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, you know, talking about what caused this bill. We're talking about how much trouble BP got in. We're 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 don't know, 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.
So hold up, hold up. So I'm recording. I'm recording now. Who the hell are you and where the hell are we? My name is Mike Orsono. I am in Berg, Louisiana at this moment in a waterway called Company Canal. Open a canal. What significance is this place? What do people do here? Exactly what we're doing, enjoying life. Sipping around. Enjoying life, man. Sipping around on a boat. Yes. 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. 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? 40% of the time. 40% of the time. Okay, we'll be 100% serious.
No, don't do that. Get the fuck out of the boat. 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.
And who are you? What's your name? Oh, my name's Norman Bilya. I'm born and raised down here. I mean, it's one of the favorite things to be on the water. I'd rather be on the water than be on land. Look at that. Look at that water moccasin'. And that's some of the hazards of South Louisiana.
you live with them water moccasin you ever gotten bit oh yeah dude you grew up getting bit by them things what happens run high fever sick like a dog yeah oh man i had to go to the hospital i had to give me a steroid shot oh yeah i mean the worst ones are the small ones the babies but the babies don't know how much the 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. The thing is when you're on a boat going 70 miles an hour... you should really wear your hat backwards. See, because my hat was on forward, so the wind ripped the thing clean off my head.
I was telling Mike not to bother trying to find it. It's not important. It's gone forever. But Mike insisted. He seemed genuinely worried about what the Louisiana sun was going to do to my bald head. Here's another thing I learned. Before you tell your boatmates that your hat flew into the water... You just lost it right before it slowed down? Oh yeah, it came off. But it went flying, man. We're not going to be able to find it. Oh, God damn it.
You should really double check to be sure it didn't just fall into the boat right behind you. They could have, probably should have, been pissed at me for wasting their time and their gasoline. But instead... I come to Louisiana and make a complete asshole of myself. Welcome to the crew, bro. Appreciate it. They just let it go. No hard feelings. The Louisiana lifestyle I do is totally different.
from other lifestyles i mean you ain't gonna find the hospitality like i don't care who you are whether 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. Let me ask you a question. Do you think there's going to be another oil spill at some point? I pray to God not be honest with you.
I mean, I really do pray to God they don't. I mean, ever since the oil spill hit, I ain't been on this. I ain't been out here. Why? I mean, right after the oil spill, we came out here, and it's like you didn't see as much fish. Before the oil spill, dude, you've 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. 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. 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, I was trying to be the one to do the deepest well in the world. I mean, you can't fault them for that. But, I mean, I know some of the people.
That knows the ones that died on a deepwater horizon. Oh And I really don't even want to talk about ours because it bothers me that much Why does it bother you so much when you see your best friend cry? Because they can't talk to... When your best friend can't talk to his dad. 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. Yeah. You know.
I have no idea who he's talking about. That's our culture. He hurts, we hurt. His dad died on that ring. And a lot of people don't understand that. His dad's never going to be there. because of some stupid screw up yeah i mean that's why i say i don't fault nobody i mean i don't fault them for trying to 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're all going in the same place. Whether you're going to heaven or you're going to hell. Hopefully, I believe I'm going to heaven. 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. Bring this to your attention. Please. Your project name is Ripple. Yes, sir. Couldn't name it any better. No. 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 Leon. 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 and 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 U.S. government a cool $34 million 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 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. It's something you don't forget, something like that. One of the first people to learn of a potential problem offshore was this man. My name is Andy Greenwood. I'm an officer in the United States Coast Guard. I've been serving for over 21 years. It was about, I would say, around 9.30 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. 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 you know we were taking it seriously and certainly went out with
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. And I asked the other pilot who was actually flying the aircraft and making sure we were safe at the time, 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?
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 off in the distance. It was unreal. The Deepwater Horizon was on fire. The flames spitting into the sky. 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.
