitals. By 11:30 she had lost all patience with Transocean and began calling the hotline every ten minutes. How could the news stories be saying there were eleven missing, and Transocean not know which eleven? And if they knew, how could they not tell her? Family and friends filled her house and took the kids outside to play. Alyssa kept searching the Internet for…anything. Dave’s brother had to finally tell her to just turn off the computer.
At 1 p.m., the ordeal ended. Transocean called to say they had good news: Dave was coming in to Port Fourchon.
She didn’t quite believe it until he called at nine that night. He could barely speak; he just kept repeating, “The fucking rig blew up!”
The following night, when he walked through the airport gate in a greasy jumpsuit, hard hat in hand, he had nothing at all except the hundred-dollar bill Transocean had handed him.
“You look like an escaped convict,” she told him.
But she knew that it was both of them who had escaped.
After he got home, Alyssa began to follow all the hearings into the cause of the blowout. She had to know what had happened, and she had to believe that it could be prevented in the future if she was ever going to let him return to the Gulf.
Dave was on full-pay leave. He played with the kids and worked on his speedboats to get them in racing prime. When he healed, he raced.
A few minutes after Dave had left for one of his races, Alyssa felt that same sick feeling she’d felt before he left for the Deepwater Horizon on April 14. She called his cell.
He was fine, he said. The race was just about to start.
Twenty minutes later, her phone rang.
“I’m in the ambulance,” he said, laughing.
His little boat had flown out of the water at high speed, then flipped. The propeller on the 25-horsepower engine had cut through the Kevlar wet suit and sliced his leg. If it hadn’t been for the Kevlar, the leg would have been at the bottom of the Sound.
She called him every name she could think of. She was so angry, she immediately got online and listed all his boats for sale.
He laughed at that, too. But Alyssa was deadly serious. She didn’t want him to race anymore. Time passed and using all his charm, he persuaded her to come watch the next one. Dave professed a reformation: he’d drive safely.
“He held back a little,” Alyssa said. “But it’s just like with the rig. I think it’s going to happen again in ten years. That’s what humans do, right? They get cautious for a while, and then they forget.”
EPILOGUE
A Hole at the Bottom of the World
On April 22, the Deepwater Horizon sank, rupturing its riser, which began a massive oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. Coast Guard and BP estimated the volume of the leak at 42,000 gallons of crude oil a day—roughly enough to fill an Olympic size swimming pool. That accounting turned out to be absurdly optimistic. In the days following the disaster, after multiple failed attempts to trigger the ram shears on the blowout preventer, it began to dawn on an anxious Gulf Coast that an uncontrolled flow of oil might continue for weeks, if not months. Before the end of the next week, with people all over the world watching a live feed, via the Internet, of the billowing leak, estimates of the disaster’s size increased fivefold, to as much as 210,000 gallons per day.
President Obama promised to assign “every single available resource” to contain the spreading oil, and vowed to hold BP accountable for the cleanup. For his part, BP chief executive Tony Hayward launched an aggressive PR campaign with an initial TV ad buy estimated to cost at least $50 million.
“The Gulf spill is a tragedy that never should have happened,” Hayward said in his upper-crust British accent as the spot began. The camera moved in for a tight close-up of his sober face and worried brow. BP would take “full responsibility for cleaning up the spill. We will honor all legitimate claims, and our cleanup efforts will not come at any cost to taxpayers. To those affected and your families, I am deeply sorry.”
The ad closed with images of the Gulf Coast as Hayward intoned, “We will get this done. We will make this right.”
It wasn’t going to be easy.
BP pursued multiple strategies for stopping the unchecked flow into the Gulf. The best hope for a quick fix was a 98-ton steel containment dome designed to cover the ruptured wellhead and siphon the oil into a waiting drill ship. The dome was lowered over Macondo on May 7, but soon clogged with slushy a mix of frozen gas hydrates after an ROV collided with the cap and accidentally shut off a deicing system.
Meanwhile, the BP-leased Transocean rigs Development Driller II and Development Driller III began to sink relief wells paral
lel to the existing Macondo shaft. Once they penetrated beyond 15,000 feet, into the pay zone, the rigs would then drill horizontally and tap into the well at the source of the blowout, where they could pump in enough heavy mud and cement to bury it for good.
