Loren C. Steffy - Drowning in Oil

DROWNING IN OIL

BP and the Reckless
Pursuit of Profit

LOREN C. STEFFY

Copyright 2011 by Loren Steffy. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-07-174132-3

MHID: 0-07-174132-1

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To Laurie, for everything

Culture is forever. Complacency is a great danger.

U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., at
the release of the report of the BP U.S.
Refineries Independent Safety Review Panel
(the Baker Commission), January 2007

This incident that happened on board our rig should have never happened. There was eleven buddies of mine that perished and their families deserve to know exactly what happened.

Chad Murray, chief electrician,
Deepwater Horizon

TEXAS CITY
(20042009)

DEEPWATER HORIZON
(2010)

CHAPTER 1
PIERCING THE FIRES OF HELL

CHAPTER 2
DAWN IN THE DESERT

CHAPTER 3
RISE OF THE SUN KING

CHAPTER 4
FLYING CLOSE TO THE WIND

CHAPTER 5
THERES NOTHING LEFT

CHAPTER 6
IMMINENT HAZARD

CHAPTER 7
THE PRICE OF FAILURE

CHAPTER 8
THE FIXER

CHAPTER 9
THE FALL OF THE SUN KING

CHAPTER 10
NOT ENOUGH

CHAPTER 11
A BURNING PLATFORM

CHAPTER 12
WHO CARES, ITS DONE

CHAPTER 13
PRELUDE TO DISASTER

CHAPTER 14
DROPS IN THE BIG OCEAN

CHAPTER 15
A FOX IN THE HENHOUSE

CHAPTER 16
REEFS OF RUIN

CHAPTER 17
APOLOGIES ALL AROUND

CHAPTER 18
MEET THE NEW BOSS ...

CHAPTER 19
LOST FAITH

CHAPTER 20
ALL FOR OIL

I first knew BP as a tiny metal truck. It was a green-and-yellow Dodge tow truck with a solitary red light atop the cab and the BP shield logo on the side. My brother had one, too. As children we both played with Matchbox cars, the British-made die-cast replicas of real vehicles. The speedy, durable little cars inevitably had accidents that required frequent towing, and the red plastic hooks on the BP wreckers latched beautifully under the wheels of the other cars.

Our collection also included a BP tanker truck and, later, a plastic model of a BP service station. At the time, in the early 1970s, it was about all the contact that anyone in the American public had with British Petroleum.

Even then, BP was among the worlds biggest oil companies, but its presence in the United States was largely unseen. It was a partner in the Trans-Alaska pipeline, and it later bought Standard Oil of Ohio; but it remained largely hidden from the American consciousness.

Public distrust of oil companies in the America grew steadily during the final decades of the twentieth century. A blowout from an offshore platform near Santa Barbara, California, gave rise to the environmental movement, and oil companies became its most reliable villain. As prices soared under the foreign oil embargoes of the 1970s, the public began to believe that Big Oil was in cahoots with OPEC, the Middle Eastern cartel that suddenly demonstrated it could bring the worlds greatest industrialized nation to its knees with the turn of spigot. In 1989, the