Black gold and the lethal race drilling for it

Book review | Stanley Reed, Alison Fitzgerald

In 2005, 15 workers were killed when BP's Texas City refinery exploded. In 2006, corroded pipes owned by BP led to an oil spill in Alaska. And then in 2010, 11 BP contract workers were killed in the Gulf of Mexico's Macondo well blowout. By the time it plugged the hole at the bottom of the Gulf, BP had become the biggest oil polluter in United States history, dwarfing the notorious Exxon Valdez incident in which the drunken captain of the oil tanker ran his ship aground in Prince William Sound off Alaska. Some commentators - perhaps BP apologists - suggest this was bound to happen and BP was simply the unlucky company to which this disaster befell. But Stanley Reed, who has been observing the company for more than 10 years, and Alison Fitzgerald saw otherwise.

In the book, journalists Fitzgerald and Reed show that the tragedy of Deepwater Horizon was not simply a horrible accident. It was a disaster that many say was long in the making, was foreseeable and almost inevitable.