@article{437823,
      recid = {437823},
      author = {Achenbach, Joel.},
      title = {A hole at the bottom of the sea : the race to kill the BP  oil gusher /},
      publisher = {Simon & Schuster,},
      address = {New York :},
      pages = {276 p. ;},
      year = {2011},
      abstract = {"It was a technological crisis in an alien realm: a  blown-out oil well in mile-deep water in the Gulf of  Mexico. For the engineers who had to kill the well, this  was like Apollo 13, a crisis no one saw coming, and one of  untold danger and challenge. A suspense story, a mystery, a  technological thriller: This is Joel Achenbach's  groundbreaking account of the Deepwater Horizon disaster  and what came after. The tragic explosion on the huge  drilling rig in April 2010 killed eleven men and triggered  an environmental disaster. As a gusher of crude surged into  the Gulf's waters, BP engineers and government  scientists--awkwardly teamed in Houston--raced to devise  ways to plug the Macondo well. Achenbach, a veteran  reporter for The Washington Post and acclaimed science  writer for National Geographic, moves beyond the blame game  to tell the gripping story of what it was like, behind the  scenes, moment by moment, in the struggle to kill Macondo.  Here are the controversies, the miscalculations, the  frustrations, and ultimately the technical triumphs of men  and women who worked out of sight and around the clock for  months to find a way to plug the well. The Deepwater  Horizon disaster was an environmental 9/11. The government  did not have the means to solve the problem; only the  private sector had the tools, and it didn't have the right  ones as the country became haunted by Macondo's black  plume, which was omnipresent on TV and the Internet.  Remotely operated vehicles, the spaceships of the deep, had  to perform the challenging technical maneuvers on the sea  floor. Engineers choreographed this robotic ballet and  crammed years of innovation into a single summer. As he  describes the drama in Houston, Achenbach probes the  government investigation into what went wrong in the deep  sea. This was a confounding mystery, an engineering  whodunit. The lessons of this tragedy can be applied  broadly to all complex enterprises and should make us look  more closely at the highly engineered society that  surrounds us. Achenbach has written a cautionary tale that  doubles as a technological thriller"--Provided by  publisher.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/437823},
}