Chapter 1: Night of Horror, Day of Triumph
Mike Williams just finished a day of routine maintenance on
the offshore drilling rig Deepwater Horizon. Short on sleep,
because today was the day he was rotating from the night to
day shifts, Williams was testing and repairing electrical
equipment, then filled in some overdue paperwork. By 9:30
that night, he was in his electronics shop, talking to his
wife on the phone. Williams was the chief electronics
engineer on the rig, which was in the middle of the Gulf of
Mexico drilling a well for the oil giant BP PLC. He’d been
away for about 10 days and had another 10 to go before he’d
be heading home.
Through the phone Williams’ wife heard someone over a
loudspeaker announce that gas levels on the Horizon were
high. “Do you need to go take care of that?” she asked her
husband. He downplayed the importance of the warning. “We’d
gotten them so frequently that I’d become immune to them,”
Mike Williams said afterward. “I didn’t even hear them
anymore, especially with this well. With this well, we were
getting gas back all the time.”
Just a few months before the Horizon had triumphantly
completed the deepest well in history, in a BP discovery
called the Tiber field. The Horizon then moved to this spot,
about 42 miles off the coast of Louisiana, to drill in a
part of the Gulf called Mississippi Canyon. The well was
called Macondo, after the fictional “city of mirrors” in
Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ masterpiece One
Hundred Years of Solitude. The city, in the end, is
destroyed by a hurricane. The Transocean Inc. rig and crew,
hired by BP, had hit oil at Macondo weeks before and had
spent April 20th preparing to plug the well with cement in
order to move on to the next hole. BP would come back later
to tie Macondo up to an oil production platform that would
harvest the crude. BP press officers were preparing a press
release announcing the find.
Williams soon heard a loud hissing noise and became
concerned. He told his wife it was time to hang up and fi nd
out what was going on. He assumed the hiss was some sort of
hydraulic leak, nothing particularly dangerous.
Doug Brown, the chief mechanic working in the engine control
room next door, heard it too. Over in the living quarters,
Stephen Bertone had just finished a shower, and was lying on
his bed, about to begin reading a book, when the hissing
began. It grew louder and louder until it sounded like a
freight train storming through his room. The hiss was soon
followed by a cacophony of alarms. Then a voice over the
P.A. system warned a nearby service ship to back away from
the Horizon because the rig was in a “well control
situation,” a mundane-sounding term that really means
disaster could be moments away.
As Williams pushed back from his desk to find out what was
wrong, the entire rig began to shake. His computer monitor
exploded, and all the lights in his room popped, leaving
him—and everyone else on the rig—in the dark. He headed for
the door as the hiss got louder and louder; he now realized
the sound came from the ship’s engines which were feeding on
the natural gas that filled the air. “It was higher than I
could possibly describe. It was spinning so fast,” Williams
said. Suddenly the spinning engines stopped and a huge
explosion rocked the Deepwater Horizon, blowing the
fire-safe door to Williams’ shop off its hinges and directly
into the electronics technician, knocking him back several
feet against the back wall and to the floor.
The blast threw Brown against his control panels, and then
down through a hole that opened on the floor. “I was
wondering what was happening. I was confused. I was hurting.
I was dazed, and I proceeded to try to get up and the second
explosion happened.” That blast threw him into the hole a
second time, and the ceiling caved in upon him.
After the first explosion, Bertone put on his boots, life
vest and hard hat and headed for the door; he could smell
and taste fuel in the air. He knew it was an emergency and
that he had a muster station to get to, and possibly a fire
to battle. Then there was the second boom. The hallway was
strewn with debris. He headed for the bridge.
Williams was crawling through the darkness toward the door
of the electronics shop, gasping for breath as the CO2
systems, designed to starve any fire of oxygen, also starved
his own lungs. He held a penlight between his teeth, but it
failed to cut through the smoke-filled darkness. He made it
through his exploded doorframe, and headed to the next fire
door. As he reached for that handle, the second blast blew
the second door off its hinges, sending another wall of
steel hurtling into his body. “The doors were beating me to
death,” Williams, a burly, goateed man with ruddy skin,
said. “Two doors in a row hit me right in the forehead. My
arm wouldn’t work and my left leg wouldn’t work, I couldn’t
breathe and I couldn’t see.”
