You forgot to mention the use of Corexit, a chemical banned in almost every other country in the world, to submerge and disperse the oil slick by making it break up into microscopic droplets, making it much less visible but very much still there and very much still horribly toxic. Caustic greed indeed.
I'm really sorry to hear that. I resent that this is labeled an "accident." I hope anyone who reads this realizes that the risks they took ensured this would eventually happen. The financial reparations BP had to pay and the deaths of those who worked on the rig are, to them, just the cost of doing business.
I feel for your dad's friends. Personally feel that this video has to much narrative and not enough facts. Simon loves the leftest view of oil bad. As any catastrophic event, there was not one cause for this event. It was a culmination of events. I strongly advise you to watch other docs on this subject. There were so many great docs out there that do not have a narrative.
@@Adam-zb5kk You do realize that this was not all BP's fault. This was a culmination of companies and employees fault. There are a lot of places to point the finger.
My childhood neighbor was one of the men that died in that accident. I remember how much impact it had on our community more than a 100 miles from the coast. It was a tragic loss that should have never happened.
If the oil industry were honest: Safety officer: "Be safe and take no shortcuts! That way if something happens, we can say YOU screwed up and didn't follow safety protocols." 30 minutes later --> "We're behind schedule, so we want you to take any steps to get back on track. Time is money! Safety of the environment and you be damned!" This hypocrisy is why I no longer work in the oil industry!
While the oil industry has a higher direct impact, I can confirm the food and drink industry is no different. They suddenly care though when you get a major incident, rest of the time there is no money available.
I worked in Aerospace and was fixing commercial passenger aircraft. On one occasion I worked 190 hours in 10 days. That leaves just 5 hours a day to eat, sleep, shower etc. How the hell is that safe? I got so sleep deprived it was inevitable I would make a mistake. I quit at that point.
There is a similar reason I no longer work in insurance sales. The company I worked for would charge a premium for various types of specific insurance, then look for any little reason to blame everything on the benefactor and not pay up. Then if it was ruled not to be their fault, try to find a piece of fine print and interpret it in a weird way. Then only after exhausting all possible technicalities would they actually give an insurance pay out. Any large company does things like this and will find any way to make as much money as possible, while paying as little attention to laws, safety and the well being of others as possible. Then blame everyone but themselves when they fuck up and get sued. That's pretty much why I work as a bartender for a local pub now instead of for a giant mammoth of a company.
Nabael - these days, if a customer leaves the bar and runs into a lamp post he'll blame the bartender for letting him drive home. About 20 years ago a drunk in Bowling Green, Kentucky, squeaked through a State Police sobriety checkpoint, then crashed his car and tried to sue the State Police for not arresting him. BP got caught red-handed and there was really no one else to blame. Maybe they considered trying to blame some of the dead guys. I still won't buy gas (or anything else) from them.
The Deepwater Horizon movie kinda hit close to home for me. My father worked for 20 years on service rigs throughout Alberta, Canada; he has almost died more times than I'd care to know about. Hes been hit with sour gas, almost crushed by equipment many times over. Im glad he moved away from the patch and still here to tell stories because his good luck couldn't go on much longer
As someone who was in school in Louisiana at the time of this, it was a crazy time. Half the day we'd be glued to the news watching what happened. Even as a teenager I was pretty shocked at how badly it was handled.
Bit of a clarification on the nitrified cement thing (which you may have simplified for clarity). Pumping cement down to that level requires such enormous pressure that that pressure can fracture the rock itself. So they fill the cement with nitrogen bubbles to reduce the viscosity and pressure required to pump. The point being that these wells are so deep that they are right on the edge of being produceable. The nitrogen bubbles in the cement can lead to voids forming in the cement job. These would have been found by the cement bond log that BP/TransOcean chose not to do.
I was working in a gas refinery in the Northern Territory of Australia as a rigger when the movie deepwater came out and went and saw it at the cinemas when I was on leave. I was actually quite impressed with how Accurate the portrayal of life on a rig or refinery was. Normally a Hollywood production looks like what a set designer thinks an oil rig should look like rather than basing it on reality. Not to mention the culture and greed from the management aspect. Even the whole “good ole boys” down south accents were correct! It’s really like that! They even chew tobacco! I always thought that was a myth from the old west until I saw it being done. The bravery of the crew evacuating the rig moved me to tears, like me, they’re just regular guys working in a tough and dangerous industry
Someone at BP mentioned praying to God for help. Jon Stewart, on *The Daily Show* said something like, "God hid that oil under a mile of water and beneath five more miles of sea floor. That should have been enough."
Simon. I’d like to start off by saying you always do a wonderful job conveying these stories, but you’ve outdone yourself with this one. I feel as if I can speak on the subject with more vigor and knowledge than most, having worked in the offshore and deep water exploration and drilling for two decades. Public opinion is one thing, but the truth is always more complicated. I hold a credential from the USCG; Offshore Installation Manager, or OIM. For reference, Kirt Russell’s character in the movie was the OIM license holder onboard the Deepwater Horizon upon the tone of the blowout. What most have failed to realize is the responsibility of this license holder aboard an offshore installation. The OIM is the end all, be all, alpha and omega, and has the ultimate authority over and responsible for every person on the vessel. Period. BP leases the rig and it’s services from Trans Ocean. Trans Ocean owned the rig, and appointed their own personnel to ensure its operational status is held to the rigorous standards and legal requirements of the governing bodies in whatever region of the world the rig is operated within. Of course BP, and every other oil company ever, pushes the leased drilling rigs and their crews to the absolute legal edge of operational efficiency. After all, at $500,000 a day for the rig alone, it’s easy to see how a lack of efficiency can be detrimental to a company’s bottom line. When the oil company representatives (known in the industry as “company men”) onboard these drilling rigs push too far, direct the work to be done outside of the law, break safety regulations or demand that work continue even with critical equipment being compromised, it is the SOLE responsibility, both legally and morally, of the onboard OIM, Offshore Installation Manager, to shut the operation down until the equipment is in proper working order, or any other deficiencies in operations are rectified. The OIM is responsible in every way imaginable, for each and every soul aboard the vessel. He is the Ultimate Authority in Charge. A framed copy of his license is placed on the wall in the bridge of every vessel of the type, letting all who come onboard know who is in command. The true failure and root cause of the disaster falls in the lap of Trans Ocean, and directly on the shoulders of the acting OIM onboard. Will there be blow-back with an OIM halting operations? Absolutely. It comes with the job. These men are well aware of the fact, and their $300-$500K salaries reflect this responsibility. It’s also worth mentioning that I knew men aboard this rig, even one of the men who perished in the initial explosion. I was also drilling on a Gusto P-10000 drillship in 2015, just a few hundred feet from the wellhead and wreckage of this very well in question after BP sold its leasing rights to a large mining firm Freeport McMoran (FMOG), who then sold it to Anadarko in late 2016. It wasn’t a particularly complex or abnormally difficult formation to drill mind you. This type of well has been completed safely countless times the world over. Human error caused this disaster. Those of us inside the industry know this reality all too well as we face it ever time we leave our homes for weeks at a time to climb aboard these mammoth floating islands of steel and sweat. For what it’s worth, the Deepwater Horizon disaster changed the world forever, the most influential changes came to the drilling industry itself. Thanks again, Simon.
I am a oil rig enthusiast and didn’t “like” the deepwater horizon but i liked the movie and the facts. This really helped me see some facts ive missed about the deepwater horizon thanks!
I lived in Florida my whole life and when this happened, a few months later we started to get acid rain that left a powdery substance all over EVERYTHING whatever it was produced chemical burns and left holes on all our plants. My best guess was it was the Corexit they were spraying to disperse the oil and it got carried inland by the sea breeze, fell in the rain etc. This happened for about two months. Shit was horrible.
