The country watched underwater shots of the ravaged well spewing oil for 87 days, leaking some 200 million gallons of crude into the Gulf’s waters. And nearly everyone we see is lacerated, gashed, bruised and swollen by the time they limp and swim their way to rescue.īack in 2010, in the wake of the real-world Deepwater Horizon disaster, nonstop news coverage mostly centered on the catastrophic damage that an oil spill of that magnitude would inflict upon the environment. Men run wildly after being engulfed in flames. Another worker gets impaled by a huge chunk of hurtling debris. Another guy has his leg caught between two metal rails, and Mike must forcibly snap his protruding shin bone in order to free him. He slowly pulls a six inch shard of metal out of his foot. Each new metal-rending explosion and eruption is deafening and deadly.Īfter being slammed by an explosion while he’s in the shower, Jimmy wakes to find himself blinded and covered with blood. The oil rig truly seems like a battlefield as many are left huddled and crying out in agony. Rivets fire from metal fixtures like bullets, men are slammed viciously into walls and through shattered glass, shrapnel repeatedly tears faces and exposed flesh. The resulting 30 to 40 minutes of cinematic destruction is extremely intense. Once the unchecked oil pressure from the deep starts bubbling up through Deepwater’s overwhelmed systems, we see how it creates one cascading crisis after another until the entire rig is enveloped in a series of explosions and raging fires. In that kind of hellish situation, what do good men do? Mike Williams, Jimmy Harrell and the crew of the Deepwater Horizon are about to answer that question. And in the space of a few fateful moments, fiery explosions, hurtling workers, twisting metal beams and crumbling platforms are everywhere. One tiny pressure leak leads to another issue, then another, until the whole bubbling time bomb of gas and crude oil can no longer be controlled or contained. No, it could be deadly.Īnd, well, that’s exactly what it became. One skipped safety check could be dangerous. It’s the oil pressure, bubbling up from some 20,000 feet down, that you have to worry about. Of course, the real roughnecks know that corporate pressure is the least of their worries on a deep-water rig. But the biggest of the wigs, Donald Vidrine, isn’t averse to applying as much pressure as necessary to get the rig back on schedule. They are so panicked, in fact, that they’re demanding that safety precautions be bypassed for the sake of expediency and efficiency. You see, those money-hungry bigwigs are wringing their hands over mounting delays in Deepwater’s scheduled delivery of its black gold prize from the ocean depths. Jimmy” as he’s known to his men-has to have some one-on-one time with the British Petroleum execs who are belligerently tossing out unrealistic orders to his men again. There are, oh, dozens of systems that could use a bit of tender love from Mike’s crew-from computer terminals to phones. In fact, when those blue-collar contractors step off the helicopter onto the deck of their floating rig, things start off as they always do. Just another long 21-day shift away from their families. No, they just knew it was time for another tour on their offshore drilling rig, Deepwater Horizon. On the evening of April 20, 2010, some 40 miles off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico, things went awry.īut on the morning of the 20th, chief electrician Mike Williams and crew manager Jimmy Harrell didn’t have any inkling of the horrific oil-spewing disaster that was just hours from erupting.
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