I knew this was something that was pretty significant. He also knows that somewhere in that inferno, there are people. So the entire Gulf Coast 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. One of the things the Coast Guard is a part of is safety of life at sea that states anytime a mariner can assist, it's their duty to help. One serious stroke of luck is the presence of a nearby supply vessel called the Damon Bankston. And they immediately, their crew, went into search and rescue mode to pull so many people out of 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. 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, headcounts of those aboard the Damon Bankston aren't adding up. We had reports of, you know, I'd say at least 30 or 40 people were unaccounted for. The severity 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. I walked into my office and I knew I had to get a brief out that day. I had to finish a brief.
to submit to the Court of Appeal, like most lawyers. I 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. My secretary, as soon as I walked in, said, there's a fire on a rig off of Fouchon. And I said, and I was right, there's hundreds of rigs off of Fouchon. And I didn't think another thing of it. Keith's son, Gordon, is a crewman on the Deepwater Horizon that night.
And maybe 10 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. I could feel the anxiety in Michelle's voice. She said, 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 crewman. Coast Guard pilot Andy Greenwood remembers seeing a transport vessel spraying water at the burning rig from thousands of feet away.
And that was as close as they could get due to the heat coming off. 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. 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 melt. Andy recalls this strange phenomenon as they circled the rig.
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 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. I drove to Gordon 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. 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.
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.
Gordon told me, he said, Dad, you know 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. 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. Gordon's brother Chris was there. I remember Chris had driven down to New Orleans, down to Fouchon, to be there when the boat got there to see if Gordon was with him.
I thought that that was fueled by hope of course, but it was not going to result in any good news. Gordon Jones is not among the group of survivors on the Damon Bankston who were brought ashore. But the Coast Guard presses on, even after the rig sinks. The more people you put out there...
who then come back to you and say, yeah, I didn't find anything, you know, it definitely, it's a ding to your optimism for sure. This is Brent Massey, a retired U.S. Coast Guardsman. Throughout the search for the missing, Brent is coordinating the rescue mission from a command center on shore. You know, you still go out there and look, you know, you take a step back and restrategize and go back out again. And so how long does that optimism endure?
The Coast Guard would want me to say that that optimism endures for as long as someone might potentially last in the water. The Coast Guard would want me to say that, that we would search through the end of survivability. And especially if there was a high media interest, we would search even beyond that. But among the operators, if I'm to be 100% honest, among the operators...
You know, we're not we're not stupid. You know, we you start to notice those things early, like, hey, man, we have searched and searched and searched. He's not here. This is a peek behind the curtain. I don't want it to sound like we don't care, but you got to be realistic about it. On April 23rd... Three days after the blowout, a decision is made. The search for the missing is called off. Eleven 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. Myself and the rest of the crew on duty were tasked with doing what's called a pollution flyover. U.S. Coast Guardsman Dylan Herbert flies over the site of the blowout.
to get a sense of how much pollution is in the water. 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. And when we went out there, from a distance, you could see the sheen, you know, just as expected. I mean, everybody knows what, you know, a little oil and water, you know, see it in a puddle in a parking lot, that rainbow, you know, sheen.
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. The ocean was not the right color. Correct, yeah. That's when we reported that 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. Louisiana State Police has my hotline. This is Walter. May I help you? Carlos Moreno. I wanted to give you an FYI notification on an incident that occurred offshore regarding one of our rig operations. This is an emergency call from the very beginning of the oil spill. 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. Could you quantify or measure the amount of oil that's been released? No, at this time we have some dimensions. Okay, but no volume or information at this point? Right. Statements on the disaster were trickling out into the world. And from the start, they didn't always prove to be accurate.
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.
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. We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused. And we will do whatever is necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy. His administration's position was clear.
they were going to 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.
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. I want to update the American people on the status of the BP oil spill. Non-stop response to the BP spill. 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 suggests it otherwise sometimes. This is BP's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, speaking at a press conference. Last Tuesday, a week ago Tuesday at about 10 p.m. at night, the Transocean Deepwater Horizon rig.