That’s awful but I’m kinda not surprised, that Corexit stuff is awfully toxic, I remember reading into it and found that it might have actually caused more trouble than the oil would’ve, and even when it worked it didn’t even destroy the oil it just broke it up and dispersed it. And from what I read Corexit wasn’t really meant to be used anymore since it’s so toxic, but BP was able to get permission to use it anyway, and they went on to use wayyyy more of it than it might’ve actually needed, and there was a bit of a conspiracy theory that they didn’t want to pay to safety dispose of these dangerous chemicals so they threw them all over the spill even when it wasn’t needed just to use it up since that way they wouldn’t need to pay for disposal. Apparently a bunch of Corexit landed on both professional and amateur rescue/cleanup workers and gave many of them chemical burns, but they never got reimbursed.
While BP undoubtedly deserve a share of blame, their subcontractors Halliburton and TransOcean would probably have had to share a hell of a lot more of the blame and compensation too if they hadn't deliberately destroyed their data, A US court gave the US subcontractors a ridiculously small fine for illegally destroying evidence.
Isn’t BP responsible for overseeing / supervising their sub contractors. If I pay someone to do a job, I’d make sure they actually do it correctly. So why can’t BP
Thanks for the information... when I got to the end and f'ing Halliburton was brought up, and they were the source of the material that failed and caused the whole thing, I knew there had to be more to it. Dick Cheney strikes again.
Thank you for saying that the crew was priceless! I have a big pet peeve about people talking about how much money a disaster cost and mentioning the loss of irreplaceable human beings as some kind of less-important side note. I always look at it this way: If I lose a dollar and then someone comes along and gives me another dollar, I have as much at the end as I did at the beginning. If I lose someone I love, no amount of other people I love, even new ones, will make up for the loss of the first one. Stuff is just stuff and, yeah, it sucks to lose it and to have to buy another one, but that in no way compares to the loss of a life.
I lived in Houston at the time of this incident, and yet I still learned a thing or two from this video! Kudos to you, Simon, for your spot-on delivery of the most appropriate tone and making it watchable while being informative. Also, well done to the writers (if they are different)!!
Thank you for taking an objective look at the Deepwater disaster. It was so hard to find honest, non political, information while the well was still actively leaking. I hope BP and other oil companies learned from this mistake.
Noone really paid for it. The people responsible for the toxic greedy company culture were fired and given cozy jobs elsewhere. The fines weren't paid with their money. This happening again is merely a matter of time.
Remember the Exxon Valdez? THAT was their chance to learn. a very public, very large, very avoidable oil spill that is still causing damage to this day. and what did they learn? they learned they need to spend more money on PR execs, and less on environmental safety. the Gulf disaster will just reinforce that mentality.
@Mazhar Imam To be blunt, they are very interested in learning. After all, an oil spill is wasted oil. You make the most money when nothing goes wrong, morality is dead, efficiency is not.
@@thomasneal9291 they did learn from that. Worldwide single hull tankers are pretty much banned. So precisely what did you expect them to learn? Oil is a necessary resource. You cannot have ANY industrial product without oil. No plastic, no rubber, no medicine, no lubricants, no steel, nothing.
They learned that all they have to do is wait 10 years and change their logo green and people will stop caring. If a fine can be easily paid it's just a cost of doing business.
Also to add, in early June, a friend and I were preparing to head south to help clean the animals in LA. On June 5th, we had an unprecedented weather event and basically my entire town was destroyed overnight. We really wanted to go but we were very suddenly faced with our own massive cleanup. 4 EF4 (borderline EF5) tornados are just something we've never, ever seen in this area, Lake Township just outside Toledo, Ohio.
The blow out preventer used in the used in the Gulf of Mexico is smaller and cheaper than the blow out preventer used in the North Atlantic and North Pacific. Why? Because the oil industry went to congress and lobbied to be able to use a smaller cheaper blow out preventer.
Gotta love our "leaders" n their tremendous foresight. Surely their own financial benefits didn't outweigh their common sense. God this place makes 0 sense.
For all the billions they make, it seems like a pretty stupid thing to cheap out on. But yet they did. It kind of makes you think what else are they cheaping out on that'll lead to the next BP spill.
Care to explain how it was smaller than those used in the North Atlantic and Pacific. As for price after this all BOPS surface and Subsea went up in price due to several reasons including everyone wanting OEM service not cheap chinease copy parts. Also last time I looked the main failures of the BOP was down to poor maintenance which makes size and cost irrelevant and the way the drill pipe sat in the BOP in a way that very few people could forsea. There is a reason Cameron is propably the worlds largest BOP supplier and its definately not due to its cost. Know that on surface a rig can go through several cheap BOPs and choke packages before they would of even equaled the cost of a Cameron one.
Lived in Mississippi for about 15 years, father worked with a clean up team and that was an absolute joke. One of his (their) jobs was reporting any animal covered in oil (will prevent birds from flying) as well as effecting sea turtles causing them to starve since they couldn't see. He was rather angry with how they handled things, seen many giant sea turtles dead (all around 100 years of age) due to their size and slow growth rate. Never once did anyone come for any animal, he reported them daily ... Every single day not one time did anyone get them. They all basically died due to the oil spill. He really wasn't the overly nature type who hugs trees by any means but countless generations of our family lived off the sea (we are Native Americans) and our tribe is native to Mississippi. More just wanting to keep the place clean for everyone else too come. As many people know oil and water do not mix, since water is more dense oil will float on the surface. The main part of the clean up (majority of time spent cleaning) involved them spray oil with a relatively unknown chemical. This in turn would make the oil more dense causing it to sink below the surface and made the areas appear clean. Very little cleaning was done, mostly just spraying the oil to hide it ... because if you can't see it than obviously it's been removed... We learned a lot about this chemical in the years that followed, apparently it was a chemical BP actually produced themselves and was patented by BP. Instead of cleaning the oil up properly they decided to keep most of the expense inside the company (to avoid cost) by only purchasing stuff they made. The chemical was not very effective since it only hid the oil (it's still there to this day just resting on the bottom of the sea floor). BP spent a lot of money on ads/borderline propaganda stating how BP did so much to help the Gulf after the oil spill ... They did this for years on end non stop, but they never stated it was actually BP behind these commercials and wanted it to come off as just others praising BP instead of BP praising itself. The oil spill really effected the wildlife in the ocean, it killed A LOT of fish and still to this day they have not recovered. Everyone who makes a living off the sea (fishermen, shrimp boats, etc) where all heavily effected by this and still are. BP ran the commercials for PR due to how many tourists visit the Gulf Coast. They wanted to make folks not native to the area believe BP was preforming miracles .... not even remotely true. Sad thing is, a lot of the folks who worked with my father on the clean up have died in the past 10 years ... basically all from cancer. A lot of people have died from cancer from the chemicals used during the clean up. Not a little, not some, a large majority of the clean up teams have passed due to cancer. The cancer rate for the Gulf Coast has skyrocketed far above the national average. The chemical used has made a lot of fish not safe to eat. Seafood has always been a large export from states on the Gulf Coast, the oil spill has effected everyone still to this day. Even my father, he was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer two years ago. They gave him 7 months to live.
Sad sad world we've created from stupid and greed. Sometimes I wish something would take us all away. We don't deserve the pure paradise the earth once was
@@rogerw-interested Considering Garcia Marquez' writings are mostly praised in the spanish speaking circles, I highly doubt whoever made the decision on BP's side were even aware of such. Ironic honestly.
Not gonna lie. I’ve watched a lot of your videos but this one was possibly the toughest for me. (Yes even tougher than the Black Plague or Stalin’s Death Island) becaus I’ve lived in Florida for a good 25 years and was here for the oil spill. We live outside of Destin Fl (which is like a hidden paradise of a beach town kinda like Panama City’s little brother) and the oil got out here too. A lot of business that rely on marine life lost a lot, beaches were closed, marine life kept washing up. It was depressing, made worse by it happening during peak summer. So the tourism that Destin relied heavily on took a big hit.
oh yeah man, those apalachicola bay oyster are full of that shit now since it has had time to work its way up through the food chain (Ph.D. Microbiologist who worked the scene)
Yeah I'm a gulf Florida local too (with an environmental science degree). We got hit really hard (lived in PCB first then pensacola). It's a hard video to watch when you've lived through the fallout and repercussions.
again comes the theme, greed and money. you imply the spill only sucked because it affected businesses during peek season. sorry we couldnt sch the spill during the winter for you. sheesh
I love on the gulf in Alabama and this devastated everything. We were finding oil for years. And I did the non destructive testing on the BOP that caused the whole thing. It was completely preventable.
