Crude Exploration

Introduction

On 20 April 2010, the oil drilling rig Deepwater Horizon exploded and burned, eventually falling into the sea, and settling on the ocean floor approximately five thousand feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Deepwater Horizon was a semi-submersible rig owned by Transocean, an offshore drilling company. It weighed 51,756 tons and carried a crew of 126. The structure was designed to drill deep wells, and on the day it sank in the Macondo oil field, it was completing one of the deepest wells in history. In 2016, the disaster was covered in a feature film, Deepwater Horizon, directed by Peter Berg and included a well-known cast starring Mark Wahlberg. The film was well received by critics and successful at the box office.

Deepwater Horizon checks off all the boxes for a blockbuster film: It has heroism, explosions, noise, drama, and conflict between good and evil. It tells us about the events and experiences of workers in the final hours leading up to, and during, the “blowout,” subsequent explosions and the carnage that would end in the deaths of eleven oil rig workers, injuries to dozens more, and the worst environmental disaster in United States history. As a story and a film, it moves audience members and provides a tragic account about the perils of putting profits before people and planet. ¹ One of the intriguing things about the Deepwater Horizon event is that, unlike many workplace events that have led to injury and death, it received sustained media attention. The disaster was also subject to a Presidentially ordered commission. ² Deepwater Horizon directs the viewer to what has been written about—the blowout and corporate irresponsibility—but it also encourages a sympathetic, emotionally charged look at the deaths and injuries experienced by the 126 oil rig workers whose story “escaped intense scrutiny, as if it were an inevitable casualty of the blowout.” ³

Deepwater Horizon provides a rare moment to examine the widely viewed representation of an industrial disaster. The film is notable and worth examining because it is one of few that presents a major industrial disaster despite the fact that thousands of workers die and are injured annually in North America. ⁴ As well as having a compelling story line, the film had a massive budget ($156 million USD), the backing of Hollywood producers, and “star power.” These factors fostered the production of an appealing film and one that was able to reach a large, diverse audience in ways other media might not, providing the opportunity for the public to learn about an industrial disaster with the workers situated at its forefront. Industrial disasters, such as the one that took place on the Deepwater Horizon, are events with which people seldom have familiarity. ⁵ Another feature of the film that makes its examination worthwhile is that it does not blame the disaster on workers’ carelessness, laziness, nor incompetence, all of which are common explanations of workplace injury and fatality. ⁶

Stories of industrial disaster can inform us about how events unfolded and how they can be avoided in the future. These stories can be communicated in many different forms—e.g., through news articles, documentaries, movies, inquests, and instructional lessons.^3,7,8 Each is a powerful shaper of how people can interpret the sources of industrial disaster and, ultimately, how they determine what could be done to minimize their future likelihood. At a fundamental level, all stories are versions of events. ⁹ They are organized to form a particular narrative that includes (and excludes) information and emphasizes some factors while deprioritizing others. In this article, we examine the story of the drilling rig, Deepwater Horizon, as portrayed in the film Deepwater Horizon. We are interested in what is presented in the film and—of equal importance—what is not presented. We are not so naïve as to think that this film—perhaps any film—could capture a comprehensive story of all the factors—distal and proximate—that an occupational health and safety investigator, sociologist, industrial psychologist, or an engineer would be interested in. However, narratives are framed in particular ways and this film is no different.

After viewing the film, we determine that the disaster is framed in at least four ways: profit maximization, technology and technology failure, managerial conflict, and worker portrayals that are further divided into humanization and heroism themes. Conversely, the film de-emphasizes the role of state regulation in the prevention of the disaster. We believe that while the film’s frames may advance public awareness about the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the perils of the oil industry, the invisibility of distal regulatory shortcomings in the film reveals a great deal about how the industry remains hazardous when its health and safety responses are continually framed to the public in individualistic and corporate self-regulatory ways. This leaves the industry free to continue to self-regulate with state support (i.e., by “regulatory capture”) and is only (briefly) publicly accountable for disasters.^10,11

The Catalyst: Profit Maximization

The Deepwater Horizon was an exploration rig designed to drill and locate oil reserves, cap them, and move on to the next exploration site. Other processing rigs would follow and pump the oil from the well. In April 2010, the Deep Water Horizon was in the final stages of completing a well in the Macondo field. From there, it would move on to another exploration site. Throughout the film, the well is repeatedly referred to as the “the well from hell” because of the problems that it had created for the rig’s crew. The problems had put the company (BP) forty-three days behind schedule and fifty million dollars over budget. The time and cost overruns were a constant refrain among managers in the film and referred to as the reason why the process should be expedited. The longer the rig lingered on the site, the more money that was lost.

