Men's Journal

It was going to be the crown jewel in BP’s deep-sea empire. But on April 20, the well blew out, killing 11 — before triggering the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Twenty-four hours in the life — and death — of the Deepwater Horizon.

by Paul Schneider

On the day his ship exploded, Captain Curt Kuchta arrived to begin his three-week hitch aboard the Deepwater Horizon, $350 million of the best seafaring and oil-drilling technology the global petroleum industry can buy. He’d flown from his home outside Baltimore to Houma, Louisiana, where he jumped a helicopter for the 48-mile flight out over the Gulf of Mexico to Mississippi Canyon Block 252 — the location of the deep-sea oil well where the huge vessel had been drilling for the previous two and a half months. At these depths, the drilling rig didn’t anchor into the seafloor, but floated on two massive pontoons. After several stressful weeks in which the crew struggled to secure the intractable well, which began on the ocean floor 5,000 feet below and penetrated, incredibly, another two and a half miles into the Earth’s crust, it appeared that they were days, or even hours, from capping it. Once they had done so, a less sophisticated rig — a pumping station, really — would arrive to extract the crude while the Deepwater Horizon moved to a new location to bore a new well. That’s when Kuchta would assume full command of the ship from the on-site drilling managers and once again become the literal captain of this great machine.

The morning of April 20, 2010, began overcast but bright, calm, the surface of the Gulf glassy. Viewed from a chopper 1,000 feet up and a mile out, the ship appeared almost toy-like, the way all ships look small against the immensity of the sea and sky. Platforms and rigs of all sizes could be seen out the chopper’s windows, sprinkled like poker chips across the blue waters of Louisiana and her neighbors. Helicopters are the primary way crews commute to and from the rigs, and the choppers come and go all day long, adding their thwop thwop thwop to the constant thrum of the ship’s giant engines. Although automation has made life on offshore rigs safer, working out there is still a hard, dangerous duty. Those who work in oil and gas extraction are eight times more likely to die on the job than average Americans. Many of the men actually dread the helicopter rides most of all.

For most of the men, though, the risk was worth it. The Deepwater Horizon was a proud, high-tech beast with a proud, courageous crew: In 2009, the ship had dug the deepest oil and gas well in the world at another site, the Tiber well, almost seven and a half miles (39,180 feet) beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Longer and wider than a football field at 396 by 256 feet, the main platform had a 24-story-tall derrick at its center, with cranes, mud pumps, and stacks of pipes in virtually every direction. The vessel had a life of its own: It throbbed and clanged and hissed around the clock, and in some respects it was like a giant relay station, too, tapping into an almost incomprehensible amount of ancient energy 18,360 feet below while taking constant navigational cues from satellites miles above the Earth’s surface.

When Kuchta arrived that Tuesday, close to half of the 126-member crew was on duty, while the other half slept or relaxed before their shift began at 6. The rig never slept; everyone aboard worked 12-hour shifts for the length of their 21-day rotation.

Working offshore makes for a strange, on-again/off-again way of life, more military than civilian. The pay is good, and few quit; the roughly $50,000 salary for entry-level roustabouts and roughnecks goes a long way in the hot, flat Gulf Coast towns where most of them live. Working on an oil rig is also one of the few remaining careers where a guy can start at the bottom, chipping paint below the waterline, and reasonably expect to make his way up the ladder.

But the greatest appeal for most of the guys was the camaraderie. A core group had been with the Deepwater Horizon since its launch in South Korea in 2001. They hunted and fished together and had fraternity-like rituals, such as shaving a guy’s head the first time he crossed the Equator. Often, the men told their families, they thought of fellow crewmen as brothers more than co-workers. Plus, two to three weeks off at home wasn’t so bad, either; for every Kuchta on his first day back, there was always someone going home or transferring to another site the next day, as Jason Anderson was. As a senior tool-pusher, Anderson was responsible for the drilling operations during his shift. A 15-year veteran and father of two kids back home in Midfield, Texas, Anderson had been promoted internally eight times and was just two steps away from becoming a rig manager with an office job on the mainland so he could see his family each night.

