INTRO

Amy Scott: Hi it’s Amy, I’m excited to introduce you to a new podcast from APM Studios and Western Sounds called Ripple. In the immediate aftermath of major disasters, there is always a swarm of media attention. The public is captivated by breaking news: there’s coverage and controversy, and then… the cameras and the public move on. But the stories aren’t over. Ripple is a new series investigating the stories we were told were over. In season one, the reporting team traveled hundreds of miles across the Gulf Coast to learn the ongoing effects of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill – which are still impacting many coastal residents more than a decade later. It’s a fascinating story and we hope you like it. Here is episode 1.

[Music]

Dan Leone (host):

Do you remember the BP oil spill?

It happened on the Gulf Coast in 2010.

A couple years ago I was talking with my father about it. I don’t really remember how it came up.

But we’re sort of – ya know, talking about what caused the spill, talking about how much trouble BP got in, talking about how it all finally ended.

And we were managing to have a pretty long conversation about this oil spill from over a decade ago, right? So at one point I asked him – “Did you ever do any research on this?” He said, “No.” I said, “Yeah, me neither. So how do we know all this shit?”

He said, “I dunno – the news I assume? Osmosis?”

I said, “Yeah, fair enough.”

But then out of curiosity, I asked some other people I knew. I said, “Hey, do you remember that BP oil spill?”

And they remembered the exact same story as my father and I. Beat for beat.

We all vaguely remembered an accident on an oil rig, an ecological disaster spiraling out of control, a months-long government response. We didn’t remember a happy ending, but we all thought that, for the most part, a worst case scenario was avoided; the Gulf eventually recovered. 

But I started wondering – is that story we all remember the whole picture? Is that really what went down? So I started looking into it. I went to the Gulf Coast. To talk to the people who lived the oil spill.

To talk to the people who, it turns out, are still living it.

[Boat Ambi fades in fast]

Dan: So hold up. Hold up. So I’m recording.

Mike Arcenaux: Oh, you recording?

Dan: Yeah, I’m recording now. Who the hell are you? And where the hell are we?

Mike Arcenaux: Okay. My name is Mike Arcenaux. I am in Burg, Louisiana at this moment in a waterway called Company Canal.

Dan: Company Canal. What significance is this place? What do people do here?

Mike Arcenaux: Exactly what we doing. Enjoying life.

Dan: Just zipping around.

Mike Arcenaux: Enjoying life.

Dan: Moving around on a boat.

Mike Arcenaux: Yes.

Mike Arcenaux: Nah, fishing. It’s a transverse canal for goods, oil and product. Whatever it may be.

South Louisiana was ground zero for the oil spill – I’d never been to South Louisiana before.

Dan: I should specify for this interview, Mike is a smartass. So I’m going to ask him a question, he’s going to give me a bullshit answer. Then he’s going to give me the real answer. Is that right?

Mike Arcenaux: 40% of the time.

Dan: 40% of the time.

Mike Arcenaux: Okay. We’ll be a hundred percent serious.

Mike Arcenaux: Get the fuck out the boat. (Laughter dips under)

I was on Company Canal to learn what life is like in South Louisiana. And luckily, my two guides here were qualified teachers. They make their living down here.

Dan: And who are you? What’s your name?

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: Oh, my name’s Norman Billiard. Born and raised down here. I mean shoot – it’s one of my favorite things to be on the water. I’d rather be on the water than be on land.

Mike Arcenaux: Look at that water moccasin.

Mike Arcenaux: That’s some of the hazards of South Louisiana. You live with them.

Dan: Water moccasin. You ever gotten bit?

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: Oh yeah, dude. You grow up getting bit by them things.

Dan: What happens?

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: Run high fever, sick like a dog. Oh man, I had to go to the hospital. They had to give me a steroid shot. The worst ones are the small ones. The babies. Because the babies don’t know how much poison they’re injecting.

Mike and Norman were teaching me lessons at a rapid clip. They taught me how to identify old abandoned oil wells, they explained that real alligator hunting is much less dramatic than you see on television, and they taught me a very valuable lesson about fast boats.

[Boat motor revs, wind rumbles in the microphone]

Mike Arcenaux: It runs 70 miles an hour, this boat.

Norman Luke Bulliard Jr: What?

Mike Arcenaux: And it moves.

Norman Luke Bulliard Jr: I can tell.

[Boat speeding up dips under]

The thing is, when you’re on a boat going 70 miles an hour, you should really wear your hat backwards…

[Boat speeds faster and faster]

Mike Arcenaux: That’s 4,000.

Mike Arcenaux: Gonna lose my hat.

Dan: Lost mine.

See, cause my hat was on forwards so the wind ripped the thing clean off my head. I was telling Mike not to bother trying to find it. 

Dan: It’s not important. It’s gone forever.

But Mike insisted. He seemed genuinely worried about what the Louisiana sun was gonna do to my bald head.

Here’s another thing I learned: before you tell your boat mates that your hat flew into the water…

Mike Arcenaux: You just lost it right before I slowed down?

Dan: Oh yeah, it came off. But it went flying, man. We’re not going to be able to find it.

Mike Arcenaux: You sure? Did it fall in the back of the… Look, right there behind you!

Dan: Oh, God dammit.

[All laughing]

You should really double check to be sure it didn’t just fall into the boat right behind you.

Mike Arcenaux: Makin’ us look for a ghost over here.

They could have, probably should have, been pissed at me for wasting their time and their gasoline, but instead…

Dan: I come to Louisiana, and make a complete asshole of myself.