How the hell do you do a test on a BOP non-destructively? The ones I used, have a small explosive charge that forces a wedge into a 1 inch thick steel tube to bend it shut,
Learned about this tragedy through the film starring Mark Wahlberg of the same name. It was one of the first films to truly effect me emotionally. I can’t even imagine what being on that rig was like when the blowout occurred. Literally hell on Earth.
Please keep up what you are doing. We most learn from our mistakes. I show your videos to my 13 year old daughter, she is learning that we will forever make mistakes but we can learn so much from what we did right and wrong in the past. That is unfortunately the only way we learn
I remember my class and I following this as it happened while at my senior geology field camp in West Texas and New Mexico. Most of my classmates were roughnecks, and this hit very close to home for them.
Peter Berg is a wonderful film maker. His focus is always the same, he celebrates the heroes!! God love and keep heroes everywhere, large and small, military and civilian and all who remind us to stay focused on what really matters, and that includes channels like this! Thank you!!
Fuck, that must suck. I'm Canadian and I have winter but I couldn't imagine that shit in my back yard. I'd rather shovel a shit load of snow than have to clean up some greedy bastards oil.
I was offshore in the Gulf, about 35 miles away from Deepwater Horizon when it blew. I was also part of the many crews tasked with skimming oil from the spill. What a stinking mess!
"In total the well had a measured depth of 35,055 feet. If you started a 10k race through the earth you would finish the race before you reached the bottom of the well." The drama is strong with this one. 35,055 feet is indeed longer than 10km.
Interesting side note, in the movie "Deepwater Horizon" Graham McGinnis, who plays the Coast Guard Lieutenant, is an actual active duty Coast Guard Helicopter Rescue Swimmer who was stationed at USCG Airstation New Orleans when the movie was made. Petty Officer McGinnis was award the Distinguished Flying Cross in 2020 for heroism rescuing trapped forest service workers during a forest fire in California.
I live on the gulf coast of mississippi and so many people dont know about this massive disaster it completely devastated our fishing and tourism economy
This was a bit of a "Titanic" situation from a fault tree analysis perspective (I have done both). Specifically both needed a long list of problems to coincide to be as bad as they were. EG if the metalwork had been up to spec (in both cases) the situation would not have been as bad. If procedures had been followed in both cases (EG the Titanic lookout forcing the lock on the binoculars case) then the situation could have been better if not avoided. There is a huge list of things like that in both cases.
In case if the titanic you may or may not be right as it is not certain that the iceberg would be seen eerlier with bino's and really any ship would have sunk on collision because the force was equal to multiple torpedo hits
Gordon Lawrence and both those points about the Titanic have been debunked. I take what you mean but those specific issues need context. The ship didn’t have any more or less weak iron in it than any other at the time, its hull was never supposed to withstand a collision with an iceberg, it’s compartments were meant to withstand a sinking event long enough to allow passengers to be saved. It was also assumed that anything big enough to sync the ship would be seen in time for it to move. The breaking of the ship was definitely not metal based because absolutely no ship on earth is designed even now to withstand those kind of forces on it. Plus the binoculars were only ever used in very specific circumstances, at the time it was widely understood and accepted that Naked vision was best for the majority of observation, binoculars were only meant to double check something. Would have made absolutely no difference. The only thing that would’ve made a difference in the Titanic’s case was better regulations for the wireless operators of all ships at sea and regulations for lifeboat capacity
@Agent J You also seem to be forgetting it was a US company that made the BOP and certificated it even though it was not up to spec. And no you cant test them as they are a one time use device. IE after use they cannot be used again.
This side of the pond in Britain we had a similar disaster in the 1980s in the North Sea. Piper-Alpha which was a modular rig drilling for both oil and natural gas. The explosions and the enormous fire killed 167. By the time the fire had burned itself out only one of the module blocks remained standing, and it was a blackened, charred hulk.
I don't normally like "based on a true event" movies but i thought Deepwater Horizon was very well done and very interesting. I feel so sorry for the people who were on it when it blew
I live near Louisiana and was in school at the time. There was a live feed where you would watch the oil coming from the sea floor that my science teacher would put up. Definitely helped make her point about renewable energy.
Because we all know, when you are doing something that has NEVER been done before and something that is VERY dangerous, you want to cut corners and rush things!
reminds me of Moria, "Moria. You fear to go into those mines. The Dwarves dug too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm...
The sad thing is that drilling for oil is actually pretty safe and catastrophes like these can be (largely) avoided if safety regulations are upheld, quality standards are not dropped and proper precautions are taken. We need oil. Period. And not just for driving our cars and flying our planes, but for countless products which all contain oil and its byproducts. But catastrophes such as these tend to rile up many people who want to outright ban drilling for oil altogether. The same people who think that their gasoline comes from the gas station and start screaming when gas prices are "too high"... The same people who want cheap and clean electricity, but will utterly freak out at the mere mentioning of nuclear power. Which is also safe and currently the only form of power which is cheap, abundant, clean (barring the radioactive waste) and actually very safe. Covering our needs with solar panels and wind farms? Right... Maybe if you're a shithole country like Somalia where your local warlord's charging iPhone is the largest energy consumer. We've been using nuclear power for over half a century and the number of accidents is tiny. Sure, when something goes wrong, then it really goes wrong, but that's the price of progress. We get into our cars every day, knowing that an accident could be our end.
You are misinformed with regard to alternative power sources. For example the UK alone has near enough 20GW of wind power and climbing. There is also a tad over 13GW of solar as well. If you add in biomass generation, the UK has 40% of it's electricity from renewables. The UK is hardly a world leader either. Also what makes you think the number of nuclear incidents is tiny? According to the Nuclear Regulatory Authority (US) the USA has had 13 accidents with immediate fatalities and that does not include 3 Mile Island or Crystal River or Buchanan or Erwin incidents where loads of radioactive materials were not contained. If you look at all incidents in the USA it's more than 150. How is that a tiny number?
If companies stopped cutting corners and accepted that regulations are required to keep our environment and people safe, we wouldn't have those conversations. But the fact of the matter is, we can't trust companies. They destroy and kill to get a penny, and if we do not stop them, we'll end up with more Deepwater Horizons.
I still can’t believe that the people from BP walked away without any serious punishment, because of their choices and greed people died, they should have been charged with first degree manslaughter without parole at least
In a case like this all the top executives and the board of directors should get an automatic 20 years jail time without possibility of parole. Oh, and confiscation of all of their assets as well, of course. Then maybe others would think twice about doing the same in the future. Or does being tough on crime only apply to poor people? I think we all know the answer to that...
My hometown is an “oil town.” Most men go to work offshore as it’s the only job that pays well enough to support a family. (Or it did prior to the collapse alongside Covid.) My husband worked on the Thunderhorse until Covid and Valaris declared bankruptcy. My husband’s brother was one of the men that survived the Horizon. He received about $2mil as compensation, and is flat broke today. We lost a few family friends on the Horizon as well. Oilfield families form their own culture. And we ALL agree the movie was pure shit!
Are you serious? Ok, My sympathy's do go out to him for surviving that hell but how in the heck did he blow through 2 million in cash that fast?! I swear y'all don't know how to save for the future down there in the south.
I remember a year or so after the disaster, my parents and i went down too St. Petersburg, FL for a week or so. My mom and i went too Treasure Island one day, and i remember seeing small spots of oil shine in the water. It was crazy to me at the time.
