Nonfiction review: Fire on the Horizon

You might not remember where you were on April 20 last year when the floating oil rig Deepwater Horizon blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 crewmen.

National tragedies such as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are compressed events, frozen vividly in our minds in the course of a single day. By contrast, the Horizon catastrophe unwound over the course of a spring and summer.

But you'd have to have been vacationing on Venus not to remember the months we waited to find out how — and when — the oil would stop spewing from the busted well.

So what exactly happened on that fateful April 20?

John Konrad and Tom Shroder have the answers. Don't expect to find them in the opening pages of "Fire on the Horizon: The Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster," though.

Konrad (a veteran oil rig captain) and Shroder (a former editor and writer at The Washington Post) focus the first third of their book on the people who eventually found themselves caught in an inferno.

Think of it as "The Perfect Storm" set on an oil rig. (Fittingly, Sebastian Junger, who wrote "The Perfect Storm," provided the front-cover blurb for "Fire on the Horizon.")

The strategy works well in part because it counterbalances the technical details needed to understand what led to the explosion.

In some ways, the Horizon catastrophe came as a surprise. While it had never been in drydock, the 10-year-old Horizon hadn't had a "lost time" incident in seven years. (A lost time incident is "any accident resulting in a worker missing time from work beyond the day or shift the accident occurred," Konrad and Shroder write.)

In fact, just hours before the explosion, four company VIPs arrived on the rig to give the crew an award for their safety record.

The rig had previously drilled "the deepest well ever drilled," and that accomplishment "was an exclamation point to the rising sentiment that offshore drilling had become so advanced, it was virtually fail-proof," Konrad and Shroder write.

Still, with nearly 30 wells under its belt, the Horizon was beginning to show its age, and the authors suggest the rig's managers chose to avoid potentially expensive, time-consuming repairs in order to keep the operation flowing.

"In simplified, everyday terms, it was a little like driving a car that is burning oil," they write. "You can put it in the shop and pay to rebuild the engine, or wait until you have more time and money, and in the meantime just keep driving, dump in a quart of oil every time you fill the gas tank, and cross your fingers."

Oil rigs are incredibly complicated machines, and describing how they (and their crews) work could have been an onerous task. But Konrad and Shroder's approach to the technical aspects of the book is outstanding. Here, for example, they describe the difficulties inherent in connecting a blowout preventer (BOP) onto a wellhead far below the rig:

"To conceive how difficult it is to drop the BOP stack's connector pipe into the well's hole, first imagine standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building and attempting to lower a soda bottle at the end of a 1,200-foot-long string into a garbage can on the sidewalk. It's extremely windy, and you're wearing roller skates. Now consider that, with the building encased in clouds, it's impossible to see the sidewalk, much less the garbage can.

"Imagine an observer with a cell phone at the bottom giving directions as the bottle descended. Every motion made by the person on the observation deck would take time to translate down the long string, and the effect on the bottle of his movements interacting with the swirling winds would be virtually unpredictable.

"But all of that would be easy compared with what the crew of the Horizon was attempting to accomplish."

By the time Konrad and Shroder reach April 20 in their account, they've helped readers understand what happened onboard the rig and how viscerally it impacted individual members of the crew. The book's blow-by-blow description of the explosion is as riveting as any Hollywood blockbuster, and far more harrowing.

Read it and you're unlikely to forget what happened that day.