Mike Arcenaux: Welcome to the crew, bro.

Dan: Appreciate it.

(Laughter)

They just let it go. No hard feelings.

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: Louisiana lifestyle is totally different from other lifestyles. You ain’t gonna find the hospitality.

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: I don’t care who you are. You come to Louisiana, you’re not really gonna want to leave.

Louisiana’s been through a lot. From that boat, the wounds were obvious. You see hurricane damage, coastal erosion, houses disappearing into the water.

So it might have been all that, in combination with their hospitality, that had me really hesitant to fuck up the mood by bringing up another wound.

The BP oil spill started about 13 years and 140 miles away from where we were – there was an accident on a massive oil rig. There were injuries and there were deaths. And then millions of gallons of crude oil surged into the ocean.

Dan: Let let me ask you a question. Do you think there’s gonna be another, uh, another oil spill at some point?

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: I pray to God not to be honest with you. I really do pray to God they don’t.

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: Ever since the oil spill hit, I ain’t been on this. I ain’t been out here.

Dan: Why?

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: I mean, right after the oil spill we came out here, and it’s like you didn’t see as much fish.

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: Before the oil spill, dude, you seen shrimp galore. I mean – now it’s like, don’t get me wrong, they do got a lot of shrimp, but it’s nothing like what it used to be.

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: And it’s just, it’s sad, dude, because that BP, a lot of people don’t realize how much it really truly impacted Louisiana.

Mike Arcenaux: No doubt.

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: And that’s why I say you live, you learn, and you adapt. That’s all you can do. I really don’t got nothing against BP trying to do what they did. I mean, from what I understand, they was trying to be the one to do the deepest well in the world. I mean, you can’t fault ’em for that. But I mean, I know some of the people that knows the ones that died on Deepwater Horizon. And I really don’t even want to talk about it – honest – because it does bother me that much.

Dan: Why does it bother you so much?

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: When you see your best friend cry? Cuz he can’t talk to –

(voice cracks, silence, tears)

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: When your best friend can’t talk to his dad.

Mike Arcenaux: That’s, that’s the, that’s the seriousness of the situation. You know what I’m saying? It’s like, you know, this is a genuine example of Cajun people. I got tears in my eyes for him. I have no idea who he’s talking about. That’s our culture. You know? He hurts. We hurt.

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: His dad died on that rig. And a lot of people don’t understand that. His dad’s never gonna be there. Because of some stupid screw up.

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: I mean, that’s why I say I don’t fault nobody. I mean, I don’t fault ’em for tryna be the first one to do a deep water. I mean, it’s just sometimes money ain’t everything, dude. I mean, what you gonna do with money? We all have the same coffin size. We all going in the same place. Whether you going to heaven or you going to hell, hopefully I believe I’m going to heaven.

[Mike Arcenaux scoffs]

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: Try to, at least.

I learned a lot from Mike and Norman.

The three of us talked for hours about the BP oil spill story I half-remembered.

The more they told me about the impacts of the spill, the more I understood that the story I had in my head was so incomplete, it may as well have been fiction. The ending I remembered, wasn’t really an ending at all. 

After Company Canal, I didn’t leave the Gulf Coast. I stayed for a while, drove a lot of miles, and sought out stories from more coastal residents who lived through the spill.  

And when you hear their stories, you’ll understand why there are those who might have preferred that we didn’t remember them.

Mike Arcenaux: I want to bring this to your attention. Your project name is Ripple?

Dan: Yes, sir.

Mike Arcenaux: Couldn’t name it any better.

Dan: No?

Mike Arcenaux: Because it’s a serious ripple effect from years ago. And it’s still rippling here in south Louisiana.

From Western Sound and APM Studios, I’m Dan Leone. 

This is Ripple. 

When I asked people what they remembered about the BP oil spill – almost everyone remembered that it started with a fire, or maybe an explosion, in the Gulf of Mexico. 

The Gulf of Mexico is a cash cow for the United States government. It’s mapped out, then divvied up into regions with names like Destin Dome and Mississippi Canyon. These regions are further chopped up into blocks. Then, these blocks are leased out to companies for things like oil exploration and production.

Back in 2008, British Petroleum paid the US government a cool 34 million dollars to lease Mississippi Canyon Block 252. A nine-square-mile plot of ocean off the southeast coast of Louisiana. 

Expectations were high; it was believed that the block might be hiding 50 million barrels of oil. That’s billions and billions of dollars if BP could find it and get the oil out of the ocean floor. Which is 5,000 feet below the surface. 

Drilling at that depth is risky – and there’s no guarantee of success. But BP asked specifically for one rig to do the job: the Deepwater Horizon. A 560 million dollar behemoth. It was 396 by 256 feet. And it was described as “lucky” and “celebrated.” Months earlier, off the coast of Houston, that rig had drilled the deepest well in the world.

So the Deepwater Horizon was towed to Block 252, and in February 2010, the crew on the rig started drilling. 

Two months later, on April 20th, there was an accident.

Andy Greenwood: It’s something you, you don’t forget. Something like that.

One of the first people to learn of a potential problem offshore was this man:

Andy Greenwood: My name is Andy Greenwood. I’m an officer in the United States Coast Guard. Uh, I’ve been serving for over 21 years.

Andy Greenwood: It was about, I would say, around nine thirty or so that we got the call for a report of an oil rig on fire.

Andy was a pilot for the Coast Guard. He got a lot of calls about things happening far out on the ocean. At first, he isn’t too concerned by what he hears. 