That day, word had gone around that everyone should be at the top of their game because executives from the Deepwater Horizon’s owner, Transocean, and the owner of the well and Transocean’s client, BP, were coming to check on the well’s progress. The visitors weren’t CEOs, but VPs with real clout: Don Winslow and Buddy Trahan from Transocean and Pat O’Bryan and David Sims from BP. Whether their presence confused the decision making during that night’s emergency (the BP execs held ultimate authority over the well) remains at the center of investigations by Congress, the Coast Guard, and the Minerals Management Service. But, according to Miles “Randy” Ezell, who spent most of the afternoon showing them around, the four execs were there mostly to pat the crew on the back for a job nearly done and to celebrate a superlative safety record — no serious accident in seven years.

That said, no one was going to be sad to say goodbye to Mississippi Canyon Block 252. There is nothing simple about drilling a hole 2.5 miles deep, let alone one located 5,067 feet underwater — near the very limit of what’s technically possible — and this well had been more trouble than most. Cracks and fissures in the rock and shale formation periodically caused pressure fluctuations and inexplicable losses of the heavy drilling “mud” — a synthetic fluid in this instance — that oilmen pump down into a well around the drill bit to keep the oil and gas down and the well walls from collapsing in on the drill bit. Four times in the space of 20 days, one crew member recalled, they’d had to pump in heavy-duty sealant compound to try to seal cracks. Another time the drill had gotten stuck altogether. As a result, the crew was a total of three weeks behind schedule and over budget by roughly $21 million. Guys up and down the chain of command had started telling their wives or parents that they’d been asked to cut corners or change procedures that made them anxious.

“Dad, I know what they’re trying to do is unsafe, and I know it’s not right,” Jason Anderson’s father, Billy, remembers his son telling him. On his last trip home, his father says, Anderson gave his wife, Shelley, “a will and a list of things that he wanted handled if something happened to him.”

Newer guys especially were also getting spooked. Twenty-four-year-old Adam Weise, a floor hand, called his girlfriend back in Texas before and after every shift. He called the site “the well from hell.”

ABOUT 5:30 PM
By sheer coincidence Randy Ezell and Jimmy Harrell showed up on the drilling floor with the corporate field-trippers right as Wyman Wheeler and his team were debating why they were getting uneven pressure readings and a flow of drilling mud out of the well. Wheeler, a 39-year-old Mississippian scheduled to go home the next day, was one of the senior officials in charge of the well during the day shift and reported to Ezell and Harrell.

If Kuchta took charge when the Deepwater Horizon traveled, Harrell, the top oilman on the rig (official title: offshore installation manager), was in command of the vessel while it was drilling during his shift. In late middle age, and with more than 31 years of experience, he wore the well-trimmed handlebars that are popular among oilmen of his generation. He was no paper-pusher. Like Ezell he’d started out as a brawny young roustabout and worked his way up.

“One of the last areas that we went to was the rig floor, where they were already conducting the negative test. The first negative test,” Ezell said later. “And the tour group left and left Jimmy Harrell and myself there because they were having a little bit of a problem.”

Ezell’s “bit of a problem” has since been described by BP as “a very large abnormality” in the pressure readings — most likely caused by gas building up in the well. Highly pressurized methane is almost always present in an oil formation, and if there were leaks or other defects in the walls of the well, this gas could seep in and build up to a potentially dangerous level. In extreme cases, if the pressure from the formation outside (and beneath) the pipe exceeds the pressure of the drilling mud or water inside the pipe, it can lead to a full-on blowout of the well.

The decisions Harrell made next, and the subsequent ones made by the senior BP man onboard, Don Vidrine, would matter more than just about anything that had ever happened in the lives of the crew.