Williams crawled, blind, across the bare grid where floor
panels had once been. He crawled over the bodies of two men
he couldn’t identify, nor help. Brown, who had pulled
himself out of the hole in the floor, was crawling beside
Williams, both searching for a way out and air. They found
the exit, found air to breathe, and turned to head upwind of
the fi re and smoke. Williams paused to wipe blood from his
eyes, and found the walkway before him, the railing, and
entire wall had been blown away in the explosion. The voice
of Andrea Fleytas, the rig’s dynamic positioning officer,
was blaring over the PA system, calling “Mayday, Mayday.”
Brown helped Williams along. “He was dazed, confused. He was
screaming he had to get out of here, and he had a wound on
his forehead and he was bleeding profusely,” said Brown. The
hissing had turned into a roar, and Williams could see that
the doghouse, a storage and break room on the rig floor, and
half the derrick, which rises 242 feet into the sky, were
aflame. “At that moment, I realized there was a blowout,”
Williams said. He eyed an empty lifeboat in the distance
and, in his terror, flirted with the notion of jumping in
and launching it to save himself. Instead, he and Brown
headed for the bridge, the emergency station they had
rehearsed going to in so many drills. “I had
responsibilities,” Williams said.
Brown and Williams reached the bridge, which was in complete
chaos. “They were trying to get systems going. They were
trying to get control back,” Brown said. There were no
engines, no thrusters, no telephones—no power at all. When
Bertone arrived on the bridge he heard someone yelling, “The
engine room, ECR, and pump room are gone. They’re all gone.”
The man was covered in blood and Bertone didn’t recognize him.
“What do you mean, gone?” Bertone demanded.
“They’ve blown up. They’re all gone. They’ve blown up.”
It was then that Bertone recognized the voice of Michael
Williams, who was also screaming at the captain, “We need to
abandon ship now!” Bertone tried to staunch the bleeding
from Williams’ forehead with toilet paper. Captain Carl
Kuchta told them to remain calm as he tried to figure out
what to do about the lost power. The only way to save the
rig would be to get the engines going again so they could
fight the fire.
Bertone volunteered to head back toward the fire and try to
start the backup generator, the only hope of saving the
Horizon. Williams told him he could not go alone. He grabbed
Bertone’s shirt, and they headed through the door toward the
blaze. The emergency generator was across the deck. The men
tried repeatedly to start it up. They failed. When they
returned to the bridge, Captain Kuchta determined the fire
was out of control and ordered the remaining crewmembers to
abandon ship.
Williams, Bertone, and Fleytas left the bridge only to find
that both lifeboats at their end of the rig had already been
launched. The fire blazed between them and the remaining
two. The air was popping and sizzling, pieces of hot metal
rained down on them, and the flames were starting to wrap
around the rig in search of oxygen.
With no lifeboats, the crewmembers found the inflatable
emergency rafts, and put an injured mate on a stretcher
aboard the first. Bertone and several others climbed in with
him and they were lowered into the water. The fire was so
hot now that Williams decided there wasn’t time to launch
another raft. Fleytas, still on deck, was yelling, “We’re
going to die!”
“I honestly didn’t believe that we would survive trying to
deploy a life raft. I decided we can stay here and die or we
can jump,” Williams recalled.
He turned to Fleytas and told her it was time to run and
jump. She said she couldn’t possibly jump the 10 stories
from the blazing rig to the dark waters below. “I said,
‘Watch me then.’ I took off running, and I jumped,” Williams
said. Fleytas followed.
By the following day, 11 crewmembers were dead and dozens
more, including Williams, were injured. The Deepwater
Horizon was ablaze in the middle of the Gulf, and would soon
tip over and sink into the depths, leaving an open wellhead
with oil gushing into the tropical waters.
