"Here's my desk." "Here's a console where I monitor and control the rig." "Right there's what's going on above the rig floor right now." "They're going down the well right now with some pipe." "I got two engines running, two broke down, and two on standby." "All's I gotta do is push that little red button right there, emergency transfer to backup, and I'll be in control of the rig." "But I'll tell you what," "I'll have a lot of people come in here real quick." "And I probably wouldn't have a job after that." "How do you know where to pick a spot out, man?" "It's everywhere." "I think it's moving, like, north, northeast compared to where we were at this morning." "Oh, man, it's thick." "It happened more than 50 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico." "126 workers were believed to be on the Deepwater Horizon rig when it erupted in flames." "Straight ahead, Bart, on a 330..." "Flaps up." "We're able to see quite a bit still where the oil's creeping northbound." "Yeah, every day, it's a different flight." "Every day they're just trying to get a picture of where it is and where it's going." "OK, we're past, shouldn't be a problem." "We're gonna climb up and do a strip search with our Selex radar, get a good picture of where the oil's creeping northbound." "The oil spill, drifting toward the Louisiana Coast, is 80 miles long." "It's about the size of Rhode Island." "This oil rig was kind of like the Titanic." "It was this marvel of engineering." "As the chief executive of BP, can you please tell the American people what specifically you take responsibility for?" "I take full responsibility to eliminate the leak as fast as we can and clean up the oil." "Well, this is the mother lode right here." "Yeah." "Yeah, we're on it here." "All right, sounds good." "Thanks, guys." "Because there's never been a leak this size at this depth, we need to know the facts before we allow deepwater drilling to continue." "What they've got us doing right now, this is our normal doors, the doors here, the nets." "It's what we use to catch shrimp with." "What they're trying to do with this, all this underneath the surface that you can't see, they're wanting us to set our nets and drag them to see if we can locate it, spot the oil." "Personally, I don't think we're gonna be able to retrieve the oil with the nets, you know?" "I mean, you know, they're designed for water to go through the nets." "I mean, they catch fish, shrimp, sea life, but you're not gonna hold oil in them." "Sir?" "Hold on." "Hey." "Oh, I didn't sign that." "All right." "I just got word from Bob." "We ain't supposed to be talking to y'all." " I didn't know that." " So, yeah." "Uh, let's see..." "Here we go, "all"?" "Outside." "I'm supposed to be monitoring the cement job here." "There it is, that stairway right up there." "That was the one that we went up to escape." "All that behind it was completely blown away." "There was nothing there." "That's our lifeboat." "That's number three." "That's number four." "And those are some inflatable emergency rafts." "There's the mighty, mighty derrick." "Doug Brown, what's up?" "What's up, homie?" "I'm making a movie for home." "This is Tom, my buddy electrician, working on a water-tight door." "What's up, Douglas?" "The rig was all ours." "Or I should say all Transocean's." "She was assembled in Korea." "When I arrived there, it was still in pieces in a shipyard." "I was there to spank it, bring it to life." "I knew that thing like the back of my hand." "It was the newest generation, state-of-the-art rig." "We drilled the deepest oil hole in the world." "It was an outstanding rig because of the crew that was on it." "They knew what they were doing." "So it was like we didn't even have to talk to each other." "And it worked." "Oh, shoot, here comes a storm." "It's blowing pretty darn good out here right now." "We just got an upgraded weather report, condition red for thunder, lightning, and water spouts." "Whoo!" "I knew my job was dangerous." "That was one reason why I took the job." "I always thought, "Wow, that's cool, you know?" "And, I like hurricanes..." "I was always like, uh, Lieutenant Dan, you know, at the top of the mast." ""Whoo-hoo, is that all you got?"" "Because of the safety that was involved with this, visitors and family were never allowed out there." "Basically, a lot of us lived in a secret world." "OK, I'm right above the drill floor now." "Let's try to sneak up so we can look down." "Shh, be quiet." "Don't say anything." "People forget that it was a very prestigious job to work on the Deepwater Horizon." "The last well that they drilled," "Gordon said for weeks, they told them," ""Dry hole, dry hole, this is a dry hole."" "And they kept drilling, and found the second biggest oil reserve in the history of the United States." "Gordon was on the rig when they hit that." "It was a lot of fun." "He said when they find oil on the rig you're working on, everybody gets a bonus, everybody." "You got snow in your hair, kid." "We were proud of him for doing so much so soon." "I