Deepwater Horizon - The 87 Day Disaster | Disasters Explained

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[00:00:00]April 20th, 2010, 9:49 p.m. A group of college students are fishing in small boats about a mile from an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. They smell something rotten chemical. One of them has the sense to say, "We need to move now."

[00:00:19]They had just gotten far enough away when they turned around. From Wesley Borg, I saw a blue spark and then the whole thing just went up in flames. He saw flames shooting out of the top of the rig. Flames shooting out of the side of the rig. Nothing but flames.

[00:00:34]His friend Dustin King said it was the loudest thing he had heard in his life.

[00:00:38]They felt the shock wave from a mile away. The rig exploded, he said, six or seven times.

[00:00:45]126 people were on board that rig. 11 of them were already dead. This is the story of what happened in the hours and the years prior that made that night inevitable.

[00:00:59]Earlier that same day, BP executives had flown out to the rig for a visit. Part inspection, part celebration. The crew had just marked 7 years without a single lost time accident. There were handshakes, congratulations. That evening, a meeting was called about how to wrap up the well and move the rig out. Despite this, the project was 43 days behind schedule. Every day cost BP around a million dollars. In that meeting, three corners were cut. A key safety test skipped. The heavy mud holding back the well pressure drained out early. Warning signs on the instruments dismissed as a false reading. All to save time. One engineer pushed back on the pressure reading.

[00:01:41]According to the federal investigation, he was overruled. What he had seen was not a false positive. It was the well trying to tell them that something was very wrong. That was at 5:00 p.m. The men on the night shift went about their work. Some ate dinner, some called their families. 23-year-old Christopher Troy had just gotten off a call with someone and gone back to his bunk. He stated, "I thought somebody was outside cleaning outside my room or something, so I just went back to sleep and then I heard an explosion, but I didn't know it was an explosion. I just heard a loud boom."

[00:02:15]At 9:49 p.m., a massive bubble of methane gas that had been silently pushing up through the mileong well boore reached the rig floor. It hit the engines. The engines ingested the gas and began revving out of control.

[00:02:29]Workers heard the sound change before anything else. Then the lights flickered.

[00:02:34]Survivor Jim Ingram later said, "On the second thud, we knew something was wrong. Then the gas found a spark. The first explosion tore through the lower deck. The second, seconds later, was bigger.

[00:02:47]From a surviving crew member giving testimony to investigators, all I heard was a loud bang, like a big old vessel coming through the wall. Chairs were flying from out the office. I just knew my life was over with.

[00:03:01]Workers near the blast didn't have time to think. Survival became pure instinct.

[00:03:06]Some ran for lifeboats. Some helped carry the injured. Some tried to run toward the fire to help and couldn't get within three steps of it.

[00:03:16]Chief electronics technician Mike Williams was one of the last to make it off. He made his way through flames and debris, tried to help others, and ultimately jumped from the rig's railing into dark water 10 stories below. He didn't know if anything was down there.

[00:03:31]He jumped anyway.

[00:03:33]A supply boat called the Damon B.

[00:03:35]Bankston was anchored nearby. Its captain saw a green flash, heard the hissing, felt the shock wave. Debris then started hitting his deck. He moved the boat back and then turned around to go pick people up. His crew pulled survivors out of the water with oil burning on the surface around them. They saved all 115 who made it off.

[00:03:56]The rig burned for 2 days and sank on April 22nd. The well, now uncapped on the ocean floor, began bleeding roughly 60,000 barrels of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico. And the question the whole country started asking was, "How does something like this happen?"

[00:04:14]The presidential commission that investigated had a blunt answer. This was not an accident. It was the predictable result of a company that had spent years treating safety as a cost center rather than a commitment and regulators who had allowed it.

[00:04:30]Just 5 years earlier in 2005, 15 workers died in an explosion at BP's own Texas city refinery. Same cause, warnings ignored, corners cut, pressure to keep production moving. BP paid fines, executives gave speeches, nothing fundamentally changed. And according to rig workers interviewed in the Deep Water Horizon investigation, raising a safety concern that might slow drilling was understood to be a career risk.

[00:05:00]The fail safe, the rig's blowout pretor, the 300 ton last resort, had a dead battery and a hydraulic leak. Both were known before the explosion. Neither were fixed. It failed to seal the well, and after the disaster, investigators found that its shear rams had never been tested at the pressures they faced that night.

[00:05:22]The well was capped 87 days later. 4.9 million barrels of oil had been poured into the Gulf. Coastlines from Louisiana to Florida were oiled. Fisheries were closed. Wildlife died in numbers that are still being tallied to this day. It remains the largest marine oil spill in recorded history.

[00:05:42]BP paid over $65 billion in fines, cleanup, and settlements, the largest corporate penalty in US history. Several executives were indicted. None served prison time. Christopher Choy, the 23-year-old who woke up to a loud boom that night, later said the bad dreams didn't fade the way he had hoped they would.

[00:06:04]The 11 men who didn't make it off the rig were Jason Anderson, Aarendale Burkin, Donald Clark, Steven Curtis, Gordon Jones, Roy Wyatt Kemp, Carl Klepinger Jr., Blair Manuel, Dwey Reette, Shane Rashto, and Adam Weiss.

[00:06:25]Aarendale Burkin had fallen from a crane and was trapped behind the flames. The 23-year-old named Christopher Troy tried to reach him. He was ordered to abandon the rig. He had to leave him behind. In a federal report in a line easy to skip past, it says Burken was last seen alive waving from the crane.