On the evening of April 20, 2010, two BP executives in from Houston were taking turns at a video simulator on the bridge of the Deepwater Horizon. The crew had programmed in 70-knot winds and 30-foot seas, knocked out two of the rig’s six thrusters, and let the visitors try to keep the rig in position.
Then the captain looked up. “What’s that?” He opened the bridge door. The supply boat alongside was glistening with what looked like drilling mud. Below them, BP’s Macondo well was blowing out.
The rig, owned by Transocean, had two commanders. While it was latched onto a well, the offshore installation manager, or OIM, ran it. While it was moving, the captain did. That night it was latched. But the operations manual had planned for exactly this kind of night: in an emergency, the captain took full control. The handover could be made out loud and announced over the public address system. Only one person could be in charge at any given moment.
Within minutes came the first explosion, then a second, and the power went out. What mattered now was the emergency disconnect system, or EDS. Pressing it was supposed to seal the well at the seabed and cut the rig loose, starving the fire of gas.
The subsea supervisor reached the bridge and told the captain, “I’m EDSing.” The captain answered, “No, calm down. We’re not EDSing.” The supervisor went to the panel anyway, where BP’s well site leader was standing. “I’m getting off here,” the supervisor said. “Yeah, hit the button.” He hit it.
The OIM had been in the shower when the rig blew. He groped his way out of his wrecked cabin, without shoes, and reached the bridge several minutes after the explosions. No one announced a handover. So the captain, the man the manual had just put in charge, asked the OIM for permission to disconnect. He got it, and turned to the subsea supervisor.
“I already hit it.”
Witness accounts of those minutes do not line up exactly. In the National Commission’s version, someone on the bridge yelled that the supervisor could not disconnect without the OIM’s approval. The Coast Guard concluded that the captain apparently did not know he had the authority to press the button at all.
The button did not work anyway. The panel lit up as if the sequence had started, but the Coast Guard found the signal never left it, because there was no hydraulic power; the Commission thought the first explosion may already have damaged the cables to the blowout preventer. The Coast Guard did not claim the confusion caused the disaster. It said the confusion may have affected the decision, and that it could not tell whether the captain hesitated out of indecision, a lack of training, or a handover that never properly happened.
The two bosses were partly a paperwork accident. The Marshall Islands, where the rig was registered, had listed it as a self-propelled rig rather than one held in place by thrusters, and later called that a “clerical error.” The listing let Transocean split command. A rig of the same kind flying the US flag could not have done so.
Eleven people died. The Deepwater Horizon sank on the morning of April 22, and oil flowed into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days. Among the investigators’ recommendations: rules that clearly name the person in charge of every drilling rig working off the US coast, in normal operations and in an emergency.