Andy Greenwood: Most of the time when we get a call for an oil rig on fire – it’s some good samaritan, saw natural gas being burned off and thought something was wrong. Which was a normal occurrence for the oil rigs out there.

Andy Greenwood: You know, we were taking it seriously and, and certainly went out with, uh, appropriate haste. But, in the back of our minds, we kind of thought maybe this was another one of those.

Andy takes off from where he’s stationed in Mobile, Alabama, and starts flying south.  

Andy Greenwood: And I asked the other pilot who was actually flying the aircraft and making sure we were safe, uh, at the time, uh, “Hey, do you have that GPS position? What was that position again? I don’t have it written down.” And he was like, “I got it.” I was like, “What does that mean?” And he was like, “Look up.” So I did. And right on the horizon was like, you know, 80 miles away was what looked like a candle, uh, off in the distance.

Andy Greenwood: It was unreal.

The Deepwater Horizon was on fire. The flames spitting into the sky.  

Andy Greenwood: But we, you could feel the heat from the inferno on the glass in the cockpit. And it was very clear that this was not your typical oil rig burn off like we might have suspected.

Andy Greenwood: I knew this was something that was pretty significant.

He also knows that somewhere in that inferno, there are people. 

Andy Greenwood: So, the entire Gulf Coast, uh, Coast Guard response just was, if it flies and we can get it airborne, let’s get it out there as fast as we can.

There were 126 crew aboard the Deepwater Horizon that night. By the time Andy arrives, they’re frantically escaping in lifeboats, and some have jumped into the ocean in desperation to escape the fire.

Andy Greenwood: One of the things the Coast Guard is a part of is safety of life at sea that states anytime a mariner can assist, um, that it’s their duty to help.

One serious stroke of luck is the presence of a nearby supply vessel called the Damon Bankston. 

Andy Greenwood: And they immediately, their crew went into search and rescue mode to, uh, pull so many people outta the water before we were able to get there.

There’s footage of the Coast Guard rescuing a crewman. Raising his body on a stretcher from an assist vessel up to a helicopter. 

[Ambi: Archival Audio of USCG medevac rescue mission; dips under]

The Deepwater Horizon story would eventually become a tangled mess of controversies – but on this night, the story is simple. It’s human beings banding together to save the lives of other human beings. 

While the injured are flown to hospitals on shore, head counts of those aboard the Damon Bankston aren’t adding up.

Andy Greenwood: We had reports of, you know, I’d say at least 30 or 40 people were unaccounted for. The severity of the, of the human toll was unknown and scary and what we were immediately focused on.

The story of what’s happening out on the ocean starts to spread. 

Keith Jones: I walked into my office and, and I knew I had to get a brief out that day. I had to finish a brief, uh, to submit to the court of appeal. Like most lawyers, um, went until the last day to finally put the finishing touches on it.

About 200 miles away from the fire, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a lawyer named Keith Jones is working late. 

Keith Jones: My secretary, as soon as I walked in, said, “There’s a fire on a rig off of Fourchon.” And I said – and I was right – “There’s hundreds of rigs off of Fourchon.” And I didn’t think another thing of it.

Keith’s son, Gordon, is a crewman on the Deepwater Horizon that night. 

Keith Jones: And maybe ten o’clock, Michelle called me – Gordon’s wife – and she said, “There’s a fire. There was a fire on Gordon’s rig.”

Michelle was getting updates from authorities, receiving calls about the situation, as it develops offshore. 

Keith Jones: I could feel the anxiety in Michelle’s voice. She said, uh, “They called again and they said Gordon is unaccounted for, but they don’t know – he could be on that boat.”

Gordon Jones might have been on the Damon Bankston or maybe he leapt into the ocean – maybe he was disoriented, injured, in need of help. 

Back out on the water, a search and rescue operation is underway to find the missing crewmen.

Coast Guard pilot Andy Greenwood remembers seeing a transport vessel spraying water at the burning rig from thousands of feet away.

Andy Greenwood: And that was as close as they could get due to the heat coming off. Um, and their water was going straight up into the air and just was vaporizing.

As the night goes on, Andy grows more and more concerned. Their search efforts aren’t finding the missing crew and the flames on the rig just won’t die. 

Andy Greenwood: I remember one of the tallest parts of the oil rig was the helicopter landing pad. The thinner part of the landing pad started to, to melt.

Andy recalls this strange phenomenon as they circled the rig.

Andy Greenwood: You know, we would fly around in an orbit and depending on who was flying, would keep their side closest to the flame so they, you know, could see and avoid. So you had daylight-like conditions while you were facing the oil rig, but it was pitch dark and very difficult to see in any other direction. So it was solitary and sobering, and you really appreciated having that light when you had it and really missed it when you didn’t.

Keith Jones: I drove to Gordon and Michelle’s house.

In the morning, the first images of the disaster are broadcast to the public. In Baton Rouge, Keith Jones watches them on TV.  

Keith Jones: And that’s when I knew how catastrophic this was. That it was a lot more than just a fire on the rig.

The imagery struck Keith because he had spent time with his son discussing the mechanics of oil rigs. And they’d spoken about the things that could go wrong.  

Keith Jones: Gordon was a mud engineer on the rig, which they reserved for the best, most talented, men they could get.

Mud is important. It’s critical on an oil rig. When crews drill into the bottom of the ocean, pushing into the earth, the earth pushes back. In kind. Enormous pressure and flammable gas can surge up drill pipes, screaming towards the surface. Mud is the substance engineers use to force that gas back down. 

To keep the well tamed.  

