Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling
TL;DR
Deepwater Horizon's alarm was silenced to let crew sleep—12 minutes between detection and warning cost 11 lives.
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The definitive post-mortem on the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history (Macondo well, Gulf of Mexico). Documents how alarm system inhibition, communication failures, and regulatory capture combined to kill 11 workers and spill 5 million barrels of crude over 87 days. Essential reading for understanding how organizations disable their own warning systems—and what happens when they do.
Key Findings from Spill (2011)
- General alarm was 'inhibited' for a year before the blowout to prevent false alarms waking crew
- 12 minutes elapsed between high gas alarms and general alarm reaching crew
- 11 workers killed, 17 injured, 5 million barrels of oil spilled over 87 days
- Minerals Management Service had adopted 78 industry-generated standards (regulatory capture)
- Root cause was systemic, not single-point failure: 'complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human judgments, engineering design'
- MMS restructured into three separate agencies (ONRR, BOEM, BSEE) to eliminate conflicts of interest