bragged about getting Gordon that job." "I'm gonna throw it at Mom." "You ready?" "Set?" "Ow, shit!" "But then when that job cost him his life..." "I had to stop bragging and and feel responsible." "I'm sorry, I know this is not a good time, but this is the two minutes our child will have of his birthday." "Mmm." "I'll give you the ultimate bittersweet experience." "It's having a new grandson whose daddy just died." "And this was a time of such happiness, and we just hugged and cried and cried." "And it was just so emotionally wrenching for us to see that Gordon..." "Not there, to be there." "Gordon's supposed to be there." "There's me." "Yeah." ""Even a cave man can do it."" "There's a crane operator, Heavy D." "His name was Dwayne, but we called him Heavy D because he was a big guy." "This is Jason Anderson, this is one of the guys that got killed out there." "But he was always making funny faces in the meetings." "So..." "We were all inside, up on the front here, when everything happened." "So that's why I was so close to the, the lifeboats." "Luckily I was, being asleep, I was right there at it." "And then all these guys working were, like, up here in the center and stuff, and this crane here on the other side, that's the one that Dale was in, when it came out, when he got blew out." "There's me." "See, this is a crane pedestal." "So that crane that I was showing you, this is what it's sitting on." "And that's, you know, that's probably like a 50-foot drop at least." "Ah, I found it." "See?" "That was my room, 338." "This is the one I grabbed and wore out of the rig, something that I wanted." "I felt that, you know, if they were gonna get mad for me stealing a life jacket, then, oh, well at that point, you know?" "Come on you guys, answer." "Hello?" "There we go." "Hey, John." "Yeah, I'm gonna take control back here, I think, OK?" "For some reason, Transocean started saying," ""We don't need that many people to properly maintain the rig,"" "so they started eliminating positions." "At first, it seemed OK because, you know, equipment's new." "It doesn't break down very much when it's new." "But pretty soon, started getting too much for us to keep up with." "The accident aboard the drilling platform, you've made clear that that was the fault of that drilling company, but it was your oil that was coming out here and is now poisoning the Gulf of Mexico." "What kind of oversight did you have on that drilling operation?" "We can review the issues around that in the future." "Our focus today is responding to the incident." "We're focused on eliminating the leak, and we're focused on defending the shoreline." "I'm pleased to announce that BP has agreed to set aside $20 billion to pay claims for damages resulting from this spill." "It is my great pleasure to introduce the person known as "the $20 billion man,"" "the man selected to handle the $20-billion fund," "Mr. Kenneth Feinberg." "BP decided we do not want to go the Exxon Valdez litigation route." "The Exxon Valdez spill is now more than 20 years old." "They're still litigating." "Let's just front the money." "The President wants us to do it." "There's political pressure." "We'll do it." "BP's only got 10 or 15 percent of that oil floating." "The rest of it is on the bottom of that Gulf and in our bay." "Are y'all gonna eat any of them crabs?" "You gotta eat the whole crab." "I don't know whether I'm gonna eat the whole crab or not." "Let me ask you a question." "You're an expert." "How long do you think it will be before you'll be able to harvest those crabs again at the bottom of the Gulf?" "Over 30 years!" "Well, then you've got a total loss!" "I think I've been chosen to do this because... of credibility." "I've done it before, going back to the 1980s with Vietnam veterans and Agent Orange." "It worked." "9/11." "It worked." "If you think this is a trick, you can go file a lawsuit." "But my friends, I'm telling you, you'll litigate for years." "You may not win." "You gotta pay a lawyer." "I suggest to you that the program" "I am setting up is absolutely the way to go." "Take the money." "It's a gift!" "Here's a box of yogurt." "OK, Alex." "This one's ready." "If you'll just sit right there, we'll take care of you, sir." "How you doing?" "I got enough, give me some yogurt!" "I got that..." "Give me some yogurt." "Not around here." "These is coming out of Louisiana." "We was working seven days a week before the oil spill." "But not now." "We're not working but three days a week, and we out of here by 10:00, 10:30." "Today's the longest day we've had in I don't know when." "But they gave me the emergency money, and gave me for so much a week." "But after that, they hadn't paid me nothing." "They hadn't paid me my four times the amount." "And I don't know why they won't, because I have all my documentation that they asked for, where I file my taxes." "Everything they asked for, they got it." "They offered me $1,500." "It look like somebody's home over there today." "We'll go over there." "What's going on with ya?" "I gotta box of