Keith Jones: Gordon told me, he said, “Dad, you know, on, on TV or on the movies when they strike oil and it gushes out of the derrick at the top and everybody dances around and celebrates that they’ve struck oil?” He said, “If that happens now, everybody gets fired. Because what we’re seeing is a blowout. A blowout is the worst thing that can happen on an oil rig. It means that they have lost control of the well. And oil and gas goes everywhere.”

What Keith is seeing on TV doesn’t look like just a fire, it looks like a blowout. A worst case scenario.

On April 22nd his suspicions are all but confirmed.  

CBS anchor: 11 workers are still missing while the rig that exploded on Tuesday has now sunk, threatening a major oil spill off the Louisiana Coast.

Gordon’s rig disappears from the surface of the ocean. 

Keith Jones: Gordon’s brother Chris was there. I remember Chris had driven down to New Orleans, down to Fourchon, to be there when the boat got there, to see if Gordon was with ’em. I thought that that was, um, fueled by hope, of course, but it was not gonna result in any good news.

Gordon Jones is not among the group of survivors on the Damon Bankston who are brought ashore. 

But the Coast Guard presses on. Even after the rig sinks. 

Brent Massey: The more people you put out there who then come back to you and say, “Yeah, man, I didn’t find anything,” you know, it, it, it definitely, it, it’s a ding to your optimism for sure.

This is Brent Massey, a retired US Coast Guardsman. Throughout the search for the missing, Brent is coordinating the rescue mission from a command center on shore.

Brent Massey: You know, you still go out there and look. You know, you take a step back and re-strategize and, and go back out again.

Dan: And so how long does that optimism endure?

Brent Massey: Um, the, the Coast Guard would want me to say that that optimism endures, um, for as long as someone might potentially last in the water. The Coast Guard would want me to say that, that we would search, you know, through the end of survivability, and especially if there was like a high media interest, we would search even beyond that. Um, but among the operators, if I’m to be a hundred percent honest, among the operators, you know, we are not, we’re not stupid. Um, you know, we, you start to notice those things early, like, Hey man, we have searched and searched and searched, he’s not here.

Brent Massey: Um, this is a peek behind the curtain. Like, I don’t want to, you know, I don’t want it to sound like we don’t care. But you gotta, you gotta be realistic about it.

On April 23rd, three days after the blowout, a decision is made. The search for the missing is called off. 

11 lives are lost on the Deepwater Horizon. Including Gordon Jones. For a brief time, their deaths are the focus of the story. A sort of communal grieving process starts on the Gulf.

But that’s quickly interrupted. 

Because unfortunately, the disaster isn’t over. It’s evolving.

Dillon Herbert: Myself and the rest of the crew on duty were tasked with doing what’s called a, a pollution flyover.

US Coast Guardsman Dillon Herbert flies over the site of the blowout to get a sense of how much pollution is in the water. 

Dillon Herbert: So we were expecting, you know, to just go over there, we’ll take some pictures of whatever might be in the area and be done.

Dillon Herbert: And, uh, uh, when we went out there, from a distance, you could see the sheen, you know, just as expected. I mean, everybody knows what, uh, you know, a little oil in water, you know, see it in a puddle in a parking lot, that rainbow, you know, sheen. Uh, but we could see the black undertone. Like, this was not just some amount of oil that was sitting on the surface of the water. There was something that was discoloring the actual water to whatever its visible depth would be.

Dan: The ocean was not the right color.

Dillon Herbert: Correct, yeah.

Dillon Herbert: That’s when we reported that, uh, the pollution was extensive and that we believed it to be growing…

This is the beginning of the largest oil spill in American history. 

In the conversation I had with my father about the spill, we both remembered that the oil was leaking into the ocean for a really long time. 

Operator: Louisiana State Police Hazmat Hotline. This is Walter. May I help you?

Carlos Moreno: Um, hi. My name is, uh, Carlos Moreno. Um, I wanted to give you a, an FYI notification on an incident that occurred offshore, uh, regarding one of our, um, uh, rig operations.

This is an emergency call from the very beginning of the oil spill.  

Operator: Alright. And Mr. Moreno, uh, you work for which company?

Carlos Moreno: Uh, BP. It’s a well control incident.

The man notifying the police is from BP. He refers to this massive blowout as a quote “well control incident.” We’re listening to a specific and fleeting moment in time – when the Deepwater Horizon story was still in flux. 

Operator: Could you quantify or, or measure the amount of oil that’s been released?

Carlos Moreno: Uh, no. At this time we have, uh, some dimensions.

Operator: OK. But no, no volume or information at this point?

Carlos Moreno: Right.

Statements on the disaster were trickling out into the world. And from the start, they didn’t always prove to be accurate. 

Operator: Is it expected that any part of this northern sheen, uh, will impact the coast of Louisiana?

Carlos Moreno: No. We do not anticipate at this time any shoreline impact. But we still wanted to give you a heads up.

Information was flowing faster than any one person could quickly make sense of it, so there’s a hundred different ways you could tell the story of the nascent spill, depending on what you chose to emphasize.

In the days after the blowout, various authorities started addressing the public.

And what unfolds is a months-long battle on two fronts: a fight to control the spill, and a fight to control the narrative. 

Each of these parties is trying to be sure it’s their curated version of events that would lodge in the national consciousness.

One authority was the administration in power. This was 2010, Barack Obama’s first term.

President Barack Obama: Make no mistake, we will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes.

In an oval office address, President Obama was strict and direct.

President Barack Obama: We will make BP pay for the damage their company has cost, and we will do whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy.