I was in a newsroom in the inland East Texas oilfield when it happened, it was indeed wild, with the editors and reporters trying to figure out which way to spin it -- accident, negligence, or environmental disaster. I think we ended up going through all three, in that order. I'd like to see more videos on oil rig disasters, like Piper Alpha, which was caused by an even more egregious screwup. Deepwater Horizon had a kick and a failed blowout preventer, and burned for a day and a half, Piper Alpha had a failure of lockout/tagout procedures during maintenance and burned for THREE WEEKS. And then there's the Byford Dolphin decompression chamber accident, which ... is one of those Simon will have to take a break in the middle of because it's so bad. Also land oil rig non-disasters would make good episodes, like Spindletop and Daisy Bradford #3 (or Dad Joiner for the Biographics channel) for happier endings.
Wicked video, my dad was a Subsea super intendant for the Transocean in charge of the Blow out prevention valve (on a different rig) during in this event and I couldn’t fault a single bit of information. Great job
Cyan Ogilvie when politics are put above science and truth is called a lie because it’s not popular then people die. Challenger... Columbia...Deepwater Horizon.
@@Calum_S Not as many as you'd think. I used to do fault tree analysis for a living and every time it was a long list of factors and almost never was it an engineering issue. In fact I cant remember even one but it's a while back.
I’ve watched as many of your videos as I can and that is one of the all time greats. Imagine just 1, ONE, person who worked there putting his/her foot down and risk getting fired to prevent all that devastation. Ever think that it’s already happened to you in the past and you succeed. I like to think so. 💪🏽
I actually enjoyed the movie for this tragedy, it wasn’t the best thing in the world but it did go to show how this all happened due to neglect and greed
Still the most disgusting corporate greed “accident” I can think of... It’s just sickening, that nobody went to jail, they were just fined... as if a fine will fix the greed from continuing on.
I wonder how big that BP execs golden parachute was. 20 million? 30 million? 40 million? That'll obviously teach him not to do that kind of thing again!
I'm glad Simon was as neutral as possible when discussing this topic and made sure to mention that US law is strong when it comes to regulation of oil extraction
Simon, this is your calling. You are great at this stuff. The perfect host as well as an awesome speaker. Kerp up the good work! These are very informative. I love history myself and I like the way you call b.s. on the fictitious tales of things and break out the truth. The sarcasm is perfect too. Have you ever considered being a voice over for shows?
This incident, coupled with mismanagement of their Texas City refinery (where they lived in denial about the chequered safety record of the plant), lead to me deciding to boycott BP from then onwards
He covers several points I have not read in research and not in the movie (movie not a resource I know) and discusses some important points about its 10-yr life making them so much money. It was an incredible city in operation. With incredible consequences for any failures.
I’m an oil hand in the Permian Basin. This is the example we point to on why you should use your Stop Work Authority and why you shouldn’t Bypass Safety Controls. We also have a concept called Production Bias where you focus more on making a deadline than completing the job correctly & safely. I’ve done jobs for ExxonMobil that have gone 2 months behind schedule, but all of us came home none the worse & no safety issues arose. Sometimes equipment breaks and that puts you behind schedule, throw the toolbox at the problem instead of carrying on with broken equipment that could lead to a tragedy. It might seem like all of this is basic workplace common sense, but I’ve seen dudes out in the field working in crocs, Adidas sweat pants, a fishing shirt, and a baseball cap. No hard hat, no FRC’s, no safety boots, no gas monitor. That kind of callous disregard is how things like Deepwater Horizon happen, and unfortunately you still find it out there
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Deepwater Horizon was also Simon Whistler's pseudonym while he worked for MI6 and MI5.
Do an episode on the Marianna trench.
19:55 What is this the pot calling the kettle black?
You forgot to mention the use of Corexit, a chemical banned in almost every other country in the world, to submerge and disperse the oil slick by making it break up into microscopic droplets, making it much less visible but very much still there and very much still horribly toxic.
Caustic greed indeed.
"Business executives and Infants are two of the types of people who need to be reminded of this" Great line.
"Only types"
@@nonnaurbisness3013 👍Right
My step dad had friends that died out there. If it means anything, he appreciates the video and the respect towards the attention to detail
My condolences man....
I'm really sorry to hear that. I resent that this is labeled an "accident." I hope anyone who reads this realizes that the risks they took ensured this would eventually happen. The financial reparations BP had to pay and the deaths of those who worked on the rig are, to them, just the cost of doing business.
My condolences to them
I feel for your dad's friends. Personally feel that this video has to much narrative and not enough facts. Simon loves the leftest view of oil bad. As any catastrophic event, there was not one cause for this event. It was a culmination of events. I strongly advise you to watch other docs on this subject. There were so many great docs out there that do not have a narrative.
@@Adam-zb5kk You do realize that this was not all BP's fault. This was a culmination of companies and employees fault. There are a lot of places to point the finger.
My childhood neighbor was one of the men that died in that accident. I remember how much impact it had on our community more than a 100 miles from the coast. It was a tragic loss that should have never happened.
If the oil industry were honest:
Safety officer: "Be safe and take no shortcuts! That way if something happens, we can say YOU screwed up and didn't follow safety protocols."
30 minutes later -->
"We're behind schedule, so we want you to take any steps to get back on track. Time is money! Safety of the environment and you be damned!"
This hypocrisy is why I no longer work in the oil industry!
While the oil industry has a higher direct impact, I can confirm the food and drink industry is no different. They suddenly care though when you get a major incident, rest of the time there is no money available.
Think many large businesses have that attitude towards safety.
Safety first, until it costs money...
I worked in Aerospace and was fixing commercial passenger aircraft. On one occasion I worked 190 hours in 10 days. That leaves just 5 hours a day to eat, sleep, shower etc. How the hell is that safe? I got so sleep deprived it was inevitable I would make a mistake. I quit at that point.
There is a similar reason I no longer work in insurance sales. The company I worked for would charge a premium for various types of specific insurance, then look for any little reason to blame everything on the benefactor and not pay up.
Then if it was ruled not to be their fault, try to find a piece of fine print and interpret it in a weird way.
Then only after exhausting all possible technicalities would they actually give an insurance pay out.
Any large company does things like this and will find any way to make as much money as possible, while paying as little attention to laws, safety and the well being of others as possible. Then blame everyone but themselves when they fuck up and get sued.
That's pretty much why I work as a bartender for a local pub now instead of for a giant mammoth of a company.
Nabael - these days, if a customer leaves the bar and runs into a lamp post he'll blame the bartender for letting him drive home. About 20 years ago a drunk in Bowling Green, Kentucky, squeaked through a State Police sobriety checkpoint, then crashed his car and tried to sue the State Police for not arresting him. BP got caught red-handed and there was really no one else to blame. Maybe they considered trying to blame some of the dead guys. I still won't buy gas (or anything else) from them.
The Deepwater Horizon movie kinda hit close to home for me. My father worked for 20 years on service rigs throughout Alberta, Canada; he has almost died more times than I'd care to know about. Hes been hit with sour gas, almost crushed by equipment many times over. Im glad he moved away from the patch and still here to tell stories because his good luck couldn't go on much longer
As someone who was in school in Louisiana at the time of this, it was a crazy time. Half the day we'd be glued to the news watching what happened. Even as a teenager I was pretty shocked at how badly it was handled.
The monologue at the end of this episode is brilliantly written and presented. Well done Simon on the presentation and Chase on the writing.
Bit of a clarification on the nitrified cement thing (which you may have simplified for clarity). Pumping cement down to that level requires such enormous pressure that that pressure can fracture the rock itself. So they fill the cement with nitrogen bubbles to reduce the viscosity and pressure required to pump. The point being that these wells are so deep that they are right on the edge of being produceable.
The nitrogen bubbles in the cement can lead to voids forming in the cement job. These would have been found by the cement bond log that BP/TransOcean chose not to do.
Sounds like they tried to drill too deep even for an technologically advanced rig like Deepwater Horizon.
Correct.