If there is the possibility of a gas bubble, or “kick,” in the well, often the procedure is to recirculate all the mud in the pipe from bottom to top to clear out the gas, a process that takes hours. Instead Harrell, not sensing a crisis, chose a quick fix. He told them to bump up the pressure going to the blowout preventer, or BOP, a five-story stack of valves that sits on top of the wellhead on the seafloor and that is supposed to be able to stop a runaway well in an emergency. In a “well control situation,” as the oilmen refer to it, when pressurized oil and gas rush to the surface through the well, any one of the different valves in the BOP is supposed to be able to shut off the flow, the way the valve under a sink might be employed if the main faucet is broken. Harrell’s solution to the problems Wheeler and his crew were having didn’t really address why there might be an abnormally high amount of pressure in the well; it just cranked the faucet tighter, forcing the pressure back down the pipe, from 1,500 psi, which is normal, to 1,900 psi, which was high, but not dangerously so.

Harrell’s solution worked — for half an hour, anyway, which was long enough for him to consider the test a success and for him to rejoin the visiting executives.

Not everyone was sure that the problems with the pressure test had been solved, however — especially not Wheeler.

“Wyman was convinced that something wasn’t right,” Christopher Pleasant, a subsea supervisor, recalled later. Pleasant had just arrived on the rig floor for the beginning of the night shift. “Wyman, he was still, like, shaking his head, he couldn’t believe it.” In part because of Wheeler’s unease, Vidrine and another BP rep agreed to repeat the pressure test. But as Wheeler had reached the end of his shift, this new test fell to Jason Anderson, one shift away from his 7 am helicopter transfer to another rig. Ezell asked if Anderson needed any help.

“Why don’t you go eat,” Anderson told Ezell. It was now past 6 and Ezell was due in yet another meeting with the visiting execs at 7.

“I can go eat and come back,” Ezell said.

“Man, you don’t need to do that,” Anderson said. “If I have any problem at all with this test, I’ll give you a call.”

8 PM
Around 8 o’clock, BP honcho Vidrine deemed the second pressure test a success, which meant the cement team could start making their plans for installing the final caps, essentially big plugs intended to close off the well until BP sent a production rig out to begin harvesting the oil. Anderson was instructed to start displacing the heavy mud in the pipes between the rig and the seafloor with lighter seawater, in preparation for the eventual disengaging of the Deepwater Horizon from the well. It’s a step that presumes the well is entirely stable and under control.

There were other tests that BP and Transocean could have performed on the cement walls of the well that might have indicated the flaws that, in hindsight, must have existed. Halliburton, the Houston-based oil field services firm subcontracted to do the cementing of the well, had even warned BP two days before that the well walls might be weak or unreliable. (Weeks earlier, on April 1, a Halliburton employee observed that the way the well was being cemented was “against our best practices.”) There is also cause to wonder why Harrell, Transocean, and BP chose to trust the blowout preventer despite internal documents that suggest they knew about potential problems with it.

Some members of the Deepwater Horizon crew were aware of these concerns — that test of the blowout preventer, for example, had been delayed and then conducted with less pressure than usual — but few, if any, could see the bigger picture of all the unusual risks BP had assumed to hasten the well’s completion. Nor were many aware of the “abnormalities” Anderson had been troubleshooting that night on the rig floor. All over the vessel they were busy cleaning equipment, changing a pop-off valve on the number two mud pump, serving dinner, writing up work orders, or getting some much-needed rest in the living quarters below the deck.

9:30 PM
The first hints of real trouble came differently to different people. One sub-sea supervisor was in his office trying to save files on his computer when the electricity went out. A technician was in the engine control room when the engines, now sucking in natural gas (escaping from the well), began to rev up. The execs from BP were on the bridge with Captain Kuchta goofing around with the dynamic positioning system simulator — “they were basically playing a video game,” he said — when Kuchta looked out the starboard window and noticed drilling mud dripping off pipes and raining into the water around the vessel.

And yet, even minutes before it blew, the top engineers thought they had a perfectly manageable situation. Around the same time, Ezell called the rig floor one last time to check on Anderson and, Ezell says, Anderson told him, “Go to bed, I got this.” Ten minutes or so after that, David Young, the chief mate of the Deepwater Horizon, stopped to see Anderson and asked when he might be needed to help ferry the cement for the upcoming operation to cap the well. Anderson was seeing unwanted fluctuations in the pressure gauges and told Young it might be an hour or two. But if Anderson and his co-workers were alarmed, Young recalled, they didn’t let on.

