RedHanded - ShortHand: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

A relentless barrage of oil that killed anything in its path, the disaster that befell the Deepwater Horizon oil rig took the lives of eleven crew members, destroyed an entire oceanic ecosystem, and is still severely affecting the livelihoods of coastal communities to this day.  Described as “the largest ecocide in history”, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the response of BP, the company responsible, serves as a testament to corporate greed and profit over people. Hard working crew members lost their lives, fishing towns lost their income, and billions of oceanic organisms perished, all so that BP could get back on schedule. --Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

Hello. Hello. And welcome to another episode of Short Hand. And following the unexpected success of our episode on the Bifid Dolphin, which I believe was one of the most listened to shorthands of last year. It was. We thought we would go back down that road. Wet road. Yeah, so here's another oil rig, you pervert.

On the 20th of April, 2010, the oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded. It was one of the most devastating. devastating oil disasters ever, killing 11 crew members and causing the largest marine oil spill in history. An estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil, that's about 210 million gallons of the black stuff, gushed out into the Gulf of Mexico. The spill was so large that it could be seen from space. It affected thousands of miles of coastline, killing an immeasurable amount of wildlife and costing countless livelihoods. And yet, BP, the company in charge of the rig at the time, doubled down. Its CEO, Tony Hayward, told news reporters that the damage was relatively tiny and that after

months of questions, he wanted his life back. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is a total cluster fuck of corporate cowardice and greed at a huge cost to the public and the planet. But what actually led to this tragedy? How did it? How did it? did it happen and could it have been prevented? Spoiler alert, yes, it could. This is the shorthand. Before we can talk about what happened on the deep water horizon, we're going to have to talk about drilling for oil in general and more specifically drilling at sea, because watching Armageddon isn't enough. Even when it goes perfectly, drilling into natural oil and gas deposits hundreds of metres under the sea is incredibly fucking dangerous.

which is why astronauts can't do it. The fact that we can extract oil from under the ocean at all is an absolute engineering marvel. But here's why oil itself isn't particularly unstable. In fact, before it's been refined, it's not even particularly flammable. Oil deposits that are relatively close to the surface don't have much weight above them, so they're under relatively little pressure.

When they're first tapped, the oil flows up. at a nice manageable pace, and it's later pumped manually to make sure that we've got every last drop. Shallow oil deposits are low pressure, low risk and inexpensive to harvest. But as you drill deeper into the earth, everything changes.

With all that weight bearing down on the oil and nowhere for it to escape to, the pressure builds. What's more, to slightly oversimplify, it's much, much, much hotter down there. more heat makes things expand and give off gas that also has nowhere to go. And so the pressure builds more and more. This creates high pressure, high temperature reservoirs, known as HPHT oil.

This is oil that is over 150 degrees Celsius and under almost 700 bars of pressure. To put that into perspective, the water in your tap at home is under about one bar. of pressure, and the water in a fire hose is under about 20. So you're talking about oil that is hotter than boiling water, and that's under 30 times more pressure than a water hose. And due to its high risk, harvesting HPHT oil is very expensive. But as conventional oil fields have begun to dry up, these risky but massive oil deposits have started to become pretty tempting propositions.

That's where Riggs like Deepwater Horizon come into play. What a great name. That's a great name. I think you only think that because you're the only person in the whole world who's seen Event Horizon. Deepwater Horizon is also a film. Is it? Yeah. It's got like Mark Wahlberg in it, I think.

Deepwater Horizon. Is it about this? It is about this. It is about this. Not just a coincidence. No, it is about this. Yeah, it's got Mark Wahlberg in it. Now, there you go.

