Читать книгу American Energy - Walter A. Rosenbaum - Страница 9

The disaster began when dangerously high methane gas pressure, building up in the underwater borehole, breached the elaborate safety equipment designed to prevent a gas blowout. First, an enormous volume of mud and oil rushed up the pipeline, erupted through the drilling platform, and cascaded down on the rig. A suffocating mist of methane gas rapidly followed, spread across the rig, and ignited. “Crew members were cut down by shrapnel, hurled across rooms and buried under smoking wreckage,” reported the New York Times. “Some were swallowed by fireballs that raced through the oil rig’s shattered interior. Dazed and battered survivors, half-naked and dripping in highly combustible gas, crawled inch by inch in pitch darkness, willing themselves to the lifeboat deck.”² The crew had been meticulously prepared for the most plausible disasters. This one was wholly unimagined. “I had no idea it could do what it did,” later remarked one veteran crew member.

In the furious fire consuming the drilling platform, eleven crew members died. The disaster left 126 survivors, including many badly injured crew members and four executives from BP and Transcon who were visiting the rig to celebrate its seven-year safety record. In little more than a day, the Deepwater platform incinerated, rolled over, and sank, beginning a frantic, eighty-nine-day struggle to cap the well and suppress the steady stream of crude oil leaking into the Gulf.