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BP Oil Spill and The Deep Water Horizon Accident

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Deep Water Horizon was a nine year old semisubmersible drilling rig that was designed to operate in waters ten thousand feet deep. This particular rig was built by the South Korean company Hyundai and owned by Transocean, on the world’s largest offshore drilling contractors. BP would charter the Deep Water Horizon from March 2008 to September 2013 for deep exploratory drilling. BP would drilling off of the Gulf of Mexico eighteen thousand three hundred and sixty feet below sea level, in five thousand one hundred feet of water. April 20, 2010 at 9:45 am, a high presser methane gas leak expanded into the drilling riser and the drilling rig, where the BP oil rig would ignite and explode. During the this time there were one hundred and twenty-six crew members working on the rig, out of them ninety-four were rescued by life boats and helicopters, seventeen were treated for injuries, but eleven of the crew members were never found. The Deep Water Horizon sank on the morning of April 22, 2010. Oil flowed for eighty-seven days, leaking a total of four point nine million barrels of oil. The amount of oil spilt during the Deep Horizon accident would make this the largest accidental oil spill in history. This spill had a detrimental affect the environment, bringing on many investigations and lawsuits. On January 5,2011 the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling released their final report. The panel found that the explosion was a result of

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