bananas back there." "You want some of 'em?" "You want some of these bananas?" "I have a lawyer fighting these BP people 'cause I got two checks, and that's it." "And that was only 2,000." "And that's how I bought my mom's trailer, just so my kids would have a home." "I've been shucking oysters since I was six years old." "And my husband, he was an oyster catcher." "He's a shrimper." "He does both." "I hope we get something out of it, me and my husband both because we deserve it." "But right now, the..." "the shrimp boats really ain't doing that good, you know?" "They ain't really doing that good at all." "Been junking." "But that's done fade away, too, 'cause we done cleaned this whole area up down here." "People let us have their junk in their yard." "Cleaned up this whole place down here, but my hus..." "That's what my husband's out doing right now is cutting up a big old frame so we can pay our light bill when it comes in." "Go in Fire River." "You know where Fire River at, don't ya?" "Go in there where them black folk live at and see what they got in their yard." "I sure will." "They're all my folks." "Tell them you know Roosevelt and Roosevelt sent you down here to get, so that you get some, some junk from these houses." "And tell em you ain't got no money to give 'em." ""Just give me the junk."" "Yeah, just give me the junk, and I'll clean your yard." " Clean your yard, that's all you tell 'em." " That's right." "The actual offshore oil and gas industry started here in Morgan City in 1947, when a group went from Morgan City out into the Gulf, built a platform, put a land rig on the platform, drilled a well, couldn't see land." "So they were offshore." "This is the first movable rig ever built." " Really?" " Mm-hmm." "So it went to work in 1954." "This is how they lived, this is the living quarters." "So when this quarters was built, it was built for all men." "So community bathroom, community shower room, and..." "You mean my dad might sleep in one of these beds?" "This is how he lives when he's offshore." "This is the type of room he stays in." "All right, this is the drill floor." "So this is where all the drilling activity takes place." "This is the whole reason we built the rig is for this drill floor." "So oil is made from the earth?" "One of the theories is that oil, it comes from fossils." " Yeah, fossil fuel!" " Fossil fuels." " But is it a fossil fuel?" " I don't believe so." "You don't believe so?" "No, 'cause it's just a theory." "Now I'll give you the theory I live by." "God created the earth to sustain life." "So he gives us wind, he gives us solar, thermal, nuclear, coal, oil, gas." "All of these things are all created by God." "The White House is putting a hold on any new offshore oil projects until safeguards continuing to drill at these depths without knowing what happened, does not make any sense." "That's why I've issued a moratorium on deepwater drilling." "260-1870 is the number." "Have you been affected by the moratorium?" "Has your company had to start laying off people?" "Have you lost your job because of it?" "I have read estimates from upwards of 400,000 jobs, 9,000 jobs here immediately on the Gulf Coast, with upwards to 23,000." "I mean, exactly what are we talking about?" "Larry, up in Avondale, what's happening, Larry?" "How you making?" "I'm getting there, Bubba." "What you think about all this?" "All right, thanks for the call." "Hope you know what you're getting into." "Hello, hello." "Can I get your name?" "Latham Smith." "What company you with?" "Smith Maritime." "And where you headed to, sir?" "For the barge, uh, BB1-10." " All right." " That's my barge." "Sure." "Catch it." "Catch it right in that loop like you did before." "Real short." "Run it right through the loop back to you." "We have done miscellaneous contracts for the Transocean people, and just about everybody in the oil field." "Anybody that builds an oil rig that needs it picked up, we drive over and reach over on the land and pick it up." "This is a big pipe-lay rig here." "This is a typical thing that we would tow with one of our tugs." "But we're going through a serious rethink on the whole industry in the Gulf of Mexico since the big BP spill." "One of the big issues is now that they're just simply not issuing permits to drill." "In normal times, you'd see several hundred people working in these yards." "Now they're down to skeleton crews." "This conglomeration was drifting around the Gulf of Mexico two miles offshore Mobile Bay." "You'll see water boiling out of this if you get it a little hot." "It's slippery." "It slides." "Its consistency's considerably stiffer than that of peanut butter." "It probably would stick to the roof of your mouth and not go down your throat." "And handling it is a bit of an art form." "Chocolate mousse, somebody says." "But it's not chocolate mousse." "It's heavier than that, and it tastes a bit different." "For years I had this theory that if you didn't get thrown out before the end of the night, you weren't having a good time." "That's what