A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea: The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher [Hardcover]

Joel Achenbach (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 5, 2011 | ISBN-10: 1451625340 | ISBN-13: 978-1451625349 | Edition: Second Impression

It was a technological crisis in an alien realm: a blown-out oil well in mile-deep water in the Gulf of Mexico. For the engineers who had to kill the well, this was like Apollo 13, a crisis no one saw coming, and one of untold danger and challenge.

A suspense story, a mystery, a technological thriller: This is Joel Achenbach’s groundbreaking account of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and what came after. The tragic explosion on the huge drilling rig in April 2010 killed eleven men and triggered an environmental disaster. As a gusher of crude surged into the Gulf’s waters, BP engineers and government scientists—awkwardly teamed in Houston—raced to devise ways to plug the Macondo well.

Achenbach, a veteran reporter for The Washington Post and acclaimed science writer for National Geographic, moves beyond the blame game to tell the gripping story of what it was like, behind the scenes, moment by moment, in the struggle to kill Macondo. Here are the controversies, the miscalculations, the frustrations, and ultimately the technical triumphs of men and women who worked out of sight and around the clock for months to find a way to plug the well.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster was an environmental 9/11. The government did not have the means to solve the problem; only the private sector had the tools, and it didn’t have the right ones as the country became haunted by Macondo’s black plume, which was omnipresent on TV and the Internet. Remotely operated vehicles, the spaceships of the deep, had to perform the challenging technical ma-neuvers on the seafloor. Engineers choreographed this robotic ballet and crammed years of innovation into a single summer. As he describes the drama in Houston, Achenbach probes the government investigation into what went wrong in the deep sea. This was a confounding mystery, an engineering whodunit. The lessons of this tragedy can be applied broadly to all complex enterprises and should make us look more closely at the highly engineered society that surrounds us.

Achenbach has written a cautionary tale that doubles as a technological thriller.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Achenbach lives up to his promises to make the disaster ‘into a tale that everyone can comprehend,’ with fluid, often Spartan prose and a candid tone. . . ."

--Los Angeles Times

“A gripping, insightful, sobering and at times heroic tale of the struggle to find a solution to a technological problem whose precise source is still a mystery.”

--The Globe and Mail (Canada)

“Briskly informative and even-handed. . . . A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea will not make anyone feel better about the BP spill. But with economic and political pressure on to resume deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s a book anyone who lives along its shores needs to read.”

--St. Petersburg Times

About the Author

Joel Achenbach is a reporter for The Washington Post, and the author of six previous books, including The Grand Idea, Captured by Aliens and Why Things Are. He started the Washington Post's first blog, Achenblog, and has worked on the newspaper's national Style magazine and Outlook staffs. He regularly contributes science articles to National Geographic. A native of Gainesville, Florida and a 1982 graduate of Princeton University, he lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and three children.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Second Impression edition (April 5, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1451625340
• ISBN-13: 978-1451625349
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #750,155 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Here's my book website:

http://www.aholeatthebottomofthesea.com/


Here's my boilerplate bio:

Joel Achenbach has been a staff writer for The Washington Post since 1990, started the newsroom's first online column in 1999 and the paper's first blog, Achenblog, in 2005. His seventh book, "A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea," an account of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and its aftermath, will be [whoa, make that WAS] published in April 2011 by Simon & Schuster. His syndicated column Why Things Are (1988-1996), which he began when he worked at The Miami Herald, appeared in 50 newspapers and three collections of the column were published by Ballantine Books. He has been a regular contributor to National Geographic since 1998, writing stories on such topics as dinosaurs, particle physics, earthquakes, extraterrestrial life, megafauna extinction and the electrical grid. Now assigned to the Post's national desk, he writes on science and politics and helped cover the Deepwater Horizon story. A 1982 graduate of Princeton University, he has taught journalism at Princeton and Georgetown University. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Mary Stapp, and three daughters.

In case that's too confusing, here's the basic point: I'm something that used to be known as "a newspaper reporter."

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Reads like a Michael Lewis book April 11, 2011

By thrillseeker

Format:Hardcover

I read A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea in two days - I hope that neither author minds the comparison, but it reads a lot like a Michael Lewis book. The book skillfully explains a complex issue told through the eyes of the quirky characters who had a front row seat to the disaster, which includes Mr. Achenbach himself. If you are a fan of the Achenblog or of his stories in the Washington Post, you won't be surprised to find yourself laughing out loud at times - which may seem inappropriate given the subject matter, but that is the charm of one of my favorite writers...

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The definitive book about the Macondo blowout April 20, 2011

By Curmudgeon

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

As other reviewers have said, this is as close to a page-turner as a non-fiction book can get, and gives a blow-by-blow and day-by-day account of what happened and why out in the Gulf of Mexico. And there could hardly be a better writer for the job than Achenbach, a self-professed science geek, but also a highly skilled "explainer" who can translate Engineer into English, as a colleague of his says. (Achenbach's writing and story-telling skills are amply demonstrated in his earlier works, "Captured by Aliens," a laugh-out-loud account of his travels among the people on the fringes of the UFO movement, and his serious-but-entertaining "The Grand Idea," the account of George Washington's plans to establish a canal system linking the Potomac River to the frontier America he'd explored and surveyed in his youth. As a science guy, Achenbach can hardly be topped, as his many years as a Washington Post reporter, National Geographic contributor, NPR guest, astronomy dude, and author of the mostly sciencey and often very droll "Why Things Are" series will attest. ("Captured/Aliens" should probably be a must-read for psychologists and behavioral science types, too, for its insights into the mindset of people who march to the sound of drums that are more than just a little different.)

People would dearly love for the Macondo blowout, the explosion aboard and the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon, and the months-long effort to find a way to shut down the Well From Hell to have relatively simple explanations and a handful of clear-cut villains (how many of us were denied the pleasure of blaming it all on Dick Cheney, ex-CEO of Halliburton?) BP greed? Sloppy work and cutting corners? Hubris? Crass stupidity? Government bumbling? Alas, no. Achenbach nicely dissects what turns out to be the complex cascade of events, as we have come to expect after Space Shuttle accidents and other manmade and natural disasters. Achenbach takes the reader step by step from the bridge of the Deepwater Horizon to the tightly guarded BP boilerroom where the best minds in industry and government struggled to figure out what went wrong and what to do about it (because figuring out what caused the blowout might have been key to its solution). Like the Apollo 13 mission, there was no textbook, and no one had ever dealt with a disaster of this scale and this type, under these conditions. Like Apollo 13, the first thing engineers had to do was figure out just what the hell happened, and what its effects and consequences were.

And along the way we learn all sorts of tidbits about all sorts of things (did you know that there was a deep underwater abyss off the mouth of the Mississippi River, and in it a colony of sperm whales dive deep to feed upon their prey, an almost unknown species of giant squid called magnapinna, which have elbows in their tentacles so they look like Daddy Longlegs? No? Me either.)

A great read, and so clearly explained it is accessible even to the average high-schooler. (Which means it'd make a great present for a class book review.)

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars a screen burner... April 11, 2011

By daktari

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I guess that is the modern equilivant of a page burner on Kindle! This was a great read and my kindle could hardly keep up with my reading... It described a very complex and protracted series of events in a way that was both entertaining and enlightening. I hope the author has already started reporting on the Japanese nuclear reactors.