Relatives of the 11 men who died aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig are flying over the Gulf of Mexico today, back to the epicentre of the worst offshore oil spill in the nation’s history.
On land, vigils are being held in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida to mark the spill.
On the night of April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, a rig operated by Transocean Ltd., burst into flames as it was drilling a well for BP PLC., killing 11 workers on or near the drilling floor. The rest of the crew evacuated, but two days later the rig toppled into the Gulf and sank to the sea floor. The bodies were never recovered.
Over the next 85 days, 206 million gallons of oil – 19 times more than the Exxon Valdez spilled – spewed from the well. In response, the nation commandeered the largest offshore fleet of vessels since D-Day, and BP spent billions of dollars cleaning up the mess, saving itself from collapse.
“I can’t believe tomorrow has been one year because it seems like everything just happened,” Courtney Kemp, whose husband Roy Wyatt Kemp was killed on the rig, wrote on her Facebook page. “I have learned a lot of things through all of this but the most important is to live each day as if it were your last ... what matters is if you truly live.”
Transocean invited up to three members of each family to attend the flyover. They are expected to circle the site a few times in a helicopter, though there is no visible marker identifying where their loved ones perished. At the bottom of the sea, 11 stars were imprinted on the well’s final cap.
The solemn ceremonies marking the disaster underscore the delicate healing that is only now taking shape. Oil still occasionally rolls up on beaches in the form of tar balls, and fishermen face an uncertain future.
Most scientists agree the effects “were not as severe as many had predicted,” said Christopher D’Elia, dean at the School of the Coast and Environment at Louisiana State University. “People had said this was an ecological Armageddon, and that did not come to pass.”
However, biologists are concerned about the spill’s long-term effect on marine life.
“There are these cascading effects,” D’Elia said. “It could be accumulation of toxins in the food chain, or changes in the food web. Some species might dominate.”