I thought, too." "I guess I been living wrong." "I've never been to jail." "Honey, you never been to jail?" " Donnie has, I'm sure." "" " Three times." "I threw a railroad tie through the back window of a suburban." "What?" "Y'all a bunch of degenerates." "I was wanted in Venezuela for about 15 years." "How many?" "15?" "About 15, years I was wanted in Venezuela." "I go to these oil conventions in Texas or wherever, and the Chinese are real big in this." "And the Chinese are building oil rigs cheaper and faster and better than we are." "Houston used to be the epicenter of oil, and China's taken over that." "People don't even want a car that they can't drive at 2:00 in the morning." "They want a car they can drive any damn time they want to, they want a light bulb they can turn on any time they want to." "They want an air conditioner they can turn on when it's hot, not just when the wind blows." " Right." " And it's coal and diesel fuel that transports everything that makes everything." "And the, uh, the idea that..." "The idea that civilization can last three hours without oil is ridiculous at this stage." "You see the enormity of the oil that got spilled by the blowout at the Deepwater Horizon, and realize that there are hundreds of rigs out there, and I just started noticing how many cars there are out all the time burning gasoline." "And how insatiable our thirst is for gasoline." "I think that everybody on the Gulf Coast kind of knows what side of their bread is buttered on, and they don't want that to change." "What are these people gonna do if they got no oil?" "Once you go into it, it gets in your blood." "I know of nobody that went into the oil business and stayed two years and has ever left it." "Kind of think of it as a job most of the time, but every once in a while, we start really thinking why we're out here." "It's..." "A lot of it's for the money." "A lot of it's for the excitement." "A lot of it's for the challenge." "But then again, a lot of it's for your kids, too." "A lot of the work, especially on the drilling rig floor, can be very, very dangerous." "Everything's heavy." "Things are moving fast." "It's kind of a macho world." "When I was running four drilling rigs at one time," "I was running 24 hours a day, not realizing that I was probably the most unsafe guy in the field." "But that is what, in the industry, is kind of the culture." "If people were more involved with how much energy they use, if they'd realize the danger involved in providing that gasoline for their car, then I think that they would demand more accountability." "I worked for the crane, so I was the guy down on the deck that would tie the ropes to it and hook it up to the crane and, you know, stabilize it while he was picking it up, and then help him set it down." "Roustabout is the name of the job, and that's your main focus of that job is to do that, but basically, you do whatever they want you to." "I never had anybody say like," ""Oh, you can't go get a drink of water,"" "but there's definitely, like, you say," ""Hey, I'm going in to get something to drink because I think I'm getting dehydrated,"" "there's gonna be ramifications for that." "I've had them tell me not to use safety as a crutch." "The senior toolpusher told me that." "And I told him, I said," ""Well, we're out here for 12 hours, and it's like 100-something degrees outside."" "I was like, there's gotta be a certain pace you have to assign yourself to make it through the day safely."" "BP had in place a policy on every rig, before the Deepwater Horizon blew out." "If anybody on the rig, BP employee or not, anybody on the rig submitted an idea that saved BP money, they'd get a bonus." "Transocean is growing quite large." "It's the largest offshore drilling company in the world." "And I think they may have overreached themselves, because they were building all these new rigs that they had to finance." "I think there was definitely some tension out there." "Like, people were..." "people were aware that things weren't going properly, you know?" "But we were a little bit behind schedule." "So it was starting to cost them a lot of money." "That's when the caution was starting to get smaller and smaller." "BP brought a company called Schlumberger out to do a pressure test on the hole." "But instead of doing that, they just turned around and sent them home." "And I thought, "That's... that's kind of odd."" "But I figured, well, OK, they're the experts." "They know what they're doing." "Then the one morning before everything happened, in a safety meeting that we all have to attend, the BP managers were saying, "OK, well, we're going to be doing this and this and this."" "And my bosses on the Transocean side were saying, "We can't do that." "No, that's against the rules."" "The BP guy's saying, "Well, I'm sorry." "But that's the way it is." "That's it, bottom line." "Tough."" "And, well, the day went on normally." "9:40, 9:45, we started hearing extremely loud hissing noise." "I called back to Brent, I asked him, you know," ""Why don't