Disaster on the Horizon

This book, published in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent oil spill in the summer of 2010, takes a critical view of BP and its role in the disaster. With many years industry experience, Bob Cavnar does not leave you wondering if he knows what he's talking about; he makes it plain over and over that he is an insider in the business of drilling for oil. And that's both this book's strength and its weakness

The Expert

I found this book to be too much of an insider book, with so many details and criticisms of the details about the pipes, the blowout preventer and the rig itself that I often felt lost in all too much technical information. However, I realize that it is in this minutia of details that the real problems of the Deepwater Horizon are exposed, but only an insider can really follow the argument here. What is apparent to me, and all of us who followed this story on the nightly news and felt sick at the sight of oil gushing into the pristine Gulf waters, is that somebody screwed up and this should never, ever happen again.

From this book, I did learn a lot more about what happened on that day when eleven lives were lost on a deep water oil rig. Incredibly, as the disaster unfolded, absolutely nothing on the rig worked. All the failsafe measures and procedures that were supposed to prevent, or at least mitigate, this kind of an accident, just did not work! In the days that followed, BP was not forthcoming about what really happened, and rolled out one hokey "fix" after another, all the while low-balling the estimate of how much oil was flowing into the water.

Cavnar makes a serious charge that BP did this on purpose, that they announced all these fixes to try to keep attention away from the actual amount of oil escaping the well, especially to keep the government from doing any measurements. They knew the fine assessed by the government would be based on the amount of oil spilled. For many weeks, the government just accepted what BP told them.

Bush? Obama? Neither Got it Right

Some of the system failures can be laid at the feet of the Bush Administration which was in a cozy relationship with the oil industry and relaxed regulations to the point of creating a dangerous lack of safety. Niehter did the Obama administration cover itself in glory; it was slow to take control once the spill happened, and let BP do what it wanted until it became blatantly apparent that BP was not making much progress on killing the well.

The situation at the site was complex, and Cavnar is critical of government panels that don't have industry insiders capable of really understanding how the safety systems were supposed to work and who can read between the lines of what company bigwigs say about this type of a situation. According to the author, Obama has apparently appointed too many academics to these panels and not enough oilmen who have actually gotten their hands dirty drilling actual wells.

A Toxic Legacy?

While the oil spill has disappeared as a nightly news story amid talk that much of the oil has dissipated, Cavnar tells us that fishermen, who have been told it's safe to fish, are reporting many anomalous sights in the water, like deep sea creatures who are now seen at the surface, and other fish and turtles just not being seen at all. Cavnar tells us that all that oil that seems to have disappeared from view is actually hanging in huge clumps in deep water, and that the oil dispersant used in never-before-tried amounts was used improperly. Just how toxic is this stuff to deep-water fish? The answer is crucially important to people who make their living from the Gulf waters (you know, as one BP official called them, those "little people").

For those with oil industry experience, the detailed analysis in this book will probably mean more than it did to someone like me (hey, I live in Michigan; we know cars, not oil wells), but it can enlighten anyone who wants to know more about this massive oil spill. Be forewarned that Cavnar has a definite point of view, and you will not come away wondering what it is.

Buy Disaster on the Horizon: High Stakes, High Risks, and the Story Behind the Deepwater Well Blowout at amazon.com.

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