Caught fire, had an explosion. Note that Suttles referred to the rig as the Transocean Deepwater Horizon, not BP. He does this a bunch of times, actually. Transocean Deepwater Horizon. I think since the Transocean Deepwater Horizon incident began, 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. 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. If at any time the state or the federal government... is not satisfied that we have enough resources on scene to respond to the still, we can apply pressure and requests 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 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? Admiral, you said that the oil... In NOAA's estimation, it is increasing by a factor of five, yet BP says it's not increasing at all. Which one is it? It's important to understand this is an estimate. Am I NOAA scientific... 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. 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. When we first put the containment cap, the first original containment cap was put on. It filled up with hydrates, which may be a containment cap buoyant. Buoyant, meaning the cap floated away. So that plan fails, and the oil is beginning to wash up on shore.
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. Until we run out of options, 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.
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. 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.
Stopped pumping the mud for the past 16 hours. Is that a sign that something went wrong or is something unanticipated happened? No, nothing's actually gone wrong or unanticipated. When we do this operation... Top kill? also fails. By now, oil is washing ashore in Louisiana. Federal On Scene Coordinator Mary Landry
offers reassurance. I want to 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. All right, plan C, day 44. a different kind of cap. with a rubber gasket around it that'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. 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. Well, we've clearly been at this for quite some time now, and I think as myself and everyone who's been involved in this, it's quite a roller coaster. 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 cleanup. 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. 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. 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 crabs 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. Cool, that's a nice one. That's a bullfrog.
That's a chicken leg right there. That's what we call chicken leg. You look hungry. Frog legs. Did you stop eating the seafood for a while or no? We had to. Oh man, I went to freaking beef, bro. I mean, the Lord knows and God knows, everybody knows, we all did it in Louisiana. All of us went bulla once or twice in our life. I'm man enough to say it. I know game wardens. It is what it is.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. I'm lost in translation here. Explain to me what you just said. That's illegal. Is it? I ain't gonna lie, man. Edit. Edit. I don't care. This is back in the day. We're going to say it like that. Oh, yeah, this is way back in the day. You need food and you had to go do some illegal interviews. I'm not going to let my family starve. Before I let my family go hungry, I'm...
I'm going to do something about them. 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. 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.
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. As Vessels of Opportunity goes, of course, it's 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. So I'm Caleb Bro. I've been living in Louisiana all my life. I am part of the culture. 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. With landscaping, it's a luxury, so nobody was doing landscaping. Normal life just kind of came to a halt. So we joined a friend's boat crew and signed up for the Vessels of Opportunity. hoping to make a difference on the cleanup. 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. And what was your job?
Like, what was your day-to-day like? What were you actually out there doing? 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. And we were anchoring them out and putting stakes in the ground and prepping for it to come in, you know, waiting for the...
The big bang, so to speak, because we knew it was coming. It was almost like waiting for a hurricane. You know, we knew it was out there. We're getting reports of where it was at. And so that was that was our main job at the beginning. It's 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. So the gulf was closed. We couldn't fish. We were out of work. Joey had been a cast net fisherman.
He caught cigarmanos, a small fish good for baiting grouper and snapper. 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. It's okay. So we were ready. You know, we were 100% ready. Back in Louisiana, patches of oil were beginning to wash up on shore. They would send us out to try to collect the patches, and we would actually...
connect soft boom from one boat to the other, and we'd drag almost like dragging a trawl to encompass the all. When a boom would fill up with oil, they'd pull it out of the water, then transfer the boom into garbage bags for disposal. It was a kind of a constant cleanup process, you know. We were on Charlie Company, which we were kind of proud of. We called ourselves the hardest workers out there, you know, all of us Cajuns in the boats.