you go ahead and call the bridge and ask them if everything's OK?"" "They told him that we were under a well-control situation." "But that's not really abnormal." "We have well-control situations all the time." "The two engines that we had running, engine three and six, both of them started increasing their RPMS." "They just kept going up higher and higher and higher." "Which is impossible." "Then the lights went out, bang." "Light bulbs blew up over our heads." "Computer consoles went "pfft," and they're dead." "We were in the dark." "It was quiet, nothing." "I only had enough time to tell my guys that, "We're in trouble." "Something's wrong, guys." "We are in trouble."" "And then the first explosion hit us." "It picked me up and flung me and flipped me through the air like I was nothing but a ragdoll." "I couldn't move." "Alls I can hear was screaming incoherent screamings of pain screaming, "I'm dying." "I'm hurt." "Somebody help me."" "Someone crawled, screaming, over the top of me." "I fought my way through, and I worked my way out of the wreckage." "People were totally..." "losing it." "They were screaming that we had to get off the rig, that it was sinking." "The fire was coming and we were gonna burn." "I saw men just completely lose control and run to the side of the rig and jump overboard." "I'm getting in the lifeboat, it was almost like it's like a dream, you know, it's like I wasn't even there." "And then, you know, it's like you remember just the waves rocking you back to the world, you know?" "At that point the panic is starting to calm down a little bit." "We were starting to realize, OK, we made it out." "We survived it, we're gonna live through this, hopefully." "And then, you know, you started to realize that some of these guys didn't get off, you know?" "There were 26 separate and distinct things that were done on or off the rig, that made it more likely to blow out, and that were done to save money or to save time, which, on an oil rig, certainly is money." "Nobody meant for a blowout to happen." "Nobody thought a blowout was gonna happen." "Everybody knew that they were doing things in a way that, little by little, took away all these redundant protections that exist to make a blowout so unlikely:" "Mechanical devices, procedures, tests, fluids, cement." "They were cast aside, one by one." "They knew when the decision was made to cut corners to finish that job a day or two earlier." "They knew the cement hadn't cured." "They knew they didn't have enough centralizers on there." "They knew that the blowout preventer may not prevent a blowout because the hydraulics weren't working." "They knew all kinds of problems." "They knew that there was rubber in the mud that was coming back up." "You're not drilling through rubber tires in the bottom of the ocean." "If you've got rubber in the mud, it came from the blowout preventer." "That tells you something." "They're still told to keep going." "When the gas is kicking back, they're told to keep going." "These are things that everybody knows are wrong and know that it's putting them at increased risk." "Yet everybody just puts their head down and keeps swimming." "And the problem is that with that type of attitude that's rewarded by the company, it induces that behavior." "The oil companies before us today amassed nearly $289 billion in profits over the last three years." "Yet the average investment for safety, accident prevention, and spill response was less than one-tenth of one percent of their profits." "Mr. McKay, as the president of US BP, were you aware of any of these concerns or problems that existed with this well prior to it blowing?" "No, I was not." "The committee asked each of the five major oil companies for their oil-spill response plans." "But what they show is that Exxon-Mobil, Chevron," "ConocoPhillips and Shell are no better prepared to deal with a major oil spill than BP." "Mr. Tillerson, like BP, on page 11-6 of your plan," ""Exxon Mobil's Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Response Plan"" "lists walruses under sensitive biological and human resources." "As I am sure you know, there aren't any walruses in the Gulf of Mexico, and there have not been for 3 million years." "It's unfortunate that walruses were included, and it's... it's an embarrassment that they were included." "But that's part of a larger marine mammal study that is used in... that's used in preparing regional response plans." "Mr. Mulva, uh, your plan as well includes walruses." "You got the call on April 20th." ""Your well just blew." What would you have done?" "We, we would activate our Spill Response plan." "That's about five pages, I think, in your proposal, right?" " Yes, sir." " To remove the oil?" "Your plan is written by the same contractor that BP is." "BP relied on Marine Spill Response Corporation to provide response equipment, and so does your plan." "So if you can't handle 40,000, how are you gonna handle 166,000 per day as you indicate?" "The answer to that is when these things happen, we are not well-equipped