His administration’s position was clear: they were gonna throw all the resources and relevant agencies at this. But, legally, this was BP’s mess, and they were going to pay to clean it up.

The second party, BP, didn’t argue that point when addressing the public, though their tone – as you’ll hear in this ad campaign – was a bit different:

Tony Hayward: The Gulf Spill is a tragedy that never should have happened. I’m Tony Hayward. BP has taken full responsibility for cleaning up the spill in the Gulf. To those affected in your families, I’m deeply sorry.

That’s BP’s CEO at the time, Tony Hayward. You’ll note there that he calls it “the Gulf spill.” Whereas figures from the Obama Administration were calling it “the BP spill” or “the BP oil spill:”

President Barack Obama: I wanna update the American people on the status of the BP oil spill.

Secretary Ken Salazar: Nonstop response to the BP spill.

Secretary Janet Napolitano: From a flight over the area affected by the BP oil spill.

The administration is emphasizing that this disaster was BP’s fault. 

But the company’s language suggested otherwise sometimes. 

This is BP’s Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles speaking at a press conference: 

Doug Suttles: Last Tuesday, a week ago Tuesday, at about 10 pm at night, the Transocean Deepwater Horizon rig caught fire… (dip under)

Note that Suttles referred to the rig as “the Transocean Deepwater Horizon.” Not BP. He does this a bunch of times, actually.

Doug Suttles: …Transocean Deepwater Horizon… (dip under)

Doug Suttles: I think since the, uh, Transocean Deepwater Horizon incident began…(dip under)

Doug Suttles: … the Transocean Deepwater Horizon rig.

Now, although BP did lease the Deepwater Horizon rig in 2001, Transocean was the owner of the Deepwater Horizon. This is perhaps a detail Suttles didn’t want left out of the story. 

So you have the Obama Administration and BP battling in the court of public opinion.  

But then you have the Coast Guard. Now the Coast Guard had a real tightrope-walk-of-a-story to tell.

When oil spills happen in the United States, we have something called the National Contingency Plan. It’s a set of rules that attempt to bring order to chaotic response efforts. It also establishes hierarchies.

Under the National Contingency plan, BP was the responsible party. So although BP says they were taking responsibility for the spill, they didn’t actually have a choice on that. 

The National Contingency plan tasked the Coast Guard with both supervising and participating in the responsible party’s efforts. BP, the Coast Guard, and a number of federal agencies are all wrapped up into what’s called a “Unified Command.” 

Mary Landry: The federal on-scene coordinator has a role to oversee BP’s efforts in responding to the spill.

The Coast Guard’s Rear Admiral Mary Landry served as the federal on-scene coordinator. This was a high up position – she oversaw the response effort. And she spoke plainly about her approach to handling BP.  

Mary Landry: If at any time the state or the federal government is not satisfied that we have enough resources on scene to respond to this still, we can apply pressure and request of BP that they bring those resources to bear. I have to say that BP has brought the resources and we’ve never been in a position yet where, where anything we wanted has not been brought to bear.

The resources being brought to bear are to try and address a growing problem. 5,000 feet down, at the ocean floor, the wellhead was leaking oil – that was an accepted fact. But there was a sticking point – how much oil? 

Reporter: Admiral, you said that the oil in NOAA’s estimation is, is increasing by a factor of five, yet BP says it’s not increasing at all. Which one is it?

Mary Landry: It’s important to understand this is an estimate…(dip under)

Throughout the disaster, again, there was competing messaging on this. Early on, government agencies were saying 5,000 barrels of oil a day, but BP was saying only 1,000 barrels. 

Despite all of this friction, there was one consensus among BP, the Coast Guard, and the administration from the very beginning: the wellhead needed to be closed. The flow of oil needed to be stopped. Quickly. 

[Music ramps]

On May 6th, 2010, day 16 of the spill, an attempt is made to stop the gushing oil. A containment cap is lowered to the bottom of the ocean; imagine a big strong dome, designed to lock in place over the leak.

Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen gives an update on the situation:  

Thad Allen: Uh, when we first put the containment cap, the first original containment cap was put on, it filled up with, uh, hydrates, which uh, made the containment cap buoyant.

Buoyant – meaning the cap floated away. So that plan fails. And the oil is beginning to wash up on shore.

Secretary Janet Napolitano: As the oil nears the shore, it’s important to note that we have anticipated and planned for a worst case scenario since day one.

The administration is projecting competence. And BP, tenacity:

Doug Suttles: Until we run out of options, uh, we won’t stop. No matter how unlikely they are to be successful, we will continue to try.

So plan B. Day 36 of the spill.

President Barack Obama: Yesterday, the federal government gave BP approval to move forward with a procedure known as a “top kill.”

“Top kill” refers to a plan to pump heavy drilling mud into the top of the leaking well.

Doug Suttles: So we began the top kill procedure at about one o’clock in the afternoon yesterday.

This is BP COO Doug Suttles being questioned by reporters. 

Reporter: You said you stopped pumping the mud for the past 16 hours. Is that a sign that something went wrong or is, uh, something unanticipated happened?

Doug Suttles: No, nothing’s actually gone wrong or unanticipated. When we do this operation…(dip under)

Top kill also fails. By now, oil is washing ashore in Louisiana. Federal on-scene coordinator Mary Landry offers reassurance.  

Mary Landry: I wanna reassure all of you, and I promised the governors of the Gulf Coast states I would do this, that all the beaches are open, with the exception of three in Louisiana…

Alright, plan C, day 44: 

A different kind of cap. 

Reporter: How much of the oil does the dome have the capacity to capture?