● ● ●
The BP and Transocean drillers on the Deepwater Horizon were
all working for one of the most powerful men in BP. Andy
Inglis had been the right-hand man of CEO Tony Hayward since
2004. When Hayward got the top job, following the ouster of
the legendary John Browne in 2007, Inglis took over the
exploration and production (E&P) unit, an elite group at BP
that accounted for most of the company’s profits and that
was used to getting its own way.
During the reign of Inglis, E&P’s stature grew even more,
and so did the importance of the Gulf of Mexico. He moved
his unit’s headquarters to Houston, away from the meddling
bureaucrats in London. Even though it was located across the
ocean, it was clear that E&P was the heart and soul of BP.
The company’s most recent annual report was emblazoned with
the title: “Operating at the Energy Frontiers.”
In the three years since Hayward took the top job at BP,
Inglis had been used to reporting a string of successes to
his boss. Now, early in the morning of April 21, he had a
very different job. He rang Hayward, who was in the habit of
staying at the Haymarket Hotel, a cozy London establishment
near BP’s offices, on weekdays. Hayward was eating breakfast
when Inglis told him there was a blowout in the Gulf and
people were missing. Hayward says his first reaction was
“unprintable.” What he thought he had worked hard to prevent
had happened—and his best business unit was responsible.
Only nine months earlier Inglis was at the top of his game.
On a steamy July day in 2009, he held court in the cabin of
a wood-paneled corporate jet as it took off into the early
morning skies from Sugarland Regional Airport, in the
Houston suburbs. Inglis was accustomed to having private
jets at his disposal. He spent much of his work life
visiting BP’s far flung empire, and oil chiefs rarely fl y
commercial. Today, he was taking a guest to BP’s showcase
development in the Gulf of Mexico, a massive oil production
platform called Thunder Horse.
On the short hop to Houma, Louisiana, BP’s base for ferrying
people and supplies to its growing number of installations
in the Gulf of Mexico, Inglis—pronounced “Ingalls”—unfolded
a table, flipped through a bound set of charts and graphics,
and gave a simple presentation, a kind of BP 101. The one
thing that is crucial for a company like BP is finding new
oil and gas to replace what you remove. If you fail in that
task, you are eventually out of business—you are dead. Many
companies struggle to replace their output; BP does not,
Inglis said. It has been consistently adding more oil to its
reserves than it produces, he said. In 2009, the company
said it had found more oil than it pumped from the ground
for 17 straight years. Inglis gave much of the credit for
this performance to a strategy first laid out by former CEO
John Browne in the early 1990s. As Inglis explained, BP
doesn’t waste its energy on small-potatoes projects.
Instead, it focuses on finding and being the first to
exploit giant fields of a billion barrels or more because
these bring the scale and follow-on opportunities that can
keep a company in business for a long time and earn it big
money.
The strategy means working on the frontier, a word that in
the oil business has more than one meaning. Sometimes the
frontier is an edgy political regime such as in Russia or
Iraq, where BP has taken risks to gain a step on its peers.
Sometimes it’s the boundaries of technology, such as
drilling and producing oil in water a mile deep or more. BP
has taken the lead in deepwater zones, including the Gulf of
Mexico and off Angola. The national oil companies that
control much of the world’s remaining oil reserves need
multinational behemoths such as BP to develop such
challenging resources. They don’t need them to develop or
maintain plain vanilla oil fields, and in those situations
they are tempted to squeeze their foreign partners or throw
them out entirely. That’s why BP, Inglis said, was not
interested in low margin, low risk work. “We don’t do simple
things,” Inglis said. “We are prepared to work on the
frontier and to manage the risks.”
