Environmental Disasters: Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
Thousands of animals soaked in oil and dying, beaches covered in oily substance, smoke clouds forming as workers try to burn the oil off the surface of the water. The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill was a disaster of massive proportions that affected marine life, human health, the economy, and the law. The causes of the spill, the explosion that started it, and the aftermath are all important to understand so that we can ensure that a catastrophe such as this never occurs again. Deepwater Horizon was a 10-year old oil rig that was owned by Transocean, the largest offshore drilling contractor in the world. It was located on the Macondo well, an oil prospect approximately 41 miles off the coast of Louisiana that BP owned a majority of. The well was 18,000 feet below the seafloor in nearly 5,000 feet of water. At 9:46 pm CST on April 20, 2010, a surge of natural gas burst through a concrete core that had recently been installed by Halliburton, an oil field service company. Three min
