A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea by Joel Achenbach

Author:Joel Achenbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Chapter 9

Repercussions

Now, the misery. The calamity had included, in spirit-sapping succession, a fatal blowout, a sunk rig, multiple leaks, a BOP intervention failure, a cofferdam failure, an unfolding environmental catastrophe, and now, after enormous hype, the top kill failure.

This was, for many people involved in the response, the worst moment of the entire disaster save the initial tragedy that killed eleven men. What made the top kill particularly shattering was that no one had made an obvious mistake. The engineers hadn’t overlooked anything. They had storyboarded the operation to within an inch of its life. The government scientists had vetted the procedure. A few outsiders tried to build a case against Steve Chu, saying that he’d put limits on BP’s ability to pump mud into the well, but that criticism never gained traction. The top kill had not been a wimpy procedure. The BP engineers had thrown 30,000 barrels of mud—more than a million gallons—at the well. There was nothing wrong with the mud, nothing wrong with the hoses or manifolds or pumps. The machinery on the boats had performed far beyond design capacity. No one blamed the golf balls or the Happy Meal stuff. Doug Suttles had been almost correct when he had told the news media during the top kill procedure that everything was going according to plan. The only thing that did not go according to plan was that it didn’t work. This was one of those operation-a-success-but-patient-died deals.

There was no partial victory here. The top kill hadn’t so much as bruised Macondo. The well was spewing oil as fast as ever, and BP began to suspect that the flow had gotten worse; that the mudding of the well had scoured it out, opened it up, like nasal mist up a nostril. This would be a debatable point. What’s certain is that Macondo’s hydrocarbons continued to shoot out the well as if they’d been fantasizing about being in open water for ten million years.

For everyone involved, this was rock bottom. No, worse: They were below the seafloor, buried in mud, like mollusks. The only virtue of the top kill was diagnostic, in the sense that a disease accurately diagnosed is an incremental step toward a cure. Now all those involved knew precisely how screwed they were. There was no magic pill. They would have to do the hard surgery of the relief well—unlikely to reach the target until late July or early August. This was but the end of May.

If you were someone like Marcia McNutt, working in that windowless room, you thought, I’m never going home. I am a prisoner of this well. Somewhere back in northern Virginia, she kept stabled a horse, Lulu, doomed to be riderless. She wanted to see her twin daughters ride in the California rodeo in six weeks, but she might never be allowed to see the sun again.

The hysterical hordes renewed their demands for the government to “take over” the oil spill, though it was never entirely clear what this

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