Inglis, a chunky teddy bear of a man with a full head of
wavy hair and bright eyes is, by all accounts, reticent,
especially with strangers. But when he warms to a subject,
he looks you straight in the eye and talks with great
enthusiasm in his north of England accent. That was how he
was behaving on this day, and why not? Since Hayward became
CEO in 2007, making Ingalls the top man in E&P, the pair had
done much to right the faltering company after the messy
exit of their mentor, the legendary Browne. The
multibillion-dollar Thunder Horse platform, for example, had
been plagued by years of delays and had even been left
listing to one side in 2005 by hurricane Dennis, nearly
sinking. Now the giant platform and the two oil fields it
drained, Thunder Horse North and South, were performing
superbly, producing 250,000 barrels per day of some of BP’s
most profitable oil and another 50,000 barrels or so of
natural gas. Some of the eight existing wells feeding the
platform—there would eventually be around 25—were producing
a company-best 55,000 barrels per day for BP and its
archrival ExxonMobil, which was BP’s 25 percent junior
partner in Thunder Horse.
Turning things around at Thunder Horse wasn’t Inglis’s only
recent accomplishment. At the end of June 2009, in Baghdad,
BP had rolled the dice and snatched the crown jewel of Iraq
away from ExxonMobil, the magnificent, if decrepit, Rumaila
oil field. BP won what was called a technical service
contract with a lowball bid that would bring the company
just $2 for each incremental barrel of oil it managed to
squeeze out. BP bet it could do so at very low cost. By
comparison, the company may make $20 or more on a Gulf of
Mexico barrel. BP and its partner, China National Petroleum
Corp., agreed to what might be the most ambitious expansion
of an oil field of all time: taking the Iraqi field from its
present one million barrels per day to almost 3 million
barrels at an estimated cost of $20 billion. That feat would
make Rumaila the world’s most productive field outside of
Saudi Arabia.
So daring was the gambit for what could be one of the
world’s great oil fields that, according to BP’s head of
exploration, Michael Daly, the Iraq team spent the ensuing
weekend agonizing over whether the move was a stroke of
genius or a blunder. They hoped their deal would put them in
pole position for other Iraq ventures that came up, but they
knew that they had only allowed themselves a slim margin,
while exposing BP to huge political and security risks. They
only began to feel more comfortable when other companies
including ExxonMobil later followed suit, offering similarly
low fees on lesser Iraqi fields.
Rumaila wasn’t a new field. It had actually been discovered
by BP in the 1950s. But it had been off limits to
international companies for decades, was badly neglected,
and represented a potentially huge opportunity because of
the tens of billions of barrels of oil that remained
underground there. Inglis argued that the project was
worthwhile because it would give BP access to large
quantities of oil for a very long time. “Long fl at barrels”
was how he described Rumaila’s future contribution to BP’s
portfolio. More important, it would give BP an early
advantage in what could, along with Saudi Arabia and Russia,
be one of the three most important oil- and gas-producing
countries in the world. At the time, word around the company
was that executives figured that if it went well—a big
if—their returns could be in the mid-teens.
● ● ●
After the obligatory safety brief ng at the airstrip, the
big helicopter taking the BP party lifted gently off the
runway and flew over the bayous and out into the Gulf of
Mexico, dodging thunderstorms that looked like gray curtains
coming down to the edge of the waves. A kind of oil field
history unfolded below as rickety platforms close to shore
gave way to more and more sophisticated installations
farther out. Finally, after about an hour and a half,
Thunder Horse, with its giant red pontoons, came into view.
BP executives liked to bring visitors to Thunder Horse to
show off the company’s technological prowess and, frankly,
its guts. One hundred and fifty miles southeast of New
Orleans, this gigantic platform, the size of a sports
stadium, was as good a symbol as any of BP’s leadership in a
region that is the heart of the American oil industry.
