On the evening of April 20, 2010, the crew aboard the Deepwater Horizon, an oil rig situated in the Gulf of Mexico, had just finished testing the safety on a recently completed well. Just hours after the well was given the green light, a bubble of methane gas, which would later ignite the rig and engulf it entirely in flames, escaped. The rig's 126 crew members had less than five minutes to evacuate. Sadly, only 115 made it.
Two days later, the Deepwater Horizon sank after burning for more than a day. Around the same time, it became public that crude oil was gushing from the well at the seabed, but the details regarding the severity of the spill were contradictory and considerably downplayed. The world then watched the largest oil spill and environmental disaster unfold. It took nearly three months to stop the oil from spewing into the ocean, but the cleanup effort is far from over.
The events leading up to the explosion and subsequent oil spill have since sparked an abundance of litigations that will continue for many years. Blame has been tossed back and forth, but ultimately, the courts have ruled that BP, the company that was leasing the rig at the time of the catastrophe, is chiefly responsible. Probing done into the years, months, and minutes before the calamity has revealed a chain of events that point to human negligence as the root of the accident. Decisions were made, suggestions were ignored, and evidence was tampered with, which are all investigated on National Geographic Channel's Seconds from Disaster. |
