The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and its Aftermath

Prologue to The The Deepwater Horizon Spill

20 April 2010 began as a day of celebration for The Deepwater Horizon, a 9-year-old offshore semi-submersible drilling rig engaged in drilling a deep exploratory well 18,360 feet (5,600 m) below sea level, in approximately 5,000 feet (1,500 m) of water in the Gulf of Mexico. Located in the Macondo oil prospect in the Mississippi Canyon, a valley in the continental shelf, it was one of the 3,858 oil and gas platforms that dotted the coastline of the five States of the USA bordering the Gulf as on 20 April, 2010 (Figs. 1 & 2). Built by Hyundai Heavy Industries of South Korea, and owned and operated by the Swiss-based offshore-oil-drilling company Transocean, the rig was leased by oil company BP (ex British Petroleum) from March 2008 to September 2013. Visiting senior BP officials had just congratulated them on seven years of accident free operations and a celebration was planned for later that day.

At around 21:45 CDT that night (02:45 UTC, 21 April 2010), a surge of natural gas blasted its way up to the platform, where it ignited, killing 11 and injuring 17 of the 126 crew members onboard. All survivors were rescued by helicopters and boats.

The burning rig capsized and sank on the morning of April 22, bursting the pipeline and allowing oil to discharge into the Gulf. The volume of oil exiting the READ MORE

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