I guess you're getting pore pressure to fight against hydrostatic pressure and reservoir pressure
Thanks guys for yalls comments . Nice insight 👏🏻
"Few things are more American than dramatizing a tragedy after enough time has passed."
Well said, Simon, well said.
Define enough time. This is America sooo 24 hours?
Brits don't even wait
I was working in a gas refinery in the Northern Territory of Australia as a rigger when the movie deepwater came out and went and saw it at the cinemas when I was on leave. I was actually quite impressed with how Accurate the portrayal of life on a rig or refinery was. Normally a Hollywood production looks like what a set designer thinks an oil rig should look like rather than basing it on reality. Not to mention the culture and greed from the management aspect. Even the whole “good ole boys” down south accents were correct! It’s really like that! They even chew tobacco! I always thought that was a myth from the old west until I saw it being done. The bravery of the crew evacuating the rig moved me to tears, like me, they’re just regular guys working in a tough and dangerous industry
Someone at BP mentioned praying to God for help.
Jon Stewart, on *The Daily Show* said something like, "God hid that oil under a mile of water and beneath five more miles of sea floor. That should have been enough."
But ones as profitable are rare
@@alexeipistoun9783 Are we humans or Ferengi?
Supadupa Swaggascoopa Jon Stewart lives on a farm and rescues pit bulls lmao, he doesn’t have private jets and shit just because he can afford to.
And the moon is 200 thousand miles away through a death vacuum.
Haha yes! Especially since they think their god is in control, so this is all in it's plan?
Simon. I’d like to start off by saying you always do a wonderful job conveying these stories, but you’ve outdone yourself with this one. I feel as if I can speak on the subject with more vigor and knowledge than most, having worked in the offshore and deep water exploration and drilling for two decades. Public opinion is one thing, but the truth is always more complicated. I hold a credential from the USCG; Offshore Installation Manager, or OIM. For reference, Kirt Russell’s character in the movie was the OIM license holder onboard the Deepwater Horizon upon the tone of the blowout. What most have failed to realize is the responsibility of this license holder aboard an offshore installation. The OIM is the end all, be all, alpha and omega, and has the ultimate authority over and responsible for every person on the vessel. Period. BP leases the rig and it’s services from Trans Ocean. Trans Ocean owned the rig, and appointed their own personnel to ensure its operational status is held to the rigorous standards and legal requirements of the governing bodies in whatever region of the world the rig is operated within. Of course BP, and every other oil company ever, pushes the leased drilling rigs and their crews to the absolute legal edge of operational efficiency. After all, at $500,000 a day for the rig alone, it’s easy to see how a lack of efficiency can be detrimental to a company’s bottom line. When the oil company representatives (known in the industry as “company men”) onboard these drilling rigs push too far, direct the work to be done outside of the law, break safety regulations or demand that work continue even with critical equipment being compromised, it is the SOLE responsibility, both legally and morally, of the onboard OIM, Offshore Installation Manager, to shut the operation down until the equipment is in proper working order, or any other deficiencies in operations are rectified. The OIM is responsible in every way imaginable, for each and every soul aboard the vessel. He is the Ultimate Authority in Charge. A framed copy of his license is placed on the wall in the bridge of every vessel of the type, letting all who come onboard know who is in command. The true failure and root cause of the disaster falls in the lap of Trans Ocean, and directly on the shoulders of the acting OIM onboard. Will there be blow-back with an OIM halting operations? Absolutely. It comes with the job. These men are well aware of the fact, and their $300-$500K salaries reflect this responsibility. It’s also worth mentioning that I knew men aboard this rig, even one of the men who perished in the initial explosion. I was also drilling on a Gusto P-10000 drillship in 2015, just a few hundred feet from the wellhead and wreckage of this very well in question after BP sold its leasing rights to a large mining firm Freeport McMoran (FMOG), who then sold it to Anadarko in late 2016. It wasn’t a particularly complex or abnormally difficult formation to drill mind you. This type of well has been completed safely countless times the world over. Human error caused this disaster. Those of us inside the industry know this reality all too well as we face it ever time we leave our homes for weeks at a time to climb aboard these mammoth floating islands of steel and sweat. For what it’s worth, the Deepwater Horizon disaster changed the world forever, the most influential changes came to the drilling industry itself. Thanks again, Simon.
Was gonna say too long didn't read but I did and it was a good read. Thanks for the insight
i really appreciate your comment, thank you
Come to think of it, I don’t believe I ever heard of anybody having stop work authority until after this happened.
They drilled so greedily and so deep that they found a Balrog
smh they learned nothing from dwarves
They Dug Too Deep
*Cthulhu
When the dark powers are running your economy
That feeling...
I am a oil rig enthusiast and didn’t “like” the deepwater horizon but i liked the movie and the facts. This really helped me see some facts ive missed about the deepwater horizon thanks!
I lived in Florida my whole life and when this happened, a few months later we started to get acid rain that left a powdery substance all over EVERYTHING whatever it was produced chemical burns and left holes on all our plants. My best guess was it was the Corexit they were spraying to disperse the oil and it got carried inland by the sea breeze, fell in the rain etc. This happened for about two months. Shit was horrible.
Nagga Lotus wow... that’s insane. Thanks for sharing
That's crazy, media forgot to report on that...
I heard somewhere that it can turn your hair green. That happen to you?
@@ghazghkullthraka9714 No, I stayed out of and avoided the rain for almost a year after that.
That’s awful but I’m kinda not surprised, that Corexit stuff is awfully toxic, I remember reading into it and found that it might have actually caused more trouble than the oil would’ve, and even when it worked it didn’t even destroy the oil it just broke it up and dispersed it. And from what I read Corexit wasn’t really meant to be used anymore since it’s so toxic, but BP was able to get permission to use it anyway, and they went on to use wayyyy more of it than it might’ve actually needed, and there was a bit of a conspiracy theory that they didn’t want to pay to safety dispose of these dangerous chemicals so they threw them all over the spill even when it wasn’t needed just to use it up since that way they wouldn’t need to pay for disposal.
Apparently a bunch of Corexit landed on both professional and amateur rescue/cleanup workers and gave many of them chemical burns, but they never got reimbursed.
While BP undoubtedly deserve a share of blame, their subcontractors Halliburton and TransOcean would probably have had to share a hell of a lot more of the blame and compensation too if they hadn't deliberately destroyed their data, A US court gave the US subcontractors a ridiculously small fine for illegally destroying evidence.
Isn’t BP responsible for overseeing / supervising their sub contractors.
If I pay someone to do a job, I’d make sure they actually do it correctly. So why can’t BP
So proud to be an American.
Absolutely! Halliburton's dodgy cement job is the main reason for the blow out (that and BP's insistence on time saving corner cutting).
Biz as usual
Thanks for the information... when I got to the end and f'ing Halliburton was brought up, and they were the source of the material that failed and caused the whole thing, I knew there had to be more to it. Dick Cheney strikes again.
Thank you for saying that the crew was priceless! I have a big pet peeve about people talking about how much money a disaster cost and mentioning the loss of irreplaceable human beings as some kind of less-important side note.
I always look at it this way: If I lose a dollar and then someone comes along and gives me another dollar, I have as much at the end as I did at the beginning. If I lose someone I love, no amount of other people I love, even new ones, will make up for the loss of the first one. Stuff is just stuff and, yeah, it sucks to lose it and to have to buy another one, but that in no way compares to the loss of a life.
Absolute truth, I loved how that had emotional emphasis
It was not an "accidental oil spill" it was a negligent oil spill. A negligence created by greed and complacency.
I lived in Houston at the time of this incident, and yet I still learned a thing or two from this video! Kudos to you, Simon, for your spot-on delivery of the most appropriate tone and making it watchable while being informative. Also, well done to the writers (if they are different)!!
Thank you for taking an objective look at the Deepwater disaster. It was so hard to find honest, non political, information while the well was still actively leaking. I hope BP and other oil companies learned from this mistake.
