What Happened at the Macondo Well?
Fireboat response crews battling the blazing remnants of the Deepwater Horizon, the offshore drilling rig owned by Transocean that exploded when BP’s Macondo oil well ruptured in the Gulf of Mexico, April 21, 2010. Photo: U.S. Coast Guard
Journalist and author Peter Maass has reviewed four recently published books on the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Maass, whose book Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil is a searing indictment of the global oil industry, knows only too well that BP is hardly the bad apple. As he says in the review, “BP recklessly cut corners whenever it could, but so did Transocean, and so did—does—the rest of the fossil fuel industry.”
Understanding the Deepwater Horizon disaster is important then, because of what happened of course, but also because this can happen again, anywhere.