Thunder Horse floats in 6,000 feet of water, tethered by
huge chains that can move the platform around so as to
position it for drilling new wells. A two-decades long,
multibillion-dollar campaign had paid off for BP in the Gulf
of Mexico. In June 2008, Thunder Horse began producing oil,
starting with a single well and rapidly building toward its
over 300,000 barrel per day plateau. Other big deepwater
projects with names like Mad Dog and Atlantis have also come
on line in recent years. BP had the most production in the
Gulf of any oil company, the most leases for drilling, and
what looked like the best future. Part of that future lay
beneath the blue waters to the West, where Inglis knew there
was a trove of oil even more promising than Thunder Horse.
But Thunder Horse was the bird in the hand now. A
Cambridge-educated mechanical engineer, Inglis revels in the
intricacies of the equipment and likes to get his hands
dirty. Thunder Horse was a special treat for him since many
of the components had to be custom-designed. This was
because of the presence of corrosive hydrogen sulfide and
fluids from the well that were being produced at
extraordinary pressures—17,400 pounds per square inch—and at
hellish temperatures—275 degrees.
Further, since much of the oil-producing infrastructure lies
on the sea bottom under tremendous pressure that would crush
any person who tried to descend there, everything from the
arrays of valves called Christmas trees that sit on top of
the well heads, to the steel pipes that rise up more than a
mile through the turbulent loop currents to bring the oil
from seafloor to platform, are custom-built. For an engineer
like Inglis it was a dream-come-true, and he expected people
to be suitably impressed. “Isn’t this amazing?” he said over
and over.
While Inglis climbed catwalks and descended deep into the
depths of Thunder Horse’s fl oats, his ears stuffed with
foam plugs to ward off the whine of machinery, the Deepwater
Horizon was about 300 miles off to the west boring the
deepest oil well ever into the floor of the Gulf. The fi nd,
called Tiber, would be announced two months later, and it
was the biggest find yet in the deep water of the Gulf.
While the oil would not be easy to recover, BP executives
were excited about it. They said it was of relatively light
consistency, making it easier to extract and likely to
produce a lot of gasoline, and they expected the field to
have a long life.
That July there was a palpable sense of pride and esprit de
corps around BP and its nerve center in an offi ce park just
off the Katy Freeway, West of Houston. The cooks on the
Thunder Horse platform presented their visitors from England
with rich, baked scones to make them feel at home. Even a
severe thunderstorm, that forced the helicopter returning
from Thunder Horse to circle round and round above the
swamps surrounding Houma, didn’t dampen Inglis’s spirits.
The Gulf of Mexico was proving to be an even greater success
for BP than just about anyone expected. The region was so
important to the future of the company that Inglis settled
in Houston with his wife Bobbye, an American, and their five
children. In the 1990s, while working in Alaska, another BP
stronghold, he had tragically lost his first wife in
childbirth. Though he roamed the globe during the week and
was often in London, he made Houston the headquarters of his
Exploration and Production division, supplanting Sunbury, a
drab London suburb. A crack golfer, who grew up near the
famous Royal Lytham and St Annes course in northern England,
host to the 2012 Open, Inglis was widely touted as Hayward’s
likely successor. And he was sought after for other
prestigious jobs including the CEO slot at BAE Systems, the
giant British defense contractor.
Heady stuff. But on the night of April 20, 2010, things
would go sour for Inglis, for Hayward, and BP.
● ● ●
Within an hour of the explosion, Williams, Bertone, and
Brown, along with 112 of their mates, were aboard a service
ship, the Damon Bankston. Many were being treated in the
Bankston’s hospital ward, and the more seriously injured
were being airlifted by the Coast Guard to hospitals on
shore. Many of the people remained on the supply vessel for
36 hours as the seamen tried to fi nd the 11 crewmembers who
remained missing, and Coast Guard officials took statements
of the survivors.
However, the rescue was far from the end of the disaster.
Oil flowed from the Macondo well into the waters off
Louisiana for 87 days, soiling that state’s shrimping and
fishing grounds, as well as its delicate marshlands. Oil
would wash ashore on the beaches of Mississippi, and some
would reach as far as Texas and Florida. For three months,
BP’s engineers, the same people who could find oil where few
else on earth could and extract it from places no one else
dared, couldn’t manage to plug the hole they drilled in the
Macondo prospect. When something went wrong they were
mystified. As the oil gushed, the anger of the American
public swelled to a howl, one that demanded action. And
action was taken.
