REVIEW

‘Mother Nature does not want to be drilled here’

A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea: The Race to Kill The BP Oil Gusher
Written by Joel Achenbach
Reviewed by Melissa Graham

A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea is a detailed account of the horrific crisis that took place because of the BP oil gusher last year. Achenbach’s account of the disaster focuses on his experience as a journalist covering the crisis.

His goal was to try and give the reader a sense of what happened that summer and how the situation was handled, without needing an engineering degree.

It is clear from the outset that he is not looking to place blame or point fingers. This non-partisan journalist position has its merits in some stories, but for a situation like the BP gusher, glazing over the environmental impacts seems like a great way to encourage future disasters.

In fact, Achenbach goes to such great lengths to avoid placing blame that he seems to regard the environmental crisis as something of a footnote, overshadowed by falling political games, technology and falling stock prices.

Achenbach gets clearly caught up in the engineering and technologies that were used to clean up the spill. At one point he compares the situation to rescuing the astronauts on Apollo 13.

It is as if he sees the crisis as this great technological feat for humanity, a blend of political will and human technology.

One point that really made this clear occurred when Achenbach was touring a cleanup vessel. As he continued to drool over the technology—the air-conditioning on board, and exercise equipment, etc.—and hardly mentioned a word about the fact that he is sitting in the middle of the ocean surrounded by oil in the worst environmental disaster at this point in human history.

While it is important to acknowledge the massive effort that went into cleaning up the spill, the environment is a main character in this story that was largely left out.

One thing to give Achenbach credit for in this book is his acknowledgment of the oil rig workers’ role in dealing with this disaster.

His description of the workers fight for their lives in escaping the Deepwater Horizon is so moving that the reader can feel the loss, shock and horror in a way that was never portrayed to us on television.
He also gives a slight nod to the women in the highly masculine oil industry, but this is quite overshadowed by the very masculine description of the technology on site.

Achenbach wrote his most moving line when describing the death of a worker during the disaster: “Mother Nature does not want to be drilled here.”

Overall I’d say this book is a good read for anyone looking for factual information and an inside look at the disaster, but don’t expect any apologies.