“I don’t know what they were feeling,” Young said later. “It was quiet. There was no panic or anything like that.… They were ‘seeing a differential pressure,’ was what they said.”

Check this out, a co-worker told Chris Pleasant, drawing his attention to the closed-circuit TV he was watching. Pleasant looked at the monitor and noticed water pouring down over the decks. What the screens didn’t show was that along with the displaced seawater, the angry well was also spewing a cloud of gas and, soon after that, drilling mud, a really bad sign.

“Then right away, he’s flipping through the channels, he says, ‘I see some mud now,’ ” Pleasant testified to a joint investigation panel of the U.S. Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service on May 27.

“I say, ‘You see some mud?’ ” When the drillers on the rig floor didn’t answer his phone calls, Pleasant took off running.

At right about that time, Ezell got a call in his bedroom. Having followed Anderson’s advice, he’d gotten ready for bed. “I called my wife and talked to her for a few minutes, and went along 15, 20 minutes, and I had laid there and turned my overhead light off in the bunk, and I was still watching a little TV, and my room phone rang.” He hit the light on his bedside alarm. It read 9:50. Anderson’s assistant driller shouted into the phone that mud was shooting out of the top of the derrick. In the background it sounded like a jet taking off. Or a hurricane.

“I was just horrified,” Ezell recalled. “Do y’all have it shut in?” he asked, meaning safely closed off at the seafloor.

“Jason is shuttin’ it in now,” came the reply. And then, “Randy, we need your help.”

Ezell grabbed his coveralls, pulled on a pair of socks, and headed out into the hall. The next instant he was on the floor, buried beneath the shattered remains of the corridor walls and ceiling.

“It blew me probably 20 feet against a bulkhead, against a wall in that office, and I remember then that the lights went out, the power went out. I could hear everything deathly calm,” Ezell testified. “I had a lot of debris on top of me. I tried two different times to get up, but whatever it was, it was a substantial weight. The third time something like adrenaline kicked in and I told myself, Either you get up, or you’re going to lay here and die.”

On that third try, whatever it was that was pinning Ezell’s leg gave way, and he stood up only to find himself gagging in the thick smoke in the top half of the room.

“So I dropped back down and got on my hands and knees. For a few moments I was totally disoriented,” he said later. “I had to crawl pretty slowly because that end of the living quarters was pretty well demolished. Debris everywhere.

“But I made it to the doorway, and what I thought was air was actually methane, and I could actually feel, like, droplets; it was moist on the side of my face. I continued to crawl down the hallway slowly, and I put my hand on a body. And it was Wyman Wheeler. I didn’t know that at the time, because there was no light. I couldn’t see.”

Wheeler, the tool-pusher who had finished his shift at 6 o’clock with a distinctly bad feeling about the well, was not dead. His shoulder was fractured, and his right leg was broken in five places. But he was alive and conscious.

Ezell sat down beside him in the pitch black of the ruined hallway, wondering how he was going to get his hurt friend and co-worker out. Seconds that felt like forever passed, until at last they saw a beam of a light. It bounced crazily about as someone made his way over the broken walls, fallen tiles, and furniture blown out of stateroom doors.

All over the living quarters of the Deepwater Horizon, scenes played out that were similar in flavor, unique in detail. In the engine control room, chief mechanic Douglas Brown, too, found himself under a pile of wreckage.

“The first explosion blew me into the control panel and into a hole that was created in the floor. A short time later, a second explosion threw me to the floor again,” he later testified. “I could hear people screaming and calling out for help, and I was terrified.” He and Mike Williams, the chief electronics technician who later appeared on 60 Minutes and who was bleeding
badly from a gash to his head, crawled out and made their way to the main deck and from there to the lifeboat station.

Not everyone was so lucky.

Anderson and assistant drillers Stephen Ray Curtis, 40, and Donald Clark, 48, along with 48-year-old driller Dewey Revette, almost certainly died in the first explosion. The blast also killed six crew men around the mud pit: Gordon Jones, Roy Wyatt Kemp, Karl Kleppinger Jr., Keith Blair Manuel, Shane Roshto, and Adam Weise.

