Who is deepwater horizon

Deepwater Horizon. Featurette Photos Top cast Edit. Douglas M. Griffin Landry as Landry. Joe Chrest Sims as Sims. Brad Leland Kaluza as Kaluza. John Malkovich Vidrine as Vidrine. Evermore Dewey A. Revette as Dewey A. Revette as JD Evermore. Peter Berg. Matthew Michael Carnahan screenplay by Matthew Sand screenplay by screen story David Barstow based upon an article by.

More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. In April , there is no oil exploration operation in the Gulf of Mexico to compare with the Deepwater Horizon oil rig with its size or sheer depth of its drilling.

However, the project for the BP oil company is beset with technical difficulties to the point where the general operational supervisor, Jimmy Harrell, and his Chief Electrical Engineer, Mike Williams, are concerned potentially dangerous trouble is brewing.

Unfortunately, visiting BP executives, frustrated by the project's long delays, order curtailed site inspections and slanted system tests to make up for lost time even as Harrell, Williams and his team helplessly protest for the sake of proper safety. On April 20, the workers' fears are realized in the worst possible way when the rig's various structural and system flaws spark a catastrophic cascade of failures that would create a massive blowout and explosion that threatens them all, even as it also begins the worst environmental disaster in US history.

When faced with our darkest hour, hope is not a tactic. Action Drama History Thriller. Rated PG for prolonged intense disaster sequences and related disturbing images. Did you know Edit. Trivia An oil rig was built just for this film, this rig is located in Chalmette, Louisiana where filming mostly took place. Director Peter Berg claimed it was one of the largest practical sets ever built; constructed of 3. Goofs Survival courses attended by oil rig staff every so often teach a special technique for jumping into the water.

The life jacket should not be worn, but held in hand. This is to stabilize the body during the fall and to avoid being decapitated upon entering the water at great speed. The life jacket floats near the point of impact, and the jumper will normally emerge close enough to it to don it inside the water. The errors were later described in detail in a January report to the president created by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling — a team of engineers, politicians and scientists tasked by President Barack Obama with investigating what caused the explosion and oil spill.

Crew members on Deepwater Horizon stood 4, feet 1, meters above the sea bed and had to rely on data from underwater instruments to make decisions. The crew worked with large, heavy steel materials and flammable oil in a natural system that can be unpredictable. On top of that, the operation was managed by a slew of contractors and subcontractors, which meant the opportunity for miscommunication was great. The Deepwater Horizon oil rig left its previous post in the Gulf of Mexico and arrived at the Macondo well in January By early April , the rig's crew was assembled and prepared to complete the three tasks required before oil could be regularly pulled from the Macondo Prospect: First, they had to drill into the bedrock and fit a metal tube into the tunnel; next, they had to pour cement down the tube to seal it in place; and finally, they would carefully remove the Deepwater Horizon rig from the well and replace it with a smaller, less expensive production rig to extract oil regularly.

Related: Gallery: Exploring the Gulf of Mexico. Problems began during drilling. BP had to stop drilling into the seabed about 2, feet m higher than expected because the pressure was too high. Next, they had to line the hole with a casing — a concrete pipe that prevents the hole from caving in.

A shorter casing would be easier to cement into place and was deemed safer by computer models, but the company ultimately decided to use a longer casing, which would be less prone to leaks. In order to hold the casing in place, concrete would be pumped into the space between the casing and the surrounding Earth. For this to work, the concrete must surround the casing evenly, otherwise it could be unstable and vulnerable to oil leaking in from the sides.

To ensure an even, snug fit, engineers fit the casing with centralizers, which are metal tubes with strips of metal sticking out on each side. Computer models recommended that the casing be fit with 21 centralizers, but BP engineers chose to insert only six centralizers because of a supply shortage. This increased the risk that the cement would surround the casing unevenly.

With the casing and centralizers in place, it was time to pour the concrete. BP engineers made several choices during this step that further increased the risk of error. First, they cut pre-cementing tests short, which prevented technicians from checking for leaked oil at the bottom of the well; they pumped the cement slower than recommended, further increasing the risk that the cement would not fill the space around the casing evenly; and they limited the amount of cement used, which can cut the risk of lost oil but increases the risk of contamination by leaving more casing exposed.