Thad Allen: Uh, the dome, the, uh, it’s actually, it’s a, we’re calling it a containment cap. Uh, the cap is, is structured so that it can cover the pipe, uh, with a, uh, a rubber gasket around it. It’s not a perfect seal.

This plan also fails to stop the leaking oil.

As the failures pile on, there are noticeable shifts in tone. BP CEO Tony Hayward catches hell for having a lapse in judgment during an interview. You may actually remember this one: 

Tony Hayward: There’s no one who wants this thing over more than I do. You know, I’d like my life back.

And BP COO Doug Suttles betrays some discouragement: 

Doug Suttles: Well, we’ve clearly been at this for quite some time now, and, uh, I think as myself and everyone who’s been involved in this, it’s, it’s quite a rollercoaster. Uh, every time we start a new operation, we obviously believe it could be successful but we actually understand where we stand today, which is – the well continues to flow.

By June 6th, 46 days into the spill, oil has washed ashore in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.  

Suddenly beaches, fisheries, and coastal towns are all at risk. So now the response also has to focus on clean up. In the summer of 2010, thousands of coastal residents participated in efforts to clean the Gulf of Mexico.

Most of them did so, because they didn’t have any other choice.

When we get back from the break, you’ll hear their perspective on all this.

[Break]

The Gulf of Mexico has a lot of things in it that I, personally, enjoy eating. Blue crab, shrimp, mullet, oysters, the list goes on. Catching them, and bringing them to market, for people like me to eat, is how tens of thousands of people made their living on the Gulf in 2010.  

At the very peak of the spill, some 89,000 square miles of federal waters were closed for fishing. The impact of this was devastating and immediate. I learned this on Company Canal.

[Boat Ambi rises]

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: I know people right now that lost their homes. They lived off the land. That’s what they did for a living. Commercial fishing. Commercial crabbing. Hell, I mean, I even got family members that crabbed and stuff like that. They all had to stop. I mean a lot of people don’t understand really what happened. We’re still having it to this day–

[BULLFROG INTERRUPTS]

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: Oh, that’s a nice one.

Dan: Bullfrog?

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: That’s a chicken leg right there. That’s what we call a chicken leg.

Dan: You look hungry.

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: Frog legs. Oh brah–

Dan: Well, did you stop eating the seafood for a while or no after, after BP?

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: We had to.

Dan: You had to?

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: Oh man, I went to fricking beef, bro. It’s like… yuck. Lord knows, and God knows, everybody knows we all did it in Louisiana. All of us went bull-eyeing once or twice in our life. I’m man enough to say it. I know game wardens. It is what it is.

Dan: Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. I’m lost in translation here. Explain to me what you just said.

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: Bull-eyeing, that’s illegal.

Dan: Is it?

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: I ain’t going to lie, man.

Mike Arcenaux: Edit.

Dan: Edit.

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: Edit. I don’t care.

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: This is back in the day. We’re going to say it like that. Oh yeah this is way back in the day-

Dan: You need food and you had to go do some illegal hunting to feed yourself.

Norman Luke Billiard Jr: I’m not going to let my family starve.
Before I let my family go hungry, I’m going to do something about it. I’m not letting my family starve.

With no way to make a living, and all efforts to stop the raging oil failing, coastal residents started protesting…

[Crowd shouting at protest]

Ian Hooch: It looks to me like we’re living in a scenario where BP is calling the shots and telling the government how it’s gonna be, when it oughta be the other way around!

Crowd: [hooting, applauding, pounding drums.]

Amidst the growing unrest, BP made Gulf Coast residents an offer or, as they called it, an opportunity. This is a recruiter at an open house in Lafitte, Louisiana. 

Recruiter: Well, we’re working with a program called Vessels of Opportunity, and it’s just that! It’s an opportunity for fishermen to put their boats to work in a time when unfortunately, they’re not able to conduct their normal operations so, as far as Vessels of Opportunity goes, of course it’s, uh, administered through BP.

Vessels of Opportunity, or the VOO program, was basically this arrangement: since you can’t do what you do, come work for us instead. Help BP clean up the oil. We’ll pay you to clean up the oil. Thousands took the offer. Or, the opportunity. 

Caleb Breaux: So, I’m Caleb Breaux. I’ve been living in Louisiana all my life. I am part of the culture [laughs]. I am part of Louisiana.

Caleb Breaux had a landscaping company that did most of its business in a barrier island town called Grand Isle, Louisiana.

Caleb Breaux: With landscaping, it’s a luxury. So nobody was doing landscaping, you know, normal life just kind of came to a halt.

So he joined a friend’s boat crew and signed up for the Vessels of Opportunity, hoping to make a difference on the clean up.

Caleb Breaux: We’re always here to help each other. Through storms, through spills, through anything. You always see Louisianians helping each other. I mean, that’s what we do.

Dan: What was your job? Like, what was your day-to-day like? What were you actually out there doing?

Caleb Breaux: So, our main job at the beginning, we were putting out a hard and soft boom.

You’re gonna hear this word a lot – “boom.”  Soft boom is a rolled up absorbent material used for cleaning spills. Imagine a giant anaconda wearing a giant sock. It can be hundreds of feet long. It’s laid in the ocean. And the idea with soft boom is – soft boom soaks up oil, thus cleaning the spill.

Then there’s also hard boom, made of plastic or metal, which traps the oil in a designated area. 