The operator of the rig’s starboard crane, 37-year-old Aaron Dale Burkeen, had tried to retreat along a catwalk when the blast knocked him off the walk altogether. He fell more than 50 feet to his death, witnesses say.

Rushing to the main deck, Pleasant passed David Young, who tried to get him to help rescue a wounded man, but Pleasant was one of the few people on board with authority to disconnect the Deepwater Horizon from the well and cut off the flow of flammable gas and oil — if, that is, the emergency disconnect system, or EDS, worked.

“I can send you some help, but I got to go,” he yelled and sprinted now for the bridge.

“I was coming through the door in the bridge. I said, ‘I’m EDS-ing.’ And captain told me, he said, ‘Calm down, we’re not EDS-ing.’ ”

As the ship’s captain, Kuchta could take charge back from the drilling managers whenever there was a general emergency. But he seems to have been one of the last people onboard to recognize the severity of the situation that night. His whole ship was blowing up, and yet when a 23-year-old navigator named Andrea Fleytas took it upon herself around the same time to radio for help from the Coast Guard and surrounding vessels, he reprimanded her.

“Dude, we were, like, 100 yards from that thing when it blew up,” says Westley Bourg, 23, one of four fishermen who happened to be fishing beneath the rig when the well erupted. “We could hear this lady on the radio saying, ‘Mayday, mayday. Uncontrollable fire, mayday.’ And we were on our radio saying, ‘Mayday, mayday’ too.”

Pleasant paid no attention to Kuchta.

“I go to the panel,” he later testified. “Don [Vidrine] the company man is standing by the panel. He said, ‘They got the well shut in?’ ”

As the on-duty BP company man, Vidrine presumably could have already activated the EDS, and why he or anyone else on the bridge didn’t do so right away, or whether it would have made a difference, remains a mystery. At any rate, when Pleasant announced he was going to disconnect, Vidrine agreed it was time.
All of the right lights on the panel lit up when he did, and the two men waited anxiously to see if the EDS would engage. In the background he heard Kuchta asking Don Winslow, one of the visiting Transocean executives, if it was okay to disconnect from the well. “And Winslow said, ‘Yeah, you hadn’t already?’ ”

“And the captain came back over to me, not knowing that I already had hit the button, and said, ‘We can EDS.’ ”

“I said, ‘I already did.’ ”

AROUND 10 PM
For a moment or two, they stood there, hoping, but the “shear ram” in the BOP did not close. The gas and oil feeding the massive conflagration kept coming. At last, Kuchta seemed to get how screwed they were, and, Pleasant recalls, “Eventually the captain said, ‘Abandon ship.’ ”

By that time the vast majority of the crew of the Deepwater Horizon had already concluded that they were getting off of the ship or they were going to die. A few reported to their firefighting stations only to find no one else there. Even if they had electricity for their water pumps, which they did not, it was obvious there was no fighting this fire, and so they headed straight for the lifeboats.

“When we got to the lifeboats, it was complete chaos and mayhem,” one survivor testified. “People were screaming and crying that they did not want to die and that we had to get off the rig.”

Some jumped 75 feet into the oily and occasionally flaming water. Some held others back from jumping. Some piled into the lifeboats and yelled at the crew to lower them quickly.

“I got into lifeboat number two, strapped myself in, and waited for what seemed like hours,” says Stephen Stone. A young roustabout who was asleep at the time of the explosion, Stone recalls that “some people were getting back out of the lifeboat, and another person was trying to get a head count. I was pretty certain I was going to die, so I just sat there and waited for something to happen, for the derrick to fall down and take the lifeboat down.”

In the wreckage of the living quarters, Ezell was still trying to get the pile of furniture and other debris off of the injured Wheeler when their boss Jimmy Harrell came out of his room.

