Hole at the Bottom of the Sea (eBook)

The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher

Joel Achenbach (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2011 | 1. Auflage
288 Seiten
Simon & Schuster (Verlag)
978-1-4516-2538-7 (ISBN)

Infos

It was a technological crisis in an alien realm: a blown-out oil well in mile-deep water in the Gulf of Mexico. For the engineers who had to kill the well, this was like Apollo 13, a crisis no one saw coming, and one of untold danger and challenge.
A suspense story, a mystery, a technological thriller: This is Joel Achenbach's groundbreaking account of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and what came after. The tragic explosion on the huge drilling rig in April 2010 killed eleven men and triggered an environmental disaster. As a gusher of crude surged into the Gulf's waters, BP engineers and government scientists--awkwardly teamed in Houston--raced to devise ways to plug the Macondo well.
Achenbach, a veteran reporter for The Washington Post and acclaimed science writer for National Geographic, moves beyond the blame game to tell the gripping story of what it was like, behind the scenes, moment by moment, in the struggle to kill Macondo. Here are the controversies, the miscalculations, the frustrations, and ultimately the technical triumphs of men and women who worked out of sight and around the clock for months to find a way to plug the well.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster was an environmental 9/11. The government did not have the means to solve the problem, only the private sector had the tools, and it didn't have the right ones as the country became haunted by Macondo's black plume, which was omnipresent on TV and the Internet. Remotely operated vehicles, the spaceships of the deep, had to perform the challenging technical ma-neuvers on the seafloor. Engineers choreographed this robotic ballet and crammed years of innovation into a single summer. As he describes the drama in Houston, Achenbach probes the government investigation into what went wrong in the deep sea. This was a confounding mystery, an engineering whodunit. The lessons of this tragedy can be applied broadly to all complex enterprises and should make us look more closely at the highly engineered society that surrounds us.
Achenbach has written a cautionary tale that doubles as a technological thriller.

Textauszug

Prologue It came out of nowhere, a feel-bad story for the ages, a kind of environmental 9/11. The BP Macondo well blowout killed eleven people, sank the massive drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, polluted hundreds of miles of beaches along the Gulf Coast, closed fishing in tens of thousands of square miles of federal water, roiled the region's economy, and so rattled the nation's political leadership that even the famously measured Barack Obama lost his cool, snapping at aides, 'Plug the damn hole!' For months on end, the disaster seemed to have no quit in it. Admiral Thad Allen, the no-nonsense US Coast Guard commandant who did as much as anyone to keep the American people from losing their minds, said early in the crisis that the oil spill was 'indeterminate' and 'asymmetrical' and 'anomalous.' No one knew what that meant, exactly, but we got the gist of it, which was that this was a very scary situation that required very scary adjectives. We were haunted by Macondo's black plume, gushing with lunatic fury on Internet news sites and camping out in the corner of the screen on every cable TV network. You could not escape the plume. It penetrated our psyche like a guilty feeling that won't go away. When I told people that I was writing about the oil spill, they reflexively offered condolences, as though covering something so gross and repulsive and tragic must be an unending torment. But it was every bit as fascinating as it was horrible. Journalists are rarely given a chance to cover an event that is unlike anything they've covered before. Mostly we write the same thing again and again, with different proper nouns. There are formulas. There are templates. But this one had no predicate, and it caught everyone off guard. It burst from the murky water of the Gulf of Mexico late one night in the spring of 2010, too late to make the print run for the morning newspapers, and too unfamiliar in its details to trigger the immediate recognition that this would be the dominant event of the summer. The disaster involved deepwater petroleum engineering, something most of us knew little or nothing about. We knew that oil companies drilled wells in deep water--somehow--but few of us had ever heard of a blowout preventer, or centralizers, or nitrogen-foamed cement, or bottoms-up circulation, or a cement bond log, or the danger of hydrocarbons in the annulus. This story had its own interesting lexicon, a language crafted by men who use tools. Offshore oil drilling is rough stuff, hard-edged, coarse, and although there are women in the mix, they're few and far between. There is a heavy maleness even in the office jobs, in the cubicles of the company headquarters. A lot of the people in the industry are guys who got their education on the job, in the oil patch. What they do is complex, difficult, and dangerous. They drill holes in the pressurized Earth. They extract crude. They pump mud and cement, and handle gear weighing tens of thousands of pounds on a rig that weighs millions. Theirs is an environment dedicated to function, not form. And so even the language is masculine, the words often short, blunt, monosyllabic. Spud. Hot stab. Top kill. Junk shot. Dump box. Choke line. Kill line. Ram. Ram block. Ram packer. Side packer. Stack. Valve. Tick. Pod. Borehole. Bottom hole. Dry hole. Drill pipe. Coning. Cylinder gauge. Cavity. Rat hole. Reamer shoe. Wiper trip. Squeeze job. Squib shot. Stabber. Static head. Stopcocking. Torque tube... A challenge in reporting the story was finding a way to translate Engineer into English. Those of us who covered the Marine Board of Investigation hearings--the joint inquiry into the Deepwater Horizon disaster...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 5.4.2011
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
• Themenwelt: Technik
• ISBN-10: 1-4516-2538-3 / 1451625383
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4516-2538-7 / 9781451625387