Fire on the Horizon - A review

Fire on the Horizon by gcaptain's John Konrad and Tom Shroder of Washington Post Magazine tells the story of the  semi-submersible offshore  drilling ship the  Deepwater Horizon  and, importantly, the story of it's crew. The book weaves together  technical and  personal details creating context for events as they unfold towards the explosion which resulted in the deaths of eleven crew and the loss of drill ship.

The book gives a good overview of the world of off-shore drilling as well as the details necessary to understand the incident. For me it was like finally getting the story from a trusted source after months of gossip and rumors for uninformed sources.



I was especially interested in the flooding incident the Deepwater Horizon suffered in 2008 which illustrated how dependent rig operators  are upon complex instrumentation and how little interest regulators had in a very serious near-miss.  Konrad details   BP's  obsessive focus on  worker safety while seemingly missing  the big picture of a crew nearing it's breaking point attempting to deal with the difficulties  of drilling the Macondo well.


Fire on the Horizon is a page-turner.  I recommend it  to anyone seeking to understand events leading  to the incident which resulted  in massive ecological damage  to the Gulf of Mexico and changed forever the lives of the crew of the  Deepwater Horizon and  the lives of the  families connected to them.


K.C.