had been photoshopped into the image. Before this bit of trickery, most of the screens were blank.
I try to make out changes in the water’s color as we fly past the boom out into the Gulf, wondering what is oil and what is not. I see great black sheens and stretches of lighter water, but I have spent enough time on the coast to know how ocean colors can change, with or without oil. I don’t want to sound like an idiot, but I decide to ask Brian if I am seeing what I think I am seeing. He tells me that he can’t really see much oil at the moment, and the pilot agrees.
“You wouldn’t have believed it when we first came out,” he says. “You wouldn’t have been able to miss it then. It covered everything.”
I assume that by now much of it has been sunk to the ocean floor. When I look down my eyes can’t penetrate the surface, but just yesterday I read an interview with Samantha Joye, a scientist from the University of Georgia, who spoke of witnessing black plumes, many miles long, that travel deep under the water, large dead areas with no oxygen and no fish.7
After another fifteen minutes we reach the Deepwater Horizon rig itself. As we approach, the dozens of boats below look like Tonka toys gathered around the rig, as if trying to protect and comfort it. But as we get closer, it is clear the rig needs no comfort. It is emblazoned with BP’s green and sunny logo and appears almost cheery, as it is no doubt supposed to look. The scene looks not just sunny but industrious, with no hint of despair.
From up here the rig may look like a toy, but it is in fact a great metal island, capable of housing over a hundred men. In broad daylight it is hard to picture the fiery hell of April 20, the night when the methane bubble blew up through the well and exploded at the platform, killing eleven men, injuring seventeen more, and sending dozens leaping off the platform into the flaming water. What was it like to take that ten-story plunge? The chief engineer said later that he thought of his wife and his little girl before closing his eyes and making the leap. Those, I am sure, would have been exactly my thoughts.
In the story being told right now the Deepwater explosion was a great tragedy, but also something anomalous, an “accident,” of course, a terrible accident. But is something an accident if crucial tests are skipped, if costs are cut, if warning systems are turned off so alarms won’t ring, and if even the CEOs of Shell and Exxon—a Big Oil gang that is known to stick together—have sworn in front of Congress that the Deepwater Horizon well did not come close to meeting industry standards? Is something an accident if a multi-billion-dollar company, the world’s fourth largest, decides it needs even greater profits, and sends a topdown directive to cut costs company wide by 25 perecent? “I’m not a cement engineer,” BP’s CEO Tony Hayward told Congress in way of defense, but presumably he had a few cement engineers working for him. He also said, “I’d like my life back,” a sentiment no doubt shared by the eleven dead crew members and their families.
Far from anomalous, disasters had, by the time of the spill, become commonplace in the world of British Petroleum. Over the past decade the company went from the little brother of oil to one of the big guns, acquiring Amoco and Arco in the process. But during that heady rush the company’s M.O. was to take risks and cut costs, safety be damned. This is not overstatement. BP has led the Big Oil league in deaths and disaster. In 2005, fifteen people were killed and 170 injured when BP’s Texas City refinery blew up due to shoddy safety standards. In July of that same year BP’s flagship for deepwater drilling, the giant off-shore rig Thunder Horse—Thunder Horse!—was toppled, seemingly by Hurricane Dennis but in fact by faulty valves hastily installed. The next year BP hit the disaster trifecta when 20,000 gallons spilled from a rusty pipeline in Prudehoe Bay on the north slope of Alaska.8
Which brings us back to the question: if things happen regularly and for the same reasons, do they still qualify as accidents? Which leads in turn to the next and larger question: if we, as a country, keep acting in ways that lead to shocking events, isn’t it time to stop being shocked?
Not that it isn’t shocking. A twenty thousand gallon spill like the one in Alaska is a disaster. But over two hundred million gallons have spilled from the well below me since early April.
We circle the rig again. I stare down to try to see the deeper story. It was down there that eleven people were sacrificed in the name of profit. Is that an exaggeration? Tony Hayward and Carl-Henric Svanberg might be scapegoats—and fine scapegoats they are, complete with their James Bond villain accents—but what about the board of directors? And what about the system that created the board? The group and the philosophy that demanded that this company, despite earning billions of dollars, had to earn even more to sate them; that to do so, to provide more billions, a 25 percent cut in operations had to be enacted, even as those operations were expanding downward into new territory, 13,000 feet below the ocean floor? How were those cuts enacted? Simply and systematically: by cutting corners and skipping regulations and eliminating safety measures. Piles of money, enough to support a small town for decades, were being divided between a board made up of a dozen or so people. And yet no one could be bothered to pay a few hundred thousand on tests, nor could they abide alarms that might slow them down.9
Take this down to a personal level and it seems almost inconceivable. This is not the first time I’ve traveled this country and I am always surprised by how decent people are. But where are all those exceptional individuals in a moment like this one? Is it only in large groups that people are allowed to bury their morals? No healthy individual would ever do to their family or friends what this corporation has done to the people of the Gulf. Individuals would face immediate ostracism. Maybe it’s as simple a problem as the size of the organization, or even the words organization and system. When profit is made the greatest priority and one’s job—one’s self-interest—hinges on that profit, simple commonsensical goodness flies out the window.
I am wrestling with these ideas and can’t stem the tide of confusion. It’s too much to handle all at once. In our oversimplified political discourse we talk a lot about the importance of business and growth, but we also talk a lot about freedom and individual rights. But a corporation like BP is about as individualistic as a batch of flesh-eating bacteria—there is no debate over what the collective will is: grow and profit, no matter the cost. What does freedom mean when we blindly trust that an entity like BP will not destroy the world we rely on for our health, happiness, and well-being?
We don’t stop there, though. Before I came down here I watched the congressional hearings where Tony Hayward testified. A woman jumped up from the back row and waved her hands, which she had painted black, and yelled: “He should be charged with a crime!” She was quickly dragged away. Maybe most people will roll their eyes and call her a wacko, but she is right. Rather than being charged with a crime, this man’s famously inept and dangerous company is being charged with running the cleanup. It is hard to imagine a culture in which this could possibly happen: not only do we trust them, but, when they err, we trust them yet more.
As we spin over this giant pool of water a graphic and slightly inelegant metaphor comes to mind. It’s as if BP were a houseguest who takes a shit in your bathtub and then, loudly and boorishly, orders your children to clean it up. Worse still, he slips each of your kids a fiver and has them sign a piece of paper promising that they won’t tell anyone what really happened. The truly wild thing down here is that everyone has gone along with this plan, carrying it out as if it makes sense, nodding and going about their unsavory business.
After we fly over the rig we head toward Grand Isle, a national park at the end of one of the green fingers of land that reaches out into the Mississippi Delta. It has long been regarded as one of the most beautiful
