April 20th, 2010.
Forty-one miles off the Louisiana coast, the
Deepwater Horizon drilling rig leased by BP
suffered a devastating blowout and exploded
in the Gulf of Mexico.
It was a very chaotic time…
11 people lost their lives, many others were
injured.
It was catastrophic.
Deepwater was probably the most complex and
diverse oil spill in the history of oil spills.
People were very prepared for another Exxon
Valdez...
They weren't prepared for this.
While the Coast Guard searched for survivors
from the air, response teams worked to contain
the fire at the surface.
But in the deep sea, nearly a mile beneath
the rig, the largest offshore oil spill on
record was just getting started.
The first time I saw a video of the discharging
wellhead it literally took my breath away.
I realized how truly bad this was and how
difficult it was going to be to stop the disaster
that was unfolding.
Over the next 87 days, BP’s Macondo wellhead
discharged roughly 134 million gallons of
oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
The unprecedented spill affected nearly 68,000
square miles of ocean surface and damaged
1,300 miles of shoreline across five states.
Despite months of clean-up efforts, the spill
became one of the largest environmental catastrophes
in American history.
I knew pretty early on that this was going
to be a marathon, not a sprint.
It was one of the most intense periods of
my scientific life.
As a result of the developing spill, the Gulf
of Mexico Research Initiative, or GoMRI, was
created with a $500-million-dollar grant from
BP for peer-reviewed, independent research
on the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative just
transformed our knowledge of the Gulf of Mexico.
We started with a clean whiteboard to try
to understand what we thought would be important
10 years from that point.
So what would we have to know to have a better
response to it?
There's a lot going on here. Wow.
What was the extent of Deepwater Horizon’s
damage to ecosystems deep in the Gulf of Mexico?
And are we prepared for the next big spill?