Marky Mark. So the situation that Surruti just illustrated for you wonderfully is where rigs like Deepwater Horizon come into play. Deepwater Horizon first entered service in 2001, and as a 50-ton drilling rig, its only goal in its machini life was to find oil deposits. And Deepwater Horizon cost her owners, TransOcean, over half a billion dollars. and she was worth every penny, widely regarded to be one of the safest and most technologically advanced offshore drilling rigs in the world. She was swiftly leased to BP. Formerly British Petroleum, BP is one of the largest companies in the world,

part of seven supermajors who dominate the oil and gas industry. BP also gave Roaldahl his first ever job. And Deepwater Horizon had a very lucky streak. While working on some of the most difficult oil reservoirs in the Gulf of Mexico, she discovered countless fresh oil deposits and even tapped the deepest oil well in the world 10 kilometres below sea level. Between 2001 and 2009, Deepwater Horizon was one of the most successful drilling rigs in history, making the rig and its crew the absolute A-team of the rigging world.

It was the team you called to achieve the unachievable. And on the 20th of April 2010, they attempted the unachievable once again. But this time, things went very wrong. Something we should make very clear before we carry on is that Deepwater Horizon was never supposed to harvest any oil. Deepwater Horizon's job was to drill down into potential oil deposits to see if any oil or gas was down there, and then leave a channel down into the deposit. That meant that a production platform could then come in and extract the oil or gas over a number of years. To do this, Deepwater Horizon and her crew would bring a special tube down onto the seabed,

then run a huge drill through it, slowly but surely drilling through the earth below until they hit oil. It's a massive job, incredibly dangerous and incredibly time-consuming. As the drill burrows into the earth, the crew has to stop constantly to reinforce the tunnel with concrete sleeves that stop it collapsing in on itself and to stop oil or gas leaking out. On top of this, at any moment, they could hit a highly pressurised oil or gas deposit that might fire its way back up the tube and onto the rig. To avoid this, the crew constantly flows their own pressurised liquid,

referred to as mud down the tube towards the oil. reservoir. This mud is designed to lubricate the drill and counteract the pressure of any oil or gas that might be hit. As they drill deeper into the earth, drilling rigs regularly hit small pockets of gas and oil that violently enter the drilling tube. These small accidents are called kicks and are expected during the drilling process. As long as the pocket of oil or gas is relatively small and there's high pressure mud being forced down the drilling tube, they're not really a big deal. What is a very big deal is if the oil from the main oil reservoir

starts to come up the drilling tube and isn't forced back down by the mud. Oh, it's like when you watch people flambay things and it goes back up the alcohol and into the bottle and expose. How often are you watching people flambay? I've seen it happen. I've seen it happen. Not in person.

If oil reaches the drilling rig on the surface, you get what's known as a blowout. The single worst thing that can happen on a rig. In a blowout, oil and gas burst out onto the rig, catching fire and killing everyone. Sounds pretty bad. And that's what happened on the 20th of April 2010. The oil reservoir that ended the deep water horizon was called the Macondo.

And the cavity they'd spent over a month drilling into had been nicknamed the well from hell. The operation was fraught with issues from day one. BP had scheduled for Deepwater Horizon to spend 55 days drilling down, creating a well and then resealing it so a production platform could come back later and harvest the oil. By the 20th of April, the drilling was almost a month over-schedule, and BP was breathing down the crew's neck to finish up. Every day that the drilling went over schedule cost the company around a million dollars,

and the rig was already supposed to be drilling in another location. On top of this, the rig urgently needed routine maintenance. Some critical systems hadn't been properly serviced in years. One of these critical systems was the blowout preventer, or BOP, a crucial piece of kit that sits on the seabed at the surface of the well. And, well, as a name suggests, it prevents blowouts from happening. By the early evening of April 20th, the crew of Deepwater Horizon, led by Mark Wahlberg,

had almost completed the lengthy task of sealing up the well that they'd created. That's a laborious process. The well has to be filled with heavy cement and thick tubing designed to keep the pressurised oil deposit at bay, whilst also keeping it accessible for harvesting. Throughout this painstaking process, high-pressure mud is continuously being fired down the well just in case the concrete fails.

The mud is only turned off, once every other step, has been completed and tested. By the end of that day, only one step remained before the Deepwater Horizon's crew could officially plug their new well and move on, turning off the mud and replacing it with seawater, which sounds simple enough. But on one of these babies, nothing is simple.

