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A Hole At The Bottom Of The Sea
Joel Achenbach
The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher
Simon and Schuster
April 2011
On Sale: April 5, 2011
359 pages ISBN: 1451625340 EAN: 9781451625349 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
It was a technological crisis in an alien realm: a blown-out
oil well in mile-deep water in the Gulf of Mexico. For the
engineers who had to kill the well, this was like Apollo 13,
a crisis no one saw coming, and one of untold danger and
challenge. A suspense story, a mystery, a
technological thriller: This is Joel Achenbach’s
groundbreaking account of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and
what came after. The tragic explosion on the huge drilling
rig in April 2010 killed eleven men and triggered an
environmental disaster. As a gusher of crude surged into the
Gulf’s waters, BP engineers and government
scientists—awkwardly teamed in Houston—raced to devise ways
to plug the Macondo well. Achenbach, a veteran
reporter for The Washington Post and acclaimed
science writer for National Geographic, moves beyond
the blame game to tell the gripping story of what it was
like, behind the scenes, moment by moment, in the struggle
to kill Macondo. Here are the controversies, the
miscalculations, the frustrations, and ultimately the
technical triumphs of men and women who worked out of sight
and around the clock for months to find a way to plug the
well. The Deepwater Horizon disaster was an
environmental 9/11. The government did not have the means to
solve the problem; only the private sector had the tools,
and it didn’t have the right ones as the country became
haunted by Macondo’s black plume, which was omnipresent on
TV and the Internet. Remotely operated vehicles, the
spaceships of the deep, had to perform the challenging
technical ma-neuvers on the seafloor. Engineers
choreographed this robotic ballet and crammed years of
innovation into a single summer. As he describes the drama
in Houston, Achenbach probes the government investigation
into what went wrong in the deep sea. This was a confounding
mystery, an engineering whodunit. The lessons of this
tragedy can be applied broadly to all complex enterprises
and should make us look more closely at the highly
engineered society that surrounds us. Achenbach has
written a cautionary tale that doubles as a technological
thriller.
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