In April 2010, methane gas within the drilling riser of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig rose up the drilling riser, ignited, exploded, and engulfed the platform. Eleven of the 126 crew members onboard died in the ensuing chaos. The drilling rig sank two days later. Over the next 87 days, 4.9 million barrels of oil gushed from the ocean floor into the Gulf of Mexico.

Carl Safina, a university professor and “professional environmentalist and conservationist” spent much of the summer visiting the Gulf coast and learning about the spill and the people it affected. He chronicled his thoughts in A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout, published just a year after the spill took place. I also spent much of the summer of 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. The Coast Guard deployed me to the command post in Houma, Louisiana to help coordinate local government relations for two months. I read this book because I wanted to learn more about the oil spill – I wanted to understand how the public saw and experienced the disaster. This is exactly what Safina provides.

The book is divided into 3 different sections. It starts with a detailed play-by-play of the chain of errors that led to the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Numerous elements in the safety scheme failed – and had just one succeeded or been caught, it is likely the explosion could have been prevented. Audio alarms were shut off before incident because they tended to go off far too often. No one was watching flow meter readings for a critical 15 minute period leading up to the explosion, when abnormal flow rates were present. Misinterpretations of negative pressure tests, replacement of heavy drilling fluid with seawater, spacers being improperly aligned – I do not fully understand the engineering behind these items (though Safina does an admirable job explaining much in ways the layman can understand). This chain of errors led up to the incident, and could have been broken anywhere along the way. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Safina places the blame squarely on a push for speed and a desire to rapidly get the job done, without enough attention paid to safety.

The second section of the book, by far the longest, details Safina’s travels through the Gulf region. He visits with fishermen who can’t fish, store owners with few buyers, restaurants with no seafood to sell, empty hotels, and more. He criticizes the response effort, let by Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen (Safina continually refers to him as the “Thadmiral”). He denigrates BP and their corporate culture. He excoriates lawmakers for reducing regulatory budgets and “[slashing] those annoying safety regs.” Eleven people died, and millions of lives were affected by the oil spill. Safina admirably puts a human face on these people. He tries to provide a voice for the affected wildlife and the oceans.

However, Safina’s writing comes off as one sided. He rarely tries to understand the response efforts made by the government or the oil industry. Some of the strongest parts of the book are when he does look deeper and push past rhetoric. For example, he examines some of the more zany conspiracy theories, such as the loop current pushing oil to the shores of Ireland, the threat of global crop failure in 2011, the looming menace of tsunamis in the Gulf, or the use of nuclear weapons to close the well-head, and states:

“I’m really angry about the recklessness that caused this, and the inanity of the response; I am deeply distressed about the potential damage to wildlife and habitats – but I find myself becoming uncomfortable with all the catastrophizing…Many scientists – and as a scientist it hurts to say this – are being a little shrill. Cool heads are not prevailing.”

Along the way, Safina covers the history of oil spills in America and the world, and how laws, regulations, and response technologies have evolved. This history is worthwhile, and shows how large disasters like this can lead to strong, positive legislation. The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill led to the creation of Earth Day and paved the way for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, and more. The Exxon Valdez oil spill directly resulted in the passage of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.

The third section of the book details a cup of coffee Safina had with ADM Allen and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco, two government officials he has spent two hundred pages repudiating. During this conversation, Safina is surprised to find both officials revealing, transparent, and caring, and begins to realize that his “summer-long simmering mental caricature of [Allen] was off base.” Safina admirably puts aside many of his assumptions as listens to the other side of the story. For example, ADM Allen explains that he restricted air space over the well-head not because of a desire to limit media access, but because there were eight near collisions in the air early on during the response. Their conversation is wide ranging, and both Allen and Lubchenco admit that the work is not done, and that mistakes were made along the way. But by the end of the book, Safina shows that they are both competent and strong leaders.

Safina ends the book by discussing what, in his mind, is a far greater disaster. He states:

“the worst environmental disaster in history isn’t the oil that got away. The real catastrophe is the oil we don’t spill…It’s the oil we burn, the coal we burn, the gas we burn…That spill is changing the atmosphere, changing the world’s climate, altering the heat balance of the whole planet, destroying the world’s polar system, killing the wildlife of icy seas, killing the tropic’s coral reefs, raising the level of the sea, turning the oceans acidic, and dissolving shellfish.”

He paints a bleak and grim picture, and excoriates all of us for not doing more and pushing harder to stem the tide of global warming. I wish he had explained the science behind this clarion call in a deeper manner, but his passion is evident and his desire for change is obviously strong.

A note on style: Safina writes much of the book in a disparate, almost stream-of-consciousness way. He jumps from one small incident or visit to an unrelated interview to a discussion of regulatory history, almost in a haphazard manner. This made following the narrative difficult, but at the same time, I think it also helped show the chaos that Safina and many people in the Gulf states felt that summer.

Score: 6.5 – I left with a much stronger feeling of empathy for the people of the Gulf and better understanding of the region’s environment, but I wish Safina had been a little more rounded for the sake of other readers.