Fire on the Horizon: The Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster

The live-streaming video of a hole in the ocean floor gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, workers in hazmat suits cleaning tar-fouled beaches, oil-soaked pelicans dying in polluted marshes, shuttered businesses and a docked fishing fleet, the BP chairman wishing aloud he could just get back to his life – the images of last year’s BP oil disaster are stark and hard to forget.

But even after congressional hearings and state and federal investigations, we forget what exactly caused the Deepwater Horizon oil rig to blow. John Konrad, a veteran oil rig captain, and Tom Shroder, former Washington Post editor, endeavor to explain what happened, going step by step through what was done and — most significantly — what was not done in the weeks, days and hours that led up to the explosion. Fire on the Horizon makes a compelling case that BP and Transocean, owner of the rig, made a series of crucial decisions in an effort to save time and cut costs that directly led to the catastrophe.

Tests that men on the rig wanted to perform were overruled on “the beach” – oil rig terminology for the BP managers directing operations from Houston. BP engineers who developed what they believed was a safe way to seal the well before it blew were told to go back and find a cheaper, faster way.

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But Fire on the Horizon is not just a finger-pointing analysis of a disaster that shouldn’t have happened. It is also the story of the men and a few women who were on the rig that day. Eleven men died and several others suffered lasting injuries in the explosion. Many of those who escaped are scarred in other ways. The authors plumb their memories to weave in the stories of such workers as Doug Brown, chief mechanic, who only realized he was wounded after helping to save injured colleagues. Part of the crew that shepherded the Deepwater Horizon from South Korea, where it was built, into the Gulf almost 10 years earlier, Brown had risen through the ranks early in his career. By the end of 2010, he was signing up for disability payments, battling post traumatic stress syndrome, traumatic brain injury and knee and back problems that doctors couldn’t seem to fix. And he had lost the ability to do the work he loved.



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/03/13/v-print/2109991/what-happened-on-deepwater-horizon.html#ixzz1IEJLZN78