The profit imperative put a great deal of pressure on employees of Transocean and BP. One of the most significant examples of how this plays out is BP’s failure to follow critical routine protocols for safely completing the well before the rig would move on. To cut costs and save time, BP’s management team unilaterally decided to cancel a cement test which ensures that there is enough heavy mud in the well to prevent volatile gases from escaping. The test would have cost $125,000 USD. In the film’s early scenes, we are shown representatives from Schlumberger, the company hired to conduct the test, departing the oil rig and on their way to an awaiting helicopter telling the rig boss the required cement test was not completed. The failure to perform this test is cast as an important indicator of BP’s negligence created by their aim to optimize productivity and profits.

Technology and Technology Failure

Technology is a critical character in this film. The setting is a piece of technology itself: a semi-submersible rig that, when it first appears on screen, prompts a BP employee to state “Anything that big ought to be made by God. That’s beautiful.” The presence of technology is paramount throughout the film as we see close-ups of the rig and workers interacting with its equipment. We are presented with shots of workers tripping pipe, the well head on the sea floor, individuals interacting with technology to both monitor and control drilling, and to control the rig. The technology that provides workers shelter and enables them to do their work is the same technology that ultimately contributes to their undoing. Some of the rig’s mission critical equipment was not working properly: computers, telephones, smoke alarms, pipe-stacking system, and the blow-out preventer (BOP). In a tense scene with the BP and Transocean men, Mike Williams states that there are 390 pieces of equipment in need of repair and, when questioned, rattles off a long list of pieces of equipment that either were not functioning or poorly functioning. The emergency disconnect system, a last ditch device that can be used to disconnect the rig from a well in case of an emergency, such as a blowout, failed: It could not cut the pipe which would have stopped the flow of oil and gas. The focus on the technology and its inoperability—especially the failure of the BOP—is a critical element in the story of Deepwater Horizon. A series of technological failures was the immediate cause of the disaster. As Barstow et al. ³ noted, “crew members died and suffered terrible injuries because every one of the Horizon’s defenses failed on April 20.” However, the focus on technology diverts the audience away from the conditions that caused these pieces of technology to fail or at least fail to operate at optimal levels that would ensure the rig’s safety.

Managerial Conflict

An ongoing struggle between BP and Transocean over the control of the drilling was central to the plot. This struggle was embedded in the context of the oil rig being behind schedule and over budget. BP wanted the well capped quickly and to move on. The Transocean employees aimed for this goal as well but were taking a more cautious approach. The motivations of each party emerge throughout the film. In an exchange between Don Vidrine (BP’s well site leader) and Jimmy Harrell (Transocean’s offshore installation manager), Vidrine states, “we worry about the bills.” In response, Harrell emphatically states, “I worry about my rig. My crew lives on it. You just rent it.” This exchange, one of several, clearly highlights the BP company men’s interests in profits and Transocean’s in the safety of the rig and its crew. The conflict between Transocean and BP comes to a head in a pivotal scene in the rig’s “drilling shack” or the “brain” of the rig’s drilling operations. It is here where the senior managers from Transocean and BP make the fateful decision concerning how to continue drilling the “well from hell.” They argued about how to interpret the results of a negative pressure test which assesses if volatile hydrocarbons are leaking into a well. There were indications that there was more pressure in the well than there should have been. Harrell’s position was that this was a “bad test.” Vidrine argued that there were other credible explanations for test results. The interpretation of test results and course of action were disputed, but BP urged the drillers to proceed. During the conversation among the managers, Don Vidrine, the BP manager, asserted that there was minimal likelihood of well problems, discredited the crew’s knowledge, and derided their overly cautious approach, referring to them as being “nervous as cats.” The turning point in the conversation came in an exchange between Harrell and BP company man, Vidrine. The ownership of the well and its oil was acknowledged to be BP, and, Harrell reaffirmed the power structure by stating, “And we’re [Transocean] just the help y’all hired to drill the hole?” Shortly after, Harrell was called away from the drill shack. The pressure from BP to proceed with drilling was intense as was indicated by a call to Harrell, in which the chief tool pusher, Jason Anderson, noted how “These [BP] guys are all over me.” The Transocean crew put its concerns about the rig and its safety aside and reluctantly proceeded to the next phase of drilling. Work continued and, shortly thereafter, pressure within the bore hole created the blowout which ultimately killed the workers and sank the rig.