Did you feel like you were making progress or no? Yeah, I mean, somewhat we were. I mean, we could tell what areas were hitting. You start picking up the boom, 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 golf. Over in Florida,
Joey had that same spirit. He was raring to fight the spill and his wait was over. Then they finally called us up, right? As of tomorrow morning, you are activated and going to be in the field. I said, great, you know, we celebrate. Here we go. We get to do something, you know. We took off and went out the pass and we went down the ocean side and we decided just to drive west and see if we saw any oil. We really didn't expect to see much 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. 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. 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. Because we were only hearing stories. They were, you know, it's not as bad as everybody says.
We ran into that wall of oil. That really hit me. We knew that our ocean that we loved so much was in big, big trouble. When that came, that was a whole other world, a whole other level. Back off the coast of Louisiana, the occasional patches were replaced by miles-long oil slicks. And 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 there like we were in it 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 i mean you know the way it was burning your eyes our throats at the end of the day we could barely talk
But they were sending us out there to try to do something, to try to stop it. And you know what? We all went. 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. You know, that's the point where I feel like, okay, we can't handle this. We're wasting time. That's really what we're doing is not...
accomplishing anything right here. We need to figure out a better method like this. This isn't working. 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. We now see thousands of square miles with this awful sludge. 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. BP identified a worst-case scenario as a leak. that would release 250 000 barrels of oil per day into the ocean 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. do you really think that you can certify again today that you could respond to a spill of 250 000 barrels per day we're doing everything we can i believe that we will learn things through this there's no doubt and and i believe that
that those certifications will be with the knowledge that we have. I just wish that you had a little more humility here today and an admission that you don't have it. 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.
In the Deepwater Horizon story I had in 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.
Because 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. 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. Even on a rough day. Even when Mother Nature just kicks the shit out of 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
You know, people ask, you know, why would you want to, you know, 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 is a part of it. She's always going to 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. And 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 cleanup. 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. The oil vanished. So, I mean... What do you mean it vanished? Vanished. Like, completely gone. Like, how... In what period of time did it vanish? Are you saying overnight, over a couple days? Yeah, overnight. Overnight. 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? Now back to the Gulf oil spill. BP has stuck with the oil dispersant. This is a news report from 2010, covering a method Unified Command had been using to try and get rid of the oil. 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. This is the dispersant being used just
about everywhere in the Gulf. What we do, we take some crude oil, we put it on top of the water. They used a chemical dispersant called Corexit. In the report, you see a representative from the chemicals manufacturer giving a demonstration of how it works. What you'll see there, that ping indicates how quickly the dispersant molecules get to that. the 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.
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. The Secretary of Defense has approved a request. for two C-130 aircraft to dispense oil dispersing chemicals capable of covering up to 250 acres per flight with three flights per aircraft per day.
There are videos of airplanes being loaded up with Corexit from huge plastic tubs then raining the dispersant down all over the ocean. How do you know where to pick a spot out, man? It's everywhere. Spray on. Spray on. Unified Command seemed enthusiastic about this method. The gallons were racking up. End of the day today, we will have applied over 100,000 gallons of dispersant. 139,459 gallons of dispersant have been used today. We're approaching the million-gallon mark.
We successfully applied 42,000 gallons of dispersant. This almost doubles yesterday's total, which had doubled the day before. 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. Ripple is produced by Western Sound and APM Studios. It's created by me, Dan Leon, for Western Sound. Ben Adair is the executive producer. Erica Krause is the executive producer for APM Studios. Ripple is written and hosted by me, Dan Leon. Betsy Shepard is the senior reporter and producer. Colin McNulty is the editor.
Original music is composed by me. Sound design by me and Alex McGinnis. Alex mixed and mastered the show. Sarah Dealey and Stella Hartman are the associate producers. Research and fact-checking by Savannah Wright, with additional fact-checking by Betsy Shepard. Additional reporting by Haley Fox. Nick Ryan is APM Studios' Senior Production Manager.
and the executives in charge for APM Studios are Joanne Griffith, Alex Schaffert, and Chandra Kavati. To learn more about what you've heard, visit our website at ripplepodcast.com. dot org.