to deal with them." "So when these things happen, these worst-case scenarios, we can't handle them, correct?" "We are not well-equipped to handle them." "There will be impacts, as we are seeing." "Houston is the center of the universe for the oil and gas business." "A lot of the companies are still downtown." "Some have moved out to big campuses." "Like BP has a large campus on the west side, but downtown is still kinda the center for energy." "For instance, if you look at this, the large silver building here, this is the second Enron building." "Enron actually never moved in." "They went bankrupt and had the criminal charges before they ever moved in." "Advanced generation system frequency control." "Automatic high-speed load shedding and load restoration." "The automated control functions of the Powermax prevent, detect, and mitigate system blackouts." "Learn more about Powermax at booth 7743 in Reliant arena." "What we've got here is a sub-sea separation and boosting system." "You've got gas in green going out the top." "You've got oil and water, yellow and blue, going down the bottom into the baffle arrangement and into the Caisson gravity separation system." "You hook up all three reservoirs." "Then you've got a very, very good return on your investment." "This is where the "B" s are." "We don't seem to have you, I'm afraid." "If you're not here, then you can go down to the end." "The thing about the oil and gas industry is that these aren't bad people." "It's just that the industry thinks that regulations get in the way of innovation." "And we'd like to thank our major sponsor this year, BP." "In this room, you have most of the major oil company executives, you have most of the major energy providers." "We're discussing things like the regulatory environment, which obviously is changing very rapidly here in the US after the Macondo event last year." "People beginning to think even about the arctic, what will it take to get up there?" "And, you know, even though our policies have a diverse range of energy, oil and gas is gonna be the staple for decades to come." "Saddam Hussein was wearing a 45." "He took his 45, put it on the table, and he threw it across the table, and he goes," ""Oscar Wyatt, you've been a friend of this country for many, many years." "I trust what you say is true." "I trust what you say that I'm not doing is correct." "Your plane will not go back empty."" "My father said, "Thank you, Mr. President."" "They went and all..." "the plane was filled with Texas and Oklahoma oil field workers." "Within 30 minutes of him taking off," "Saddam Hussein released the other 3,000 hostages." "Your father got up and made a short speech, and he was very, very emotional." "I think President Bush was a little bit upset, but what upset everybody so much is in January 21 of 1991, even though the hostages were released," "President Bush ordered the bombing." "Remember that?" "Everybody at this table has been a part of the golden era of the oil industry back in the late 70's and 80's which..." "You had no faxes." "You did everything by phone." "Your word was your bond." "Everybody made a lot of money." "Everybody got spoiled." "Houston got big." "Everybody had Texas Longhorns on their Cadillac driving around." "Everybody hammers big oil." "What is Google?" "Google earns billions." "Yet big oil gets the hammer." "They get all the bad press." "Where I think we should be thanking our lucky stars that we should have four dollar gas." "When you have..." "When you pay for..." " In Europe it's..." " It's ten dollars a gallon." "I agree, Hal." "I'm starving." "Let's fucking eat." "The memory of the 2010 Gulf oil spill is still pretty fresh for families in the Gulf Coast." "Sheila Hagler noticed her students needed an outlet, a way for them to talk about what their families are going through." "And since today is the 23rd anniversary of the Exxon Valdez, we wanted to partner with kids who were kids back then in Alaska with our kids here today." "I wanted to introduce our two Skype scientists." "Kara works at the Prince William Sound Science Center, and Scott works at the Oil Spill Recovery Institute figuring out how we can deal with recovering from an oil spill." "Did anyone lose jobs or businesses get shut down because of the oil spill like what happened to us?" "The economy's changed here." "You know, the biggest one is the loss of the herring fishery, which for us would mean that the boats would be starting to work right about now." "Now they don't start till mid-May instead of mid-March." "And so that means that we don't have the fishermen in town bringing in the revenue, which affects all the businesses." "I don't know if they would risk extinction." "Definitely local depletions are possible." "Do you feel like you understood what was going on with the oil spill?" "Does anyone think that they should have talked about it a little bit more in school?" "Yeah?" "I think they should have talked about it more because it was like..." "I'm pretty sure it wasn't important to, like, the