The Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, triggering the largest US marine oil spill
On this day · 20 April 2010
A blast on a drilling rig off Louisiana killed eleven workers and bled millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf for nearly three months.
At about 7:45 p.m. on April 20, 2010, high-pressure gas surged up the well beneath BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig, drilling the Macondo prospect off Louisiana, and ignited. The explosions tore through the platform, killing 11 workers whose bodies were never recovered. Survivors scrambled into lifeboats as the rig burned.
The Deepwater Horizon sank two days later, on April 22, leaving a wellhead a mile down on the seabed gushing crude. A failed cement barrier and a malfunctioning blowout preventer had let hydrocarbons race to the surface unchecked.
Before engineers finally capped the well on July 15, 2010, roughly 134 million gallons of oil escaped over 87 days.
It remains the largest marine oil spill in US history, fouling shorelines from Texas to Florida and prompting a vast, years-long cleanup and restoration effort across the Gulf.
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