“He told me he was in the shower when the explosion happened,” Ezell later testified. “And he was grittin’ his eyes real hard, and he said there was something in his eyes, and he was having trouble seeing. I looked down and he didn’t have any shoes either. And I said, ‘Jimmy, I’ve got Wyman down right here.’ ”

“Yeah, okay, I gotta see if I can find me some shoes,” Harrell replied and made his way off, eventually to the bridge. Another crew member, Chad Murray, came by, and Ezell sent him in search of a stretcher. Before Murray returned, they managed to get Wheeler to his feet and forward a few steps, but the pain in his broken leg was too great.

“Set me down, set me down, set me down,” Ezell remembered him crying out. “Y’all go on and save yourself.”

“No, we’re not going to leave you in here,” Ezell responded.

Suddenly there was another voice in the dark hallway.

“God help me; somebody please help me.”

“I looked to where our maintenance office had been, and all I could see was feet: a pair of feet sticking out from underneath a bunch of wreckage and debris,” Ezell told investigators. He and the others in the living quarters didn’t know who it was at first, “but when we got the debris off, we saw it was Buddy Trahan, who was one of the Transocean visiting dignitaries.”

Trahan’s injuries were even worse than Wheeler’s, so when the stretcher appeared, he was taken first to the forward lifeboat station. A few minutes later, a crew member arrived with a second stretcher for Wheeler. Ezell and Murray carried him out, but when they got to the lifeboat station, both lifeboats had already lowered and were motoring away from the blazing rig toward the Damon B. Bankston. A 260-foot ship that by a stroke of good fortune was tethered to the Deepwater Horizon that day (to take on the drilling mud that was expected to be removed from the well once it was capped), the Bankston had a second, smaller boat called a “fast recovery craft” that was used to race around and rescue all of those who’d leapt into the water.
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Less than half an hour had passed since the first explosions, making it about 10:15 when Ezell, Wheeler, Kuchta, and about a half-dozen other people found themselves standing on the business end of the world’s largest blowtorch watching the lifeboats pulling away. The two lifeboats at the other end of the Horizon were out of the question — no way to get around the fireball at the ship’s center — but there were some inflatable life rafts, and Kuchta and another crew member deployed one.

“Chief mate David Young and I got in the life raft, and we were able to catch the head part of the stretcher and assist getting Wyman into the life raft,” Ezell said. “We actually fell trying to get him into the life raft.”

Some, however, did get left behind when the raft suddenly began to lower. “I don’t know if it was an explosion or just a wind shift or something, but the raft filled up real bad with smoke, and it started getting real hot in there, and once it got that bad in there, it was…uh… I don’t know what made the raft drop, but the raft dropped, luckily,” Young later testified.

Halfway down, the raft flipped about 90 degrees, and everything and everyone got scattered around the raft. It was terrifying, Young and Murray recalled.

For Kuchta and the others left on deck, getting left behind was just one more baffling fuckup in a tremendously bad day.

“As the raft was going down, we knew that there — I knew there wasn’t going to be time to hand-crank it back up and repeat the scenario,” Kuchta recalled. “Basically we decided — I decided — to jump.”

By 10:45 no one who was to survive the ordeal remained on the Deepwater Horizon. But the remaining crew were not yet safe. The rope that attached the raft to the burning rig wouldn’t break at its weak link, and no one in the raft had a knife, as it was against regulations to carry one. Ezell and the others inside the enclosed life raft groped madly in the dark and smoke for the knife that was a part of the raft’s supplies, but it had been hopelessly lost given all the tossing and turning that had gone on.

For all his apparent indecisiveness on the bridge, Kuchta knew what to do once he hit the water. He swam from the life raft to the fast recovery craft, got a knife, and swam back and cut the raft free. Then, having collected the rest of the jumpers, the fast recovery craft towed the last of the survivors over to the Bankston.
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By the time the Coast Guard helicopters arrived in the area around 11 o’clock, all 115 survivors were onboard the Bankston. Seventeen were wounded, some of them seriously. Heads had been counted and recounted; 11 were missing. No one knew for sure what everyone who saw the hellfires suspected: The unaccounted for had been killed by the explosion and fire and were not somewhere in the surrounding sea. Therefore, the Coast Guard concentrated on searching for the missing 11 for the first hour they were in the vicinity. It wasn’t until close to midnight that they turned some of their attention to the dangerous work of bringing the wounded up from the deck of the Bankston in baskets and flying them away across the glowing gulf to hospitals.

