Hole at the Bottom of the Sea: The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher

Author:   Joel Achenbach
Publisher:   Simon & Schuster
ISBN:  

9781451625370


Pages:   304
Publication Date:   03 April 2012
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   Available To Order   Availability explained
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Hole at the Bottom of the Sea: The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher


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Overview

The struggle to kill the BP Macondo gusher in the Gulf of Mexico is the Apollo 13 of our time--this is the thrilling story of the nightmare well and the men who conquered it in dangerous waters. Suspensful and illuminating, Joel Achenbach offers a 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 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 maneuvers 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. A confounding mystery and 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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Joel Achenbach
Publisher:   Simon & Schuster
Imprint:   Simon & Schuster
Dimensions:   Width: 14.10cm , Height: 2.10cm , Length: 21.50cm
Weight:   0.263kg
ISBN:  

9781451625370


ISBN 10:   1451625375
Pages:   304
Publication Date:   03 April 2012
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order   Availability explained
We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately.

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Reviews

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. <p>-- St. Petersburg Times


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


Here's what really happened at the spill -- a compelling look behind the curtain. Joel Achenbach, one of America's best journalists, digs up thousands of previously undisclosed documents to weave a deeply human story of failure, heroism, and the high price of oil addiction. <p>--David Von Drehle, author Triangle: The Fire That Changed America


Author Information

Joel Achenbach is a reporter for The Washington Post, and the author of seven books, including The Grand Idea, Captured by Aliens, and Why Things Are. A Washington Post staff writer since 1990, Achenbach writes about science and politics. He started the newspaper's first online column, ""Rough Draft"", and started the Washington Post's first blog, Achenblog. He regularly contributes science articles to National Geographic. A native of Gainesville, Florida and a graduate of Princeton University, he lives in Washington, DC with his wife and three children.

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