But the drilling would take several months, at least, and the unnerving possibility that the gusher would continue unchecked for that long ratcheted up the tension just as executives from BP, Transocean, and Halliburton appeared before congressional hearings in Washington. By that point, estimates for how much oil was spewing each day had climbed still higher, to 800,000 gallons.
Despite the “full responsibility” pledge in BP’s ad campaign, it became clear that the company’s strategy in the hearing was to blame Transocean for the malfunctioning BOP; Halliburton for the cement failure; and the Horizon crew for misreading the negative test and failing to spot the upwelling oil and gas in time to do anything about it. Transocean and Halliburton joined in the finger-pointing, focusing on BP’s suspect well design. Obama called the hearing a “ridiculous spectacle.”
Meanwhile, the growing oil slick, now visible from space, was spreading in a lopsided loop around the blowout site. The leading edge of the slick made landfall on uninhabited and environmentally sensitive barrier islands off the Louisiana coast. Soon oil would sully beaches in Alabama and western Florida. Unexplained deaths of marine wildlife began to escalate to many times the normal rate. Though only a small percentage of the carcasses were visibly oil-fouled, the high death rate was almost certainly related to the environmental degradation brought on by the flood of oil blooming in the Gulf.
On May 26, BP embarked on what they called a “top kill,” the company’s last real hope for ending the gusher sooner rather than later. Even the name of the maneuver had a kind of gunslinging swagger to it, as if John Wayne might come riding in from off screen to solve everything with one well-aimed bullet to the head.
A top kill, though, isn’t so much about precision as it is overwhelming force. BP was ready to throw the kitchen sink at the gushing oil, hoping to drown it in a high-pressure barrage of drilling mud and cement—50,000 barrels’ worth—pumped from barges on the surface. The technique had never been attempted a mile deep in the ocean, and after more than two days of trying, BP officials had to acknowledge that it had all been an expensive waste of mud. The force of the oil flowing out of the well simply blew away everything in its path.
On Saturday, May 29, BP announced the failure. When the stock markets opened the following week, BP shares plunged 17 percent, wiping out $23 billion of stock equity in a matter of hours. The day of the blowout, BP stock had been trading at $60 a share. By the end of June, the share price would fall to just above $26 a share, cutting the company’s value by more than 50 percent in just two months. Transocean’s stock price plunged by a nearly identical percentage, exactly 50 percent, from $92 a share at close of business on April 20 to $46 a share on June 30.
If that wasn’t a big enough dose of bad news for the two companies, U.S. attorney general Eric Holder announced within days of the top-kill failure that the Justice Department would conduct criminal and civil investigations into the rig explosion and the oil spill. The president wanted “to know whose ass to kick” over the disaster.
Two weeks later, the CEOs of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and the U.S. arm of Royal Dutch Shell took turns speaking before Congress. They all agreed on one thing: Their companies would never have designed a deepwater well the way BP had designed Macondo. This damning testimony was followed days later by a statement from Anadarko Petroleum, the minority partner in Macondo, that BP had “operated unsafely and failed to monitor and react to several critical warning signs during the drilling of the Macondo well. BP’s behavior and actions likely represent gross negligence or willful misconduct.”
BP’s Hayward and chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg met with White House officials and announced that the company, which had suspended dividend payments to shareholders, would set up a $20 billion fund for damage claims from the spill, and pay $100 million to workers put out of work by a federal moratorium on deep-sea drilling.
When the crew of the Damon B. Bankston, the Tidewater workboat responsible for saving so many lives on April 20, had returned to the Gulf in May for their next hitch, it was clear the world had changed. Every oil service port on the Gulf Coast was now full of boats idled by the moratorium. Some of the workboats and rigs in the Gulf would make occasional errand runs for the production platforms still in operation, but for the most part, crew members’ time was filled with maintenance chores, busywork. It was an unsettling coda to the heroics of April, though their spirits would be lifted six months later, when, their captain, Alwin Landry, representing all of them, was awarded the maritime industry’s top honor: Shipmaster of the Year.
The 98-ton cap was reinstalled in early June, but the 500,000 gallons of oil siphoned away each day seemed relatively insignificant compared to the amount still visibly spewing into the Gulf on the live feed.
By July, tar balls from Macondo began to wash up on the Texas coast, the only Gulf Coast state to have—until then—avoided the spill.