Here, they have to slowly release the pressure being forced down onto the well, to see if the concrete plug is strong enough to hold the oil and gas. And the pressure test that evening did not go as planned, The test was inconclusive. Reading showed that the pressure had spiked when the mud was turned off, which indicated that the well was leaking. But members of BP's management team were getting testy.

They insisted that the test had gone to plan and the crew's job was all but done. Even so, the team redid the test, which was completed at 8pm. At this point the crew and the BP management, all conceded that the well was stable. It wasn't. By 8.50pm, the crew had started to remove the mud from the well, and hydrocarbons, aka gas and oil, had started to leak through the concrete plug. By 938, oil and gas made its way all the way up the several kilometres of drilled earth, and it started rising up the pipe that connects the oil well to the rig.

It passed through the enormous blowout preventer, which was designed to stop this exact scenario. Two floor hands working upstairs glanced at the monitor to see mud gushing out onto the drilling floor. Seconds later, the heavy seals designed to keep the liquid at bay failed. Liquid sprayed out from the large scaffolding-like drilling tower known as the Derek. According to the crew, the noise of rushing water was so loud

sounded like a jet engine. This might sound catastrophic, but at this point things still could have been recovered. The crew settled on two options. A, they could try and contain the blowout, B, they could let it fly, letting the blow out into the sea. In theory, the crew had a handbook given to them by Transocean,

the owners of Deepwater Horizon that gave them clear instructions on when to try and contain the blowout and when to give up and vent into the ocean. But the handbook was confusing and contradictory, and the crew were none the wiser. Pressurised gas from deep in the reservoir had now made its way all the way up to the rig

and began spraying as a fine mist onto the drilling floor. Immediately alarms, signaling high levels of flammable gas erupted across the ship. Teams on the captain's bridge, the engine room and the drilling shack were now all aware that they were in serious trouble. But once again, progress stalled. Under so much pressure for the well from hell to be finally finished, nobody wanted to be seen to be holding things up. So the issue was downplayed.

In theory, what to do next shouldn't have even been a question. They should have sounded the general alarm and shut down the rig. But neither of those things happened. these general alarms were usually on an automated system that contacted the Coast Guard if any critical incident was detected. But the Riggs owner, TransOcean, had disabled it. So it had to be set off manually. The same went for the emergency shutdown.

That left those decisions to human judgment on how serious the situation was. And in the moment, the crew members in charge misjudged that seriousness. Both on the bridge and in the engine room, nobody hit the large red emergency shutdown button. Gas continued to leak onto Deepwater Horizon, slowly seeping onto the upper decks. Down on the drilling floor, a team was fighting hard, but they had no idea the danger they were in. A blowout preventer can either restrict the flow of oil from the well or in a complete disaster situation, sever the rig from the well entirely.

Unfortunately, the drilling team chose to try and restrict the flow before going the whole hog and cutting themselves loose. And also, if it's like the gas that's leaking out first, natural gas, they add that smell to it. I believe that it's like actually odourless when it comes out of the ground. So they wouldn't have even been like, can everyone smell that? and some have pointed to this as the turning point that sealed deep water horizon's fate

other people say that it was already too late but regardless just nine minutes after the mud began spilling onto the drilling floor gas was sucked into two of the rig's enormous engines and seconds later there was a monumental explosion it's so genoble isn't it like the handbook not really saying what you're supposed to be doing and then everything having to be like manual shutdown And if you look at pictures of the explosion, it is insane.

Look at that. Yeah. Bad times. It looks like a volcano erupting. Most of the crew had no idea, though, that anything was wrong, until a fireball, hundreds of feet high, engulfed the rig and left a mushroom cloud in the sky. Amazingly, the majority of the crew were actually unharmed. How?