Caleb Breaux: And we were anchoring them out and, and putting, uh, stakes in the ground and prepping for it to come in, you know, uh, waiting for the, the big bang, so to speak. Cuz we knew it was coming. It was almost like waiting for a hurricane, you know? We knew it was out there. We were getting reports of where it was at. And so that was, that was our main job at the beginning is just getting ready…

Hundreds of miles east, in Destin, Florida, a commercial fisherman named Joey Yerkes was also bracing himself for the arrival of the oil. 

Joey Yerkes: So the Gulf was closed, we couldn’t fish. We were outta work.

Joey had been a cast net fisherman – he caught cigar minnows – a small fish, good for baiting grouper and snapper. 

Joey Yerkes: We were actually activated in the VOO program and being paid every day. Even if we didn’t go on the water, we were being paid to stand by. So we were ready, you know, we were a hundred percent ready.

Back in Louisiana, patches of oil were beginning to wash up on shore. 

Caleb Breaux: They would send us out to try to collect the patches and we would actually, uh, connect soft boom from one boat to the other and we’d drag – almost like dragging a trawl – and to encompass the oil.

When a boom would fill up with oil, they’d pull it out of the water and transfer the boom into garbage bags for disposal. 

Caleb Breaux: It was a kind of a constant clean up process, you know.

Caleb Breaux: We were in Charlie Company, which we were kind of proud of. Uh, we called ourselves the hardest workers out there, you know, all of us Cajuns in the, in the boats.

Dan: Did you feel like you were making progress or, or no?

Caleb Breaux: Yeah. I mean, somewhat we were. I mean, we could tell what, what areas we hit and you start picking up the, the boom, uh, the soft boom that had a lot of oil on it. It felt like it was helping a little bit.

For Caleb Breaux, the situation seemed bad, but not as bad as he was expecting. He had hope that if everyone just kept working and working, they would save the Gulf.

Over in Florida, Joey had that same spirit – he was raring to fight the spill and his wait was over. 

Joey Yerkes: Then they finally called us up, right? “As of tomorrow morning, you are activated and gonna be in the field.” And I said, “Great,” you know, we celebrate. “Here we go. We get to do something,” you know.

Joey Yerkes: We took off and went out the pass and we, we went down the oceanside and we decided just to drive west and see if we saw any oil. We really didn’t expect to see much.

Joey Yerkes: And I had my depth sounder on at the time.

A depth sounder is a tool that uses sonar to display on a screen how deep the water is beneath your boat.  

Joey Yerkes: And I’ll never forget the depth sounder, just the screen just went black, completely black, top to bottom. So we really couldn’t figure out what was going on. We went a little bit further, a little bit further, and we started to smell it. Then we looked over the side and realized that we had run into a wall of oil coming — makes me upset when I talk about this.

Joey Yerkes: So that was a wall of oil that was heading towards our home. And that was an oh shit moment. My deckhand and I, I mean, we both broke down. We just started crying. Right? This was way bigger than we ever imagined it would be. Cuz we were only hearing stories. They were, you know, “It’s not as bad as everybody says.” We ran into that wall of oil and that really hit me. We knew that, that our ocean that we love so much was in big, big trouble.

Caleb Breaux: When that came, that was, that was a whole ‘nother world, a whole ‘nother level.

Back off the coast of Louisiana, the occasional patches were replaced by miles-long oil slicks. 

Caleb Breaux: As far as you can see, you can see oil. And I mean, we were in it. Like there was no, it wasn’t a riding around a patch here or there. Like, we were in it.

Caleb Breaux: The biggest thing that I remember was the smell. The smell was just so intense. This petroleum – just this intense smell. And you couldn’t escape it. You couldn’t, you knew you were breathing it in. Didn’t matter what you, what you did, it was, you were in it.

Caleb Breaux: I mean, you know, the way it was burning your eyes, our throats at the end of the day, we could barely talk. Um, but they were sending us out there to try to do something, to try to stop it. And you know what? We, we all went, like we, we were trying our best to do what we can.

But Caleb says booms were just useless against that amount of oil.

He admits they just couldn’t keep up with the spill anymore.

Caleb Breaux: And, you know, that’s the point where I felt like, okay, we, we, we can’t handle this. We, you know, we’re wasting time. What we’re doing is not accomplishing anything right here. We need to figure out a better method. Like, this isn’t working.

[Music transitions]

President Barack Obama: Because there’s never been a leak this size, at this depth, stopping it has tested the limits of human technology.

The inability to plug the wellhead at the bottom of the ocean was rationalized by the administration, the Coast Guard and BP. The official story was: the situation is unprecedented, it’s understandable that we aren’t able to stop the leak, because deepwater drilling is highly complex.

And it is. We used to be able to drill for oil closer to shore, but wells ran dry, now we have to venture further out. Many of the strategies that they were attempting to close the wellhead had worked in the past because they weren’t being tried at a depth of 5,000 feet.

That said, the absolute inability to clean the surface oil was much more difficult to rationalize.

Ed Markey: We now see thousands of square miles with this awful sludge…(dip under)

This is Massachusetts congressman Ed Markey. He’s a senator now, but at the time he was the chairman of the Energy and Environment subcommittee, which held hearings throughout the spill.

Ed Markey: BP identified a worst case scenario as a leak that would release 250,000 barrels of oil per day into the ocean…(dip under)

At this point, it was BP’s position that 5,000 barrels of oil per day were spilling into the Gulf. But Ed Markey pointed out that BP had certified with the federal government that they were prepared to handle a spill of 250,000 barrels of oil per day.

So why were they struggling with 5,000 barrels? He questioned Lamar McKay, chairman and president of BP America.

Ed Markey: Do you really think that you can certify, again, today, that you could respond to a spill of 250,000 barrels per day?