As the oil spread, BP quietly prepared another experimental piece of equipment they called a “capping stack,” which engineers hoped might shut off the flow completely. The capping stack was a three-ram BOP, custom-designed to attach to the inoperative BOP left behind when the Horizon sank. The stack had been in the works since shortly after the blowout, but, following the earlier failures, BP managers didn’t want to raise too many hopes for what was essentially an experiment. After weeks of construction, the capping stack underwent more weeks of testing on the surface with equipment that mimicked what was still attached to the Macondo wellhead.
Some experts feared that shutting off the well at the top could force out the well walls farther down the shaft, allowing oil to escape into the formation and flow into the Gulf from dispersed fractures in the seafloor, a flow that, once begun, would be virtually impossible to stop.
On July 12, with a grave awareness that this new attempt could do more damage than good, the capping stack was installed on Macondo in a maneuver even more complex and painstakingly executed than the Horizon’s original latch-up to the well. Over the next three days, all openings and valves within the device were closed one by one under the watchful gaze of retired U.S. Coast Guard rear admiral Thad Allen, the federal government’s national incident commander. With each closure, the pressure inside the new device was carefully monitored.
BP engineers had projected that if the well were compromised, permitting oil to leak into the surrounding formation, the pressure within would never rise above 6,000 pounds per square inch, even with the new device completely shut. If the operation proved a success and the well were kept intact, with the oil flow captured by the stack, the readings would—in theory—rise to between 8,000 and 9,000 pounds per square inch and hold steady. In other words, they would know if the ruptured well had been truly contained only by the digital readout on a computer monitor.
The pressure followed neither predicted course. It rose to 6,700 pounds per square inch before stalling. Anxious watch was kept on pressure readings over the next few days. Seismic surveys of the area around Macondo were analyzed for evidence of seafloor breaches. Ultimately, officials concluded that the well had not been breached, and the lower-than-expected pressure might be explained by the extensive depletion of the oil reserve in the Macondo deposit. The new capping stack had finally stopped the flow after eighty-four days, in which an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil—more than 205 million gallons—had issued from the blown-out well. Once the well was finally capped, on July 15, officials determined that the actual rate of oil leakage, per day, had been 5,000 times the initial estimate of 42,000 gallons a day.
Three weeks later, on August 4, government scientists reported surprisingly positive news: 75 percent of the spilled oil had been captured, evaporated, burned, skimmed, or dispersed by chemicals and surp
risingly efficient natural processing by petroleum-eating bacteria.
But other, independent scientists disputed both the methodology and conclusions of the government study. One dissenter called the claims “ludicrous.” On August 16, University of Georgia scientists reported that they had analyzed the federal estimates and concluded that 80 percent of the oil said to be gone from the Gulf was in fact still there. The report cautioned that it was “a misinterpretation of data to claim that oil that is dissolved is actually gone.”
In any case, even if the government estimate was taken at face value, it meant that 50 to 60 million gallons of crude oil remained in the Gulf, with undetermined consequences.
The following day the controversy over the government report took a backseat to news that BP had completed a “static kill” by pumping cement through the capping stack to seal the well, though failure-weary officials stressed that Macondo could not be declared dead until the relief wells reached its base and sealed it from the bottom.
The relief well broke through on September 16. The next day, cement was pumped into the bottom of Macondo for seven hours straight. Two days later, the well from hell was finally issued a death certificate.
Meanwhile, evidence had accumulated that the rosy government report on the quick disappearance of most of the oil had seriously understated the continuing threat to the Gulf ecosystem. Controversy erupted over BP’s admitted use of 1.8 million gallons of an oil dispersant called Corexit—which critics called both ineffective and toxic to the environment in its own right, more so than other dispersants, but which BP officials said had been chosen for the job because it was available in the huge quantities required.
University of South Florida researchers concluded that much of the oil that had been considered “dispersed” had actually fallen to the seafloor in “a blizzard” of oil particles. The University of Georgia research team announced it had discovered a thick layer of oily sediment covering several hundred square miles of Gulf sea bottom. In some places, the oil was more than 2 inches thick. In October, other researchers reported a plume of oil more than 20 miles long at a depth of about 3,500 feet. Perhaps as disturbing as the existence of the plume was the fact that over several months of observation, it had barely degraded at all.