Noone really paid for it. The people responsible for the toxic greedy company culture were fired and given cozy jobs elsewhere. The fines weren't paid with their money. This happening again is merely a matter of time.
Remember the Exxon Valdez? THAT was their chance to learn.
a very public, very large, very avoidable oil spill that is still causing damage to this day.
and what did they learn?
they learned they need to spend more money on PR execs, and less on environmental safety.
the Gulf disaster will just reinforce that mentality.
@Mazhar Imam
To be blunt, they are very interested in learning. After all, an oil spill is wasted oil.
You make the most money when nothing goes wrong, morality is dead, efficiency is not.
@@thomasneal9291 they did learn from that. Worldwide single hull tankers are pretty much banned. So precisely what did you expect them to learn? Oil is a necessary resource. You cannot have ANY industrial product without oil. No plastic, no rubber, no medicine, no lubricants, no steel, nothing.
They learned that all they have to do is wait 10 years and change their logo green and people will stop caring. If a fine can be easily paid it's just a cost of doing business.
Aaaaand here we are setting the ocean on fire today. "We're sorry."
Have you ever thought about doing a video about the Giant's Causeway. The geology of it and myths etc that surround it.
Also to add, in early June, a friend and I were preparing to head south to help clean the animals in LA. On June 5th, we had an unprecedented weather event and basically my entire town was destroyed overnight. We really wanted to go but we were very suddenly faced with our own massive cleanup. 4 EF4 (borderline EF5) tornados are just something we've never, ever seen in this area, Lake Township just outside Toledo, Ohio.
The blow out preventer used in the used in the Gulf of Mexico is smaller and cheaper than the blow out preventer used in the North Atlantic and North Pacific.
Why?
Because the oil industry went to congress and lobbied to be able to use a smaller cheaper blow out preventer.
Gotta love our "leaders" n their tremendous foresight. Surely their own financial benefits didn't outweigh their common sense. God this place makes 0 sense.
For all the billions they make, it seems like a pretty stupid thing to cheap out on. But yet they did. It kind of makes you think what else are they cheaping out on that'll lead to the next BP spill.
Care to explain how it was smaller than those used in the North Atlantic and Pacific. As for price after this all BOPS surface and Subsea went up in price due to several reasons including everyone wanting OEM service not cheap chinease copy parts. Also last time I looked the main failures of the BOP was down to poor maintenance which makes size and cost irrelevant and the way the drill pipe sat in the BOP in a way that very few people could forsea. There is a reason Cameron is propably the worlds largest BOP supplier and its definately not due to its cost. Know that on surface a rig can go through several cheap BOPs and choke packages before they would of even equaled the cost of a Cameron one.
Lobbying is a scourge.
That particular BOP was irregularly serviced and non OEM parts were used as well because they were cheaper.
A : "Boss, the warning lamp is on"
B : "Meh.. Now, get back to work boys"
Lived in Mississippi for about 15 years, father worked with a clean up team and that was an absolute joke. One of his (their) jobs was reporting any animal covered in oil (will prevent birds from flying) as well as effecting sea turtles causing them to starve since they couldn't see.
He was rather angry with how they handled things, seen many giant sea turtles dead (all around 100 years of age) due to their size and slow growth rate. Never once did anyone come for any animal, he reported them daily ... Every single day not one time did anyone get them. They all basically died due to the oil spill.
He really wasn't the overly nature type who hugs trees by any means but countless generations of our family lived off the sea (we are Native Americans) and our tribe is native to Mississippi. More just wanting to keep the place clean for everyone else too come.
As many people know oil and water do not mix, since water is more dense oil will float on the surface. The main part of the clean up (majority of time spent cleaning) involved them spray oil with a relatively unknown chemical. This in turn would make the oil more dense causing it to sink below the surface and made the areas appear clean.
Very little cleaning was done, mostly just spraying the oil to hide it ... because if you can't see it than obviously it's been removed... We learned a lot about this chemical in the years that followed, apparently it was a chemical BP actually produced themselves and was patented by BP. Instead of cleaning the oil up properly they decided to keep most of the expense inside the company (to avoid cost) by only purchasing stuff they made. The chemical was not very effective since it only hid the oil (it's still there to this day just resting on the bottom of the sea floor).
BP spent a lot of money on ads/borderline propaganda stating how BP did so much to help the Gulf after the oil spill ... They did this for years on end non stop, but they never stated it was actually BP behind these commercials and wanted it to come off as just others praising BP instead of BP praising itself.
The oil spill really effected the wildlife in the ocean, it killed A LOT of fish and still to this day they have not recovered. Everyone who makes a living off the sea (fishermen, shrimp boats, etc) where all heavily effected by this and still are.
BP ran the commercials for PR due to how many tourists visit the Gulf Coast. They wanted to make folks not native to the area believe BP was preforming miracles .... not even remotely true.
Sad thing is, a lot of the folks who worked with my father on the clean up have died in the past 10 years ... basically all from cancer. A lot of people have died from cancer from the chemicals used during the clean up. Not a little, not some, a large majority of the clean up teams have passed due to cancer. The cancer rate for the Gulf Coast has skyrocketed far above the national average.
The chemical used has made a lot of fish not safe to eat. Seafood has always been a large export from states on the Gulf Coast, the oil spill has effected everyone still to this day.
Even my father, he was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer two years ago. They gave him 7 months to live.
Good god.. That's terrible
Sad sad world we've created from stupid and greed. Sometimes I wish something would take us all away. We don't deserve the pure paradise the earth once was
Bet they went through a lot of bottles of Dawn, eh?
The amount of times when the word "Oil" was used, America is about to drill this video
I found it quite crude!
@@krisvalenti4141 Ooh, a slick reply!
British Petroleum.....
Lol
No, they gonna claim to find WMD's in this video and invade.
Naming are risky project after a cursed town doomed to annihilation, and then it blows up in a huge disaster... That sounds too ridiculous to be true.
i also find it hard to believe that BP would name the project with such a negative image
@@rogerw-interested Considering Garcia Marquez' writings are mostly praised in the spanish speaking circles, I highly doubt whoever made the decision on BP's side were even aware of such. Ironic honestly.
What happens to the town in the book?
Simon is such a good narrator. He even makes the commercials sound interesting!
One among many things I love about your videos is that you do a prehistory leading to the event in question, really appreciate that!
Not gonna lie. I’ve watched a lot of your videos but this one was possibly the toughest for me. (Yes even tougher than the Black Plague or Stalin’s Death Island) becaus I’ve lived in Florida for a good 25 years and was here for the oil spill. We live outside of Destin Fl (which is like a hidden paradise of a beach town kinda like Panama City’s little brother) and the oil got out here too. A lot of business that rely on marine life lost a lot, beaches were closed, marine life kept washing up. It was depressing, made worse by it happening during peak summer. So the tourism that Destin relied heavily on took a big hit.
oh yeah man, those apalachicola bay oyster are full of that shit now since it has had time to work its way up through the food chain (Ph.D. Microbiologist who worked the scene)
Yeah I'm a gulf Florida local too (with an environmental science degree). We got hit really hard (lived in PCB first then pensacola). It's a hard video to watch when you've lived through the fallout and repercussions.
again comes the theme, greed and money. you imply the spill only sucked because it affected businesses during peek season. sorry we couldnt sch the spill during the winter for you. sheesh
@@TrekkieBrie How is it now though? Has it recovered? Do you go swimming in the Gulf?
@@rogerw-interested "made worse", so he was not implying that the tragedy "only" suck because of effect on tourism. Learn to read
Your videos are very informative and articulate. Thanks & keep up the good work. God bless.
"Company cut corners"
How to tell when any disaster by a corporation is going to happen
I love on the gulf in Alabama and this devastated everything. We were finding oil for years. And I did the non destructive testing on the BOP that caused the whole thing. It was completely preventable.
How the hell do you do a test on a BOP non-destructively? The ones I used, have a small explosive charge that forces a wedge into a 1 inch thick steel tube to bend it shut,
@@gordonlawrence1448 what's a bop?