Every member of Congress who could remotely claim
jurisdiction launched an investigation. On some days in
summer 2010, there were three separate oil spill hearings in
a single day on Capitol Hill. BP executives were summoned to
Washington over and over to answer the questions and absorb
the anger of Senators and Congressmen. President Barack
Obama went looking for some ass to kick, as he famously said
on June 6, 47 days into the spill. He found it at the door
of BP, where he demanded a lump sum of $20 billion to
compensate those whose lives had been ruined or damaged by
the explosion and subsequent oil spill.
It was less than a year between Inglis’s triumphant tour of
Thunder Horse and the early morning of April 21, when he
picked up the phone to dial Tony Hayward and tell him there
was trouble in the Gulf. The explosion, the fire, and that
phone call marked the beginning of the end for both men.
Hayward would be forced out just over four months later
after his consistently horrendous performance as a public
spokesman. Inglis, who became invisible to the outside world
after the explosion, saw his post eliminated two months
after that.
And it was a devastating blow for BP, the company that made
its name pushing the bounds of the possible, deep under the
waters of the Gulf. For BP, the Macondo blowout was yet
another turning point. While it may not lead to the
company’s demise, it marks the end of its brief period of
industry leadership and the beginning of a spell of
downsizing and eating humble pie. The tragedy of the
Deepwater Horizon, however, was not simply a horrible
accident. It was a disaster that many say was long in the
making, was foreseeable, and almost inevitable.
Only 15 years earlier, BP was a middleweight, mid-sized oil
company, heavily bureaucratic, and known more for its long
history and ties to the British government than for doing
groundbreaking work.
In 1995, John Browne, an ambitious Cambridge University
graduate, with a Stanford MBA who had spent his entire
career with the company, took over as CEO. Through his BP
101 strategy of going after only huge new finds, combined
with aggressive acquisitions, BP became the largest producer
of oil and gas in the United States, with over 1 million
barrels per day. A major reason for this success was its
lead in the relentless march into deeper and deeper water.
The oil found and produced far out in the Gulf became a huge
growth area for the U.S. industry, which was now increasing
production after two decades of decline. All of the
deepwater activity in the Gulf just beyond its doorstep,
enabled Houston to retain its primacy as the world’s premier
oil hub, even becoming a kind of Silicon Valley for the oil
industry.
Browne also launched an initiative to rebrand BP as a green
company, one that was “Beyond Petroleum” and an innovator in
alternative energy. Under the glamorous and dynamic Browne,
BP became the Goldman Sachs of the oil industry. It was
elitist, innovative, and hard-charging.
That aggressive expansion and technological prowess,
however, gave the leadership of BP a swagger that led them
to believe they were better than others, industry officials
say. The company had a long track record of industrial
accidents in the United States and around the world, and had
been under investigation by federal agencies including the
EPA, the FBI, and OSHA for years. Initial investigations
into the causes of the Deepwater Horizon explosion revealed
a string of questionable decisions by BP officials and their
Transocean Inc. subcontractors, as well as what appeared to
be lax maintenance on crucial equipment and shortcuts to
save time and money.
By the time it plugged the hole at the bottom of the Gulf,
BP had become the biggest oil polluter in U.S. history,
dwarfing the notorious Exxon Valdez, the oil tanker whose
drunken captain ran his ship aground in Prince William Sound
off Alaska, dumping its entire payload into the sea.
BP also had the poor luck of falling on its face in the
worst possible place at a bad time. Pilloried in the U.S.
press, BP found itself facing the fury of an inexperienced
president and the scorn of its own industry. In very little
time, the most daring and successful oil explorers on earth,
who had managed to once be the envy of their peers, the
toast of investors, and the darlings of some
environmentalists, had become the most hated company in the
Western world.