Lamar McKay: We’re doing everything we can. I believe that we will learn things through this. There’s no doubt. And, and I believe that those certifications will be with the knowledge that we have –

Ed Markey: I just wish that you had a little more humility here today. And an admission that you don’t have it…(dip under)

They mostly spoke past one another for the entire hearing – with neither side really giving an inch.

What I’m hearing is them argue over the true magnitude of this disaster. And I’m not convinced that can truly be articulated in numbers. 

[Music: transition]

In the Deepwater Horizon story I had my head, I remember there being a lot of focus on the amount of oil. 

I do remember news reports emphasizing 5,000, 10,000, 60,000 barrels a day. These numbers were stated with urgency. And I do remember reacting in my mind that – yes, this is very very bad.

But I had trouble comprehending emotionally what those numbers really meant for the people of the gulf.

I think it’s an inherent challenge in telling the story of something this monumental.

Cause I’ve learned that there’s this psychological phenomenon involving large numbers. Basically, human beings are really bad at understanding them. They’re abstract to us. And we’re terrible at processing them emotionally.

So if you heard back in 2010 that maybe 100,000 sea turtles died, or over 4 billion oysters died as a result of the spill – don’t beat yourself up if that felt impossible to grasp. It might be why there was less national outrage than you might expect in the aftermath of the spill.

It was just too big.

I only started to really understand all this when I spoke to the fishermen, like Joey Yerkes.

Joey Yerkes: I had a connection with the ocean, just like all fishermen do. They have a connection with the water. It’s in your blood. It runs through your veins. That’s where you’re comfortable.

These were people who did feel those large numbers.

Joey Yerkes: Even on a rough day, even when mother nature just kicks the shit outta you, or you have lightning strike your boat. Those are the things that make you realize that, you know, I’m here doing it. It’s all part of it. People ask, you know, why would you want to go through that rough weather or, you know, put your life in danger commercial fishing, that kind of thing. It’s in your blood. It’s what you do. Mother nature’s a part of it. She’s always gonna be there. You can’t control it. So you have to embrace it.

After the spill, they made the difficult choice to work for the same company that took their livelihoods away from them.

Joey Yerkes: We just did what we had to do to make a living.

They worked long shifts bent over the sides of their boats with their faces in crude oil. Breathing its fumes. For weeks and weeks of breaths. 

Trying – and failing – to scrub their ocean clean of it. 

But one Vessels of Opportunity worker told me that progress was happening on the clean up. It was just progress that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the work that he was doing.

Something he couldn’t explain was happening out on the water.

Caleb Breaux: The oil vanished. So…

Dan: What do you, what do you mean it vanished?

Caleb Breaux: Vanished. Like completely gone.

Dan: Like how, in what period of time did it, did it vanish? Are you saying overnight, over a couple days?

Caleb Breaux: Yeah, overnight. Dan: Overnight.

Caleb Breaux: That’s what was kind of strange. Like, you know, it all was there and then it vanished.

I heard this from a couple coastal residents and I thought… how the hell does a mile-long oil slick disappear overnight?

News Anchor 1: Now back to the Gulf oil spill. BP has stuck with the oil dispersant COREXIT.

News Anchor 2: BP says COREXIT is the most effective option to clean up the huge spill.

This is a news report from 2010, covering a method Unified Command had been using to try and get rid of the oil.

Nalco Representative: The toxicity of this particular product is at least 25 times less toxic than common dishwashing soap that everybody uses in their house on a day-to-day basis.

Reporter: This is the dispersant being used just about everywhere in the Gulf.

Nalco Representative: What we do, we take some crude oil, and we put it on top of the water.

They used a chemical dispersant called Corexit. In the report, you see a representative from the chemical’s manufacturer giving a demonstration of how it works.   

Nalco Representative: What you’ll see there – that ping indicates how quickly the dispersant molecules get to that region between the oil and the water, and that is absolutely key.

You can see that the dispersant starts having an effect on the oil.

Reporter: The dispersant breaks up the oil into tiny droplets, which will eventually decompose. Without the dispersant, the oil just sits on the surface.

The Department of Defense gave the go-ahead. 

Secretary Janet Napolitano: The Secretary of Defense has approved a request for two C-130 aircraft to dispense oil dispersant chemicals capable of covering up to 250 acres per flight with three flights per aircraft per day.

[Ambi: Archival audio from the interior of C-130s on flight missions]

There are videos of airplanes being loaded up with Corexit from huge plastic tubs, then raining the dispersant down all over the ocean.

[Ambi: Archival audio from the C-130s introduces the pilots cockpit communications]

Pilot: How do you know where to pick a spot out, man? It’s everywhere. Spray on.

Co-Pilot: Spray on.

Unified Command seemed enthusiastic about this method. The gallons were racking up…

Doug Suttles: End of the day today, we, we will have applied over a hundred thousand gallons of dispersant.

Lisa Jackson: 139,459 gallons of dispersant have been used to date.

Thad Allan: We’re approaching, uh, the million gallon mark.

Doug Suttles: We successfully applied 42,000 gallons of dispersant. This almost doubles yesterday’s total, which had doubled the day before.

OUTRO

They were so bullish on their use that although dispersants were intended to be used on the surface of the water… authorities permitted the lowering of a giant pipe to the bottom of the ocean. Where they pumped a stream of Corexit directly into the leaking plume of oil. This technique had never been attempted at a depth of 5,000 feet.

And this is where a different version of the Deepwater Horizon story – one that I never knew –  begins. 

That’s next time, on Ripple. 

[Credits]