@@johnuferbach9166 blow out prevent(er) or (ion)
Simon you helping so much through this time, thank you for everyone on all your teams for keeping my brain learning
Learned about this tragedy through the film starring Mark Wahlberg of the same name. It was one of the first films to truly effect me emotionally. I can’t even imagine what being on that rig was like when the blowout occurred. Literally hell on Earth.
Watching The Newsroom episode actually made me interested in learning way more about it
Please keep up what you are doing. We most learn from our mistakes. I show your videos to my 13 year old daughter, she is learning that we will forever make mistakes but we can learn so much from what we did right and wrong in the past. That is unfortunately the only way we learn
Thanks for the music to let me know when to fast forward through the ad, Simon 👍
I remember my class and I following this as it happened while at my senior geology field camp in West Texas and New Mexico. Most of my classmates were roughnecks, and this hit very close to home for them.
Yeah I feel that.I live on earth so this really hit very close to home
'For the sake of a nail, a shoe was lost'!
"Because a shoe was lost a horse was lost"?
Peter Berg is a wonderful film maker. His focus is always the same, he celebrates the heroes!! God love and keep heroes everywhere, large and small, military and civilian and all who remind us to stay focused on what really matters, and that includes channels like this! Thank you!!
BP still has gas stations over here and I can't for the life of me, figure out how they survive. I never see one without thinking about it.
10 years to the day ... Glad found this. Great work and a good tribute to the real story.
Please start a series about major events , such as afgan war
I would definitely like to say that.
I would love that. I spent 2.5 years there and you love to hear a modern hindsight twist on it.
Oo yes, please do this!
I know nothing about it lol
Another excellent, well-written piece. I am beginning to think this is Simon's best channel! Keep it up.
Hello from someone living in an area that still to this day is seeing impacts from the deepwater horizon spill...
Fuck, that must suck. I'm Canadian and I have winter but I couldn't imagine that shit in my back yard. I'd rather shovel a shit load of snow than have to clean up some greedy bastards oil.
@@Zeldahol Well if you live in Alberta , you have the Oil Sands.
Ontario.
I was offshore in the Gulf, about 35 miles away from Deepwater Horizon when it blew. I was also part of the many crews tasked with skimming oil from the spill.
What a stinking mess!
Deep Water Horizon needed Daniel Day Lewis. He's the best oil-man bad guy ever.
Um, Bruce Willis is.
@@MidwestDankAlumni daniel plainview wants a word with your milkshake
"I see the worst in people, Henry...I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need...."
"In total the well had a measured depth of 35,055 feet. If you started a 10k race through the earth you would finish the race before you reached the bottom of the well."
The drama is strong with this one. 35,055 feet is indeed longer than 10km.
Interesting side note, in the movie "Deepwater Horizon" Graham McGinnis, who plays the Coast Guard Lieutenant, is an actual active duty Coast Guard Helicopter Rescue Swimmer who was stationed at USCG Airstation New Orleans when the movie was made. Petty Officer McGinnis was award the Distinguished Flying Cross in 2020 for heroism rescuing trapped forest service workers during a forest fire in California.
Tragic. Rest in peace to those that passed away.
13:25- "But at the cost of some /structural/ integrity." Which, unfortunately, was the only kind BP had left.
Nicely put. I'm sure they're very comfortable with our current Administration.
I live on the gulf coast of mississippi and so many people dont know about this massive disaster it completely devastated our fishing and tourism economy
This was a bit of a "Titanic" situation from a fault tree analysis perspective (I have done both). Specifically both needed a long list of problems to coincide to be as bad as they were. EG if the metalwork had been up to spec (in both cases) the situation would not have been as bad. If procedures had been followed in both cases (EG the Titanic lookout forcing the lock on the binoculars case) then the situation could have been better if not avoided. There is a huge list of things like that in both cases.
In case if the titanic you may or may not be right as it is not certain that the iceberg would be seen eerlier with bino's and really any ship would have sunk on collision because the force was equal to multiple torpedo hits
Actually, it's a _very_ short list in both cases. BP did _everything_ wrong they remotely could.
Gordon Lawrence and both those points about the Titanic have been debunked. I take what you mean but those specific issues need context. The ship didn’t have any more or less weak iron in it than any other at the time, its hull was never supposed to withstand a collision with an iceberg, it’s compartments were meant to withstand a sinking event long enough to allow passengers to be saved. It was also assumed that anything big enough to sync the ship would be seen in time for it to move. The breaking of the ship was definitely not metal based because absolutely no ship on earth is designed even now to withstand those kind of forces on it. Plus the binoculars were only ever used in very specific circumstances, at the time it was widely understood and accepted that Naked vision was best for the majority of observation, binoculars were only meant to double check something. Would have made absolutely no difference. The only thing that would’ve made a difference in the Titanic’s case was better regulations for the wireless operators of all ships at sea and regulations for lifeboat capacity
@Agent J Well the senior leadership at that point was American.
@Agent J You also seem to be forgetting it was a US company that made the BOP and certificated it even though it was not up to spec. And no you cant test them as they are a one time use device. IE after use they cannot be used again.
This side of the pond in Britain we had a similar disaster in the 1980s in the North Sea. Piper-Alpha which was a modular rig drilling for both oil and natural gas. The explosions and the enormous fire killed 167. By the time the fire had burned itself out only one of the module blocks remained standing, and it was a blackened, charred hulk.
Anyone remember the south park episode about deep water horizon? "Were sorry"
You mean the exact episode he mentioned in the video you commented on? No. Never heard of it.
This is the most concise well-presented version I have heard. Thanks for doing it !
I don't normally like "based on a true event" movies but i thought Deepwater Horizon was very well done and very interesting. I feel so sorry for the people who were on it when it blew
You guys should do a video on the Darien Gap
Ah yes, this story reminds me of when i blew up the Enclave oil rig some many, many years ago...
Piper Alpha would be a good one to cover (if not already done so).
Scrolled to find this comment, I’m from Aberdeen in Scotland and this would indeed make a sobering and compelling episode.
If the crew and the rig were actually priceless, I highly doubt the sort of thing would have happened.
@Agent J your feelings and opinions are meaningless.
Chase Kiddy: excellent writing! Intelligent Poetry is the thang.
thanks, brad!
Today I learned that theres such a thing as "documentary porn"
And that there are likely people who get off to it
@@NickCamokidVisneski Disgusting.
@@vejet no kink shaming
One more like and this comment has 69. Just saying.
@@dennymambo you’re welcome
I live near Louisiana and was in school at the time. There was a live feed where you would watch the oil coming from the sea floor that my science teacher would put up. Definitely helped make her point about renewable energy.
4:20 that is not an oil rig, that is a pump jack.
P.C. Windham Paranormal/Romance/Sci-fi/Fantasy I literally said the exact same thing out loud! 🤣
I've always liked the term "Prairie Pecker" But yes, you are correct about it being a pump jack.
Never ever cut corners while dealing with oil
Is this the same that spilled oil and south park made fun of?"We sorry" "We soooorry" and summoned cthulu
*Edit* Hahahaha there it is xD
Certainly is bud
I thought the “we sorry” episode was about global warming?
@@HUN73RK1LL3R I think a gigantic oil spill and climate change have something to do with one another there guy.
@@tylerwerner291 dont call me guy, buddy!
@@cavemanlovesmoke4394 I'm not your buddy, pal!
Because we all know, when you are doing something that has NEVER been done before and something that is VERY dangerous, you want to cut corners and rush things!
reminds me of Moria,
"Moria. You fear to go into those mines. The Dwarves dug too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm...
Excellent choice! Glad you did this one.
The sad thing is that drilling for oil is actually pretty safe and catastrophes like these can be (largely) avoided if safety regulations are upheld, quality standards are not dropped and proper precautions are taken.
We need oil. Period. And not just for driving our cars and flying our planes, but for countless products which all contain oil and its byproducts.