In the months leading up to the disaster, Halliburton had conducted several tests showing that the type of cement used wasn't stable, meaning that it might form pores that allow liquids and gasses to pass through it. Halliburton shared some of these test results with BP, but the company decided to proceed. The crew, made of Transocean and Haliburton employees, finished cementing just after midnight on April At that point, BP and Halliburton representatives checked a valve to be sure that the pressure from the cement was not pushing too much liquid up out of it.

After a couple of hours, the BP and Halliburton representatives emailed members of their respective teams to confirm that the cementing job had been a success. The operation went awry during the final step, when the crew planned to follow a set of precarious procedures to detach Deepwater Horizon from the well to make room for a smaller rig, the report describes.

During the process, crew members conducted positive and negative pressure tests to ensure no gas had leaked into the well. The negative pressure test should have alerted them that there was a leak, but they misinterpreted the results. At p. But that was a mistake — gaseous hydrocarbons had leaked into the well. When gaseous hydrocarbons enter a well, they expand to fill up the space, shooting up the pipe in what is called a "kick," and this is what happened at Deepwater Horizon.

The crew closed the blowout preventer — a seal that is designed to stop the expanding molecules from climbing up the well to the rig — but it was too late. The molecules climbed with increasing speed up the pipe until, at around p. A few minutes later, the gaseous hydrocarbons enveloped large areas of the rig and met at least one ignition source could have been heat or sparks from on-board equipment , which then erupted in an explosion that could be seen from miles away.

Eleven workers went missing during the explosion and were presumed dead three days later. Oil on Gulf waters after the Deepwater Horizon spill. Credit: Jonathan Henderson. Take, too, the continuing impact the spill had on human health. According to a government health study published seven years after the spill, tens of thousands of workers who first responded to the study are still wrestling with respiratory illnesses brought on by Corexit, the chemical used to disperse the spill.

And take that many of those who were affected by that chemical — mostly lower-income fisherman — are still ill, or have gone on to die. The more time that passes, the worse the spill seems to become, begging the question — could something like this happen again? As oil drilling moves farther offshore and deeper at sea, they say, the risk only increases.

Some 17 percent of the oil produced in the United States comes from the Gulf of Mexico. Over 1, platforms are connected to refineries along the shore through more than 41, kilometers of pipelines. Leading up to the coronavirus pandemic, which has caused oil prices to plummet, Gulf production continued to be remarkably robust.

In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the US interior department restructured in a bid to allow a new division of the agency, the bureau of safety and environmental enforcement, or BSEE, to focus on safety.

The move was meant to separate safety regulators from government officials who might be more motivated by the money coming in from taxes on drilling. Crucially, the Obama administration also beefed up safety rules for the offshore oil industry, including checks on blowout preventers like the one that failed on the Deepwater Horizon.

But those rules have been weakened under the Trump administration. Checks by the BSEE have been reduced as well. According to a study by the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy institute, the number of safety inspections the agency has conducted on rigs, platforms, pipelines, and other facilities during the last three years of the Trump administration decreased by 13 percent. The same study showed that enforcement actions against offshore drillers had fallen by 38 percent.

Meanwhile, offshore drilling is only going deeper and getting more dangerous. The Deepwater Horizon reached a depth of 1, meters. Now, studies show that more than half of the oil produced in the Gulf is coming from wells even deeper than that. All of this despite a study , which found that for every feet or Such accidents have been on an upswing under the Trump administration. There were also nearly 50 fatalities over that time. Lingering oil slick in the Mississippi Delta off the coast of Louisiana on May 24, Leaks are a constant state of affairs.

One oil well off the southeastern coast of Louisiana, owned by Taylor Energy, has been leaking since , spilling between and barrels per day. That a new spill will one day meet gulf shores has become and article of faith.

Unfortunately, efforts to control a new slick will likely look much as they did after the Deepwater Horizon, with armadas of local fishermen once again mustered onto the front lines and toiling in a haze of chemicals. As the oil eventually receded, many who fought to clean it up became seriously ill. Many of them have died of respiratory complications, including cancer. In the days following the blowout, some 47, people, mostly newly jobless fisherman, were contracted by BP to pilot their boats into the slick pulling skimmers.