At midnight that’s how things stood: The rig exploding periodically as the gas and oil continued to spew out of the well and various tanks and pipes burst into flames, sending flares out the sides and occasionally blooming in towering conflagrations. Coast Guard helicopters buzzing overhead, some evacuating the wounded, others still in search of people in the water. The Damon B. Bankston, the fishermen’s boat, and other boats that had gathered during the past hour motoring around the perimeter, on the lookout as well. There were to be no other survivors, however. The dead were dead.

“My boy was cremated,” Billy Anderson, Jason Anderson’s father, says. But he takes some solace knowing his son was doing all he could to improve the odds for the other 115.

As it was the only ship in the area of any size, the Coast Guard ordered the Bankston to stay in the vicinity throughout the night, and most of the senior members of the Deepwater crew gathered on the bridge in various states of stunned disbelief. “That was one of the most painful things that we could have done — stay on location and watch the rig burn,” said Randy Ezell later. “Those guys that were on there were our family. It would be like seeing your children or your brothers and sisters perish in that manner, and that put some mental scarring in a lot of people’s heads that will never go away.”

For more than 36 hours, the listing Deepwater Horizon burned, and then it sank. By then the survivors were back on land, at home, or in hospitals recovering from their injuries. Lawyers, investigators, and reporters were circling, and politicians were posturing. But no one yet had any inkling of the true magnitude of the tragedy. At the bottom of the sea, at the top of the failed blowout preventer, the worst environmental disaster in American history was just beginning.

—-

One Hell of a Fishing Trip

Fishing under oil rigs is a favorite pastime of sportsmen throughout the Gulf of Mexico. At night the huge lights on the rigs attract clouds of baitfish to the surface, and those fish, in turn, lure major predators, such as tuna. Albert Andry, 23, and his friends loved to fish in his 26-foot catamaran. On April 20 the Mandeville, Louisiana, native and his buddies Ryan Chaisson, Dustin King, and Westley Bourg decided they’d try their luck beneath the Deepwater Horizon, only to end up narrowly escaping a cataclysm. Here is what Andry recalls, in his own words:

We got to the Deepwater Horizon around sunset, about 7:30. To catch the really big tuna, you gotta have live bait, so we go right up to the rig, and you throw these little sabiki rigs down there hoping to get some. Ryan was reeling in a blackfin tuna when we noticed all this water rushing down off the rig. Wes knew what it was ’cause he’d worked on rigs before, and he started explaining to me what he thought was going on. But before I could even finish comprehending what he said, gas started blowing out of the rig. And it kind of confirmed Wes’s whole theory about the well, and he just started screaming bloody mary, “Go, go, go! It’s time to leave! Go, go!”

I pinned the throttle. We got about 50 yards or a little more, and we heard a boom, but there was no fire or anything. So I slowed down and we all looked back, and it all looked fine. The lights were on and nothing was going on. I went, “Oh, maybe it’s supposed to do that.” Soon as I said that, the lights went off on the rig, and so I hit the gas again. Then as soon as they came back on, the whole thing exploded.

It was an out-of-this-world explosion. When you feel an explosion like that — you think something’s actually touching you or going to come and hit you. So I was waiting for debris or something to come flying through the boat. I sort of ducked down behind the center console, and I looked, and I see the other three guys are standing there looking at it exploding.

We watched it for about four hours. A supply boat was parked under the rig the whole time, and everyone who jumped off the rig or whatever just went straight onto that boat. We just sort of drifted around making sure that no one drifted off. We were in and out of a half-mile. I wanted to go in there, but they told us not to, and everybody on my boat was scared out of his mind anyway. The water was on fire and all.

The Coast Guard got there not much more than an hour later. They came in helicopters, and then boats made a circle looking for anyone who drifted off. We all knew there was no way there was anyone left on that rig. It was constantly exploding, and flames were shooting out of pipes on the sides and everywhere. We knew they weren’t going to find any of those guys. No way.