But catastrophes such as these tend to rile up many people who want to outright ban drilling for oil altogether. The same people who think that their gasoline comes from the gas station and start screaming when gas prices are "too high"... The same people who want cheap and clean electricity, but will utterly freak out at the mere mentioning of nuclear power. Which is also safe and currently the only form of power which is cheap, abundant, clean (barring the radioactive waste) and actually very safe. Covering our needs with solar panels and wind farms? Right... Maybe if you're a shithole country like Somalia where your local warlord's charging iPhone is the largest energy consumer.
We've been using nuclear power for over half a century and the number of accidents is tiny. Sure, when something goes wrong, then it really goes wrong, but that's the price of progress. We get into our cars every day, knowing that an accident could be our end.
You are misinformed with regard to alternative power sources. For example the UK alone has near enough 20GW of wind power and climbing. There is also a tad over 13GW of solar as well. If you add in biomass generation, the UK has 40% of it's electricity from renewables. The UK is hardly a world leader either. Also what makes you think the number of nuclear incidents is tiny? According to the Nuclear Regulatory Authority (US) the USA has had 13 accidents with immediate fatalities and that does not include 3 Mile Island or Crystal River or Buchanan or Erwin incidents where loads of radioactive materials were not contained. If you look at all incidents in the USA it's more than 150. How is that a tiny number?
Brilliant comment.
Gordon has a bike that he powers his modem with to make these comments....
If companies stopped cutting corners and accepted that regulations are required to keep our environment and people safe, we wouldn't have those conversations. But the fact of the matter is, we can't trust companies. They destroy and kill to get a penny, and if we do not stop them, we'll end up with more Deepwater Horizons.
@@geoffreygriffin3015 Ah so you are a troll.
I still can’t believe that the people from BP walked away without any serious punishment, because of their choices and greed people died, they should have been charged with first degree manslaughter without parole at least
In a case like this all the top executives and the board of directors should get an automatic 20 years jail time without possibility of parole.
Oh, and confiscation of all of their assets as well, of course. Then maybe others would think twice about doing the same in the future. Or does being tough on crime only apply to poor people? I think we all know the answer to that...
My hometown is an “oil town.” Most men go to work offshore as it’s the only job that pays well enough to support a family. (Or it did prior to the collapse alongside Covid.) My husband worked on the Thunderhorse until Covid and Valaris declared bankruptcy. My husband’s brother was one of the men that survived the Horizon. He received about $2mil as compensation, and is flat broke today. We lost a few family friends on the Horizon as well. Oilfield families form their own culture. And we ALL agree the movie was pure shit!
Are you serious? Ok, My sympathy's do go out to him for surviving that hell but how in the heck did he blow through 2 million in cash that fast?!
I swear y'all don't know how to save for the future down there in the south.
I remember a year or so after the disaster, my parents and i went down too St. Petersburg, FL for a week or so. My mom and i went too Treasure Island one day, and i remember seeing small spots of oil shine in the water. It was crazy to me at the time.
Excellent choice for a location. Well done!
I was in a newsroom in the inland East Texas oilfield when it happened, it was indeed wild, with the editors and reporters trying to figure out which way to spin it -- accident, negligence, or environmental disaster. I think we ended up going through all three, in that order.
I'd like to see more videos on oil rig disasters, like Piper Alpha, which was caused by an even more egregious screwup. Deepwater Horizon had a kick and a failed blowout preventer, and burned for a day and a half, Piper Alpha had a failure of lockout/tagout procedures during maintenance and burned for THREE WEEKS. And then there's the Byford Dolphin decompression chamber accident, which ... is one of those Simon will have to take a break in the middle of because it's so bad.
Also land oil rig non-disasters would make good episodes, like Spindletop and Daisy Bradford #3 (or Dad Joiner for the Biographics channel) for happier endings.
The most accurate title to a youtube video I've ever seen.
Wicked video, my dad was a Subsea super intendant for the Transocean in charge of the Blow out prevention valve (on a different rig) during in this event and I couldn’t fault a single bit of information. Great job
When will the world learn: NEVER IGNORE ENGINEERS!
Cyan Ogilvie when politics are put above science and truth is called a lie because it’s not popular then people die. Challenger... Columbia...Deepwater Horizon.
It's not as simple as that; practically every engineering disaster will have a load of engineers underestimating the risks involved.
@@Calum_S Not as many as you'd think. I used to do fault tree analysis for a living and every time it was a long list of factors and almost never was it an engineering issue. In fact I cant remember even one but it's a while back.
I’ve watched as many of your videos as I can and that is one of the all time greats. Imagine just 1, ONE, person who worked there putting his/her foot down and risk getting fired to prevent all that devastation. Ever think that it’s already happened to you in the past and you succeed. I like to think so. 💪🏽
I actually enjoyed the movie for this tragedy, it wasn’t the best thing in the world but it did go to show how this all happened due to neglect and greed
I have been enjoying your narrative voice so much! Would love to see your take and a deep dive on the Bhopal tragedy.
Still the most disgusting corporate greed “accident” I can think of...
It’s just sickening, that nobody went to jail, they were just fined... as if a fine will fix the greed from continuing on.
I wonder how big that BP execs golden parachute was.
20 million?
30 million?
40 million?
That'll obviously teach him not to do that kind of thing again!
It was still in the tens of billions in addition to the fines they'd already paid, which were also in the billions. Hardly just a slap on the wrist.
Fines = ‘legal if you’re rich’.
of which prolly insurance paid most of the fines and the whole thing is considered 'the cost of doing business'
I'm glad Simon was as neutral as possible when discussing this topic and made sure to mention that US law is strong when it comes to regulation of oil extraction
Too strong
I remember Tony Hayward in South Park.... "We're soooorryyyy"....
"Soooorrrryyy...."
The fact that BP wasn’t forcibly taken over and broken up after this says everything you need to know.
"the caustic greed that reigns chaos on innocent bystanders"
This. This verbage keeps me coming back as much as his sultry voice.
16:45. 60,000 barrels of oil, not gallons.
60,000 brl = 2,520,000 gls.
I can’t believe it’s been 10 years already 😢
Simon, this is your calling. You are great at this stuff. The perfect host as well as an awesome speaker. Kerp up the good work! These are very informative. I love history myself and I like the way you call b.s. on the fictitious tales of things and break out the truth. The sarcasm is perfect too. Have you ever considered being a voice over for shows?
This incident, coupled with mismanagement of their Texas City refinery (where they lived in denial about the chequered safety record of the plant), lead to me deciding to boycott BP from then onwards
How ?
Same. 10 years, still won't buy gas from them.
He covers several points I have not read in research and not in the movie (movie not a resource I know) and discusses some important points about its 10-yr life making them so much money. It was an incredible city in operation. With incredible consequences for any failures.
"The greatest teacher, failure is." - Yoda.
I was born in Beaumont tx, grew up in orange tx, long history of oil rigs and refineries.
jyggalag daedric prince of order congratulations
🎉
It’s sucks guys
Who else just came here from a business blaze video thinking: wait, who are you and what did you do to Simon??!!
Ba-dum TCCCHHHHH
Just you noob
for anyone who hasn't seen the movie, it's absolutely phenomenal and a real tear jerker.
I’m an oil hand in the Permian Basin. This is the example we point to on why you should use your Stop Work Authority and why you shouldn’t Bypass Safety Controls. We also have a concept called Production Bias where you focus more on making a deadline than completing the job correctly & safely. I’ve done jobs for ExxonMobil that have gone 2 months behind schedule, but all of us came home none the worse & no safety issues arose. Sometimes equipment breaks and that puts you behind schedule, throw the toolbox at the problem instead of carrying on with broken equipment that could lead to a tragedy. It might seem like all of this is basic workplace common sense, but I’ve seen dudes out in the field working in crocs, Adidas sweat pants, a fishing shirt, and a baseball cap. No hard hat, no FRC’s, no safety boots, no gas monitor. That kind of callous disregard is how things like Deepwater Horizon happen, and unfortunately you still find it out there