Worker Portrayals

Regulatory Environment

The depth that Deepwater Horizon goes into the experiences of the immediate causes of the blowout is not matched by its examination of the role of the regulatory environment. The film does not explore how the U.S. Government’s goal of finding sources of domestic energy increased exploration that was left largely unfettered. Moreover, there is no attention to how the contradictory mandates of the Mineral Management Service—regulating while also gathering revenues from industry—severely weakened the state’s ability to regulate and minimize the hazards in oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. ¹¹ However, this relationship is of critical importance to understanding the disaster. These conditions in the regulatory environment were significant and would ultimately influence how oil drilling was conducted, and they would eventually influence the safety of the crew and Deepwater itself. These factors are not spectacular or easily amenable for a film—especially a block-buster action film. There are a number of factors that changed the conditions under which oil exploration was carried out that would ultimately increase the hazards of drilling. For instance, (1) the number of pressure tests that needed to be conducted was reduced, (2) the recommended recertification of the BOP was not carried out, (3) there were “no meaningful regulations governing the requirements for well cementing and testing” and (4) “Nor were there regulations governing negative-pressure testing of well integrity—a fundamental check against dangerous hydrocarbon incursion into an unbalanced well” (see Woolfson, ¹¹ p. 512). All this was exacerbated by an inspectorate that was woefully under-resourced to the extent it could not properly assess the drilling rigs in the Gulf. ¹¹

Conclusion: The Double-Edged Sword

The portrayal of the Deepwater Horizon event is a double-edged sword: It reveals a great deal about the sequence of events leading up to the tragedy itself and the heroism of the crew, but it also conceals as well. We learn about the role of technology and technology failure, the major conflicts between managers, and the production imperative. The reasons why so much equipment—safety and operational—was faulty were not examined. It was not only inoperable safety equipment, confusion, chaos, and the push for profits, but also the political economy that created the conditions in which the disaster occurred. They are antecedent to the technology problems and inadequate testing. They are distal causes.

Deepwater Horizon “zooms in” on the tragedies of 20 April 2010, and in doing so offers audiences a solid starting point from which to understand the disaster. Here is what audiences potentially learn. The film dramatically portrays the spectacular character of the event. Stories that examine the disaster can be found through a casual internet search, but the movie brings the “spectacular” to the big screen with sense-enhancing authenticity. The film offers an account of the individuals and organizations who participated in, witnessed, and were affected by this spectacular firestorm. Emergent here are the acts of heroism, workers struggling to save themselves and their fellow workers, and villainy, the arrogant, dismissive, and productivity-obsessed energy corporations. Finally, the film enables the audience to enter the Gulf of Mexico, above and below the surface, to play witness to the sequential technological failures that coalesced that day to kill eleven human beings and injure many others.

The Deepwater Horizon event was a poignant industrial disaster. A Hollywood film rarely comes along that is so explicit in its attention to occupational injury and fatality. The proximate characteristics of the tragedy, which are thrust to the forefront of the film (i.e., its spectacular scale, individual injuries, deaths and struggle for survival, corporate malfeasance and technological failure), are constructive for attracting public attention to the role that occupational health and safety played (or not) in this disaster. In doing so though, the film’s focus on the proximate causes of the disaster has implications for how audiences may interpret and understand the Deepwater Horizon event specifically and workplace injury and fatality generally.

By offering an up-close account of the event, and highlighting the proximate factors of the disaster, the film potentially perpetuates the common misconception which is to regard workplace injuries and fatalities as individualistic and isolated events. ⁶ Distal causes of injury and fatality, namely the systemic regulatory inadequacies and failures by a state, industry, or even from the relationship between the two; the power-struggles in the capitalist labor process; and the related insatiable global appetite for fossil fuels that place environments and humans at risk are left opaque and publicly unaccountable. Deepwater Horizon is a rare and timely film that is praiseworthy for drawing attention to an industrial disaster and showing audiences its immediate causes and consequences. The next step is to encourage audiences to “zoom out” and realize the political-economic and cultural forces that create and exacerbate the risks of workplace injury and death of other working people around the globe. Another implication is that the public understands the problems that Deepwater Horizon faced as only a Deepwater Horizon issue—an appalling, heartbreaking tale, but a one-of-a-kind, “perfect-storm” tragedy that was the product of several missteps, avarice, profit-driven managers, geology, and a series of missed opportunities to forestall disaster. This thinking hinders the development of industrial disaster explanations that include political-economic factors and, ultimately, permits companies, indeed whole industries, to continue “business as usual.”