But they were by no means out of the woods yet. crew members had to clamber their way from below deck up into the fresh air outside. You'd hope that a several hundred foot fireball would put a stop to all that second-guessing that had caused the issue in the first place. But no. Upstairs, there were still arguments about the severity of the situation. Part of the crew wanted to hit their biggest and reddest button, one that severed them from the oil well and released the rig from the fuel source. but the captain was still reluctant. So they debated for more precious minutes,

trying to get permission from BP or the rig's owner Transocean to cut themselves loose. Eventually the call came, but it was far too late. Down on the seabed, the pipework that connected the rig to the well had become warped by the heat and the movement from the blowout. So when the crew finally hit the button to cut themselves loose, the giant steel jaws that were supposed to sever the pipe, missed.

With the rig now permanently bonded to the well, and with an ever larger blaze raging on deck, the crew finally started to run for the lifeboats. The majority made it, but in the panic the boats left several crew members still on board. The lifeboat sailed to a nearby support vessel and watched in horror as crew members threw themselves into the ocean from the 34-meter-high top deck. Despite all of this, unbelievably, out of the 126 souls on board, 115 survived. The 11 who died were all at or near the site of the first explosion, and were likely killed instantly by the blast, which is not a terrible way to go.

Deepwater horizon burned for about 36 hours as fire vessels tried to contain the blaze, before eventually she sank on the 22nd of April 2010. As she sank, the pipework connecting her to the oil well began to disintegrate. And what came next was one of the most catastrophic environmental disasters in history? At first, BP CEO, Tony Haywood, told the news that wasn't so bad. But the public response was brutal. So much so that the then-P-President Barack Obama went down to Louisiana, saying, so I know who's aster kick.

Tony Hayward did admit that it was an ecological disaster and put out an apology video so cringeworthy, it got spoofed on South Park. Hello, I'm Tony Hayward, president and CEO of BP. Our accidental drilling spill again in the Gulf is a tragedy that should have never happened. And to all those affected, I want to say, we are deeply sorry. We're sorry. We're sorry. We're sorry.

Because ecological disaster is still putting it mildly. The damage to wildlife and livelihoods in the Gulf of Mexico has been described as the largest ecocide in history. Because of the depth and complexity of the drilling site, the Macondo well continued to spill oil into the ocean for over four months. The US government later estimated that roughly 5 million barrels of oil had been released into the Gulf of Mexico, covering over 1,000 miles of coastline in oil. Above the sea surface, the estimated wildlife death toll sailed past 100,000 animals.

And that number doesn't even include the toll on sea life. The number's unknown, but undoubtedly enormous. Oil is toxic to fish at all stages of. of life and affects reproduction for decades. And the spill is still affecting the shrimp, oyster and fishing industries today. I always think about baby seals getting stuck in oil, do you? Why do I think that? Is it because of The Simpsons, probably?

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I recently, my cousin gave me this book and she was like, please read it. And it has the best opening line. Baby Seal walks into a club. For their part, BP Plea. guilty to felony manslaughter and federal environmental crimes for the 11 crew that were killed, and the devastating effect the spill had on the environment.

They were initially fined for around $4 billion. They actually attempted to make a deal with the Supreme Court to cap the potential compensation payouts. But the Supreme Court rejected this deal. It's not like them, and as a result, BP had paid over $65 billion in compensation to those affected by the spill. BP had to sell oil fields and infrastructure and their share prices plummeted. Probably should have just let them drill a bit more slowly for a few more days, shouldn't you? In 2010, pre-disaster, BP was worth over $140 billion. And to this day, after a decade of recovery, they're worth half of that.

Wow. So it can happen. There you go. Another oil rig for you. Less people getting sucked through keyholes in this one. Yeah. You know. Yeah.

There's only so much we can do. I know. If you have an oil rig story or any story that you want us to cover on shorthand, I don't know. Tell someone. Tell someone. Tell someone. Tell someone. Tell someone.

Tell someone here about that and we will see what we can do. Otherwise, we are just going by your voting with your ears. So thank you very much for listening. And we will see you next week for another shorthand. Goodbye. Bye.