northern states, but it was important to us." "And how we grew up here and the businesses down in the Bayou and stuff, so." "The culture shock in Mobile wasn't that bad." "The culture shock in the bayous, Bayou La Batre, that's where I met Debruce Nelson, one of the, um, claimants, who, when I asked him for his tax returns, said," ""We do things with a handshake down here."" "Big problem." "Big problem." "Proof." "Peggy, I need ice on my tray!" "BP says they're gonna responsible for everything." "But now, look like they kinda back out of it, you know?" "They're not doing what they say they gonna do or back us up or anything." "We'll still, you know, try to manage without them, you know, but it couldn't get worse." "We need to see, um, what's his name?" "Kenneth Feinberg?" "I need him to come out here, stay for a couple hours, sit on this stool, see how it feels like." "Nobody had had lunch yet today." "Everybody trying to catch on." "You know, trying to work out what we got." "You know, without seafood, we don't know what else to do because most people don't even speak English." "It's hard for them to make a living." "I got two girls." "I got a 15-year-old and an 8-year-old." "My 15-year-old, she come help me on weekends." "She want to be a doctor, but, you know, you never know." "We was fine, everybody was fine before the oil spill." "Now you can see people, you know, fighting, fussing, begging for some stuff." "I mean, it's just not Bayou La Batre anymore." "You hear me run my mouth." "I'm behind, so far behind now." "Nah." "No." "Yes, you do, you got a little bit." "You got a little bit." "My mom wants me to be a model." "My cousin's supposed to come work down here at the Waffle House, and I might get a job with her." "What could you say, baby?" "That's a lot of children!" " OK, I appreciate it." " I appreciate you." " Thank you." " And thank you, ma'am." "Be for real." " Be for real when you talk to him." " I know." "You have to get real with these people." " You got to get real, to be." " Yep." "I'm used to seeing dirt, sand, something like that." "But I ain't never seen no kind of black, like a black..." "like a black oily look." "I just caught these shrimp." "Look how they look." "These shrimp, see the black in them and stuff?" "See?" "That's a subversant came out of the water." "That came out of that shrimp." "While that shrimp was in the freezer freezing," " that's what came out of the shrimp." " Ew." "Why, why is this gulf open?" "People don't want to talk to people because they scared it's gonna hurt the Gulf." "But it's best for the Gulf they shut it down." "Let the..." "Send somebody to clean it all up, get that subversants out of that water." "All right, all right, well, see, you just come down, and you tell the lawyer what happened to you." "Oh, yeah." "It ain't just me." "It's the whole community." "All right, all right, well, you could tell about yourself." "The cultural barriers, the skepticism, the suspicion of workers, concern about their family." "Important barriers that I think probably precluded some people from filing." "But we did our best to encourage them to file a claim." "116,000 of the 331,560 claims processed have been refused payment." "Are you stating that those that have been refused payment are because of fraud?" "No, not at all." "If we have refused claims, it can be for a number of reasons." "No documentation, insufficient documentation, ineligible." "Moratorium claims, unfortunately, are eligible." "There are all sorts of reasons that we... that we, either deny claims or deem claims to be deficient." "Be very careful when vulnerable people are expecting compensation." "Be very careful about over-promising, which I did." "I made a mistake by telling them," ""You'll be paid in a couple of days, you'll be paid in a week."" "It turned out that calculating damages and looking at proof took longer." "And people got frustrated and angry." "Despite the Gulf oil spill, executives with the company that own the Deepwater Horizon rig recently got big bonuses." "Transocean says, quote," ""Notwithstanding the tragic loss of life in the Gulf of Mexico, we achieved an exemplary statistical safety record."" "Uh, you know, we're doing all right." "I mean, we're not doing great, but slowly trying to pay down some debt and get back in school and do something, you know, besides just kind of sitting here." "We sent in the stuff with the Gulf Coast Fund, like, twice, and they denied it for, you know, state taxes, which Texas doesn't have state taxes so... it seems like they were just kicking the can" "down the road until it pretty much dissolved itself, and we just got stuck out of the loop." "Got some Nietzsche up here, Animal Farm," "Plato, Five Dialogues." "A lot of Hemingway, short stories." "We got the Bible, and we got Richard Dawkins,  The God Delusion," "Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris." "There is one book, though." "The Razor's Edge." "I read this book when I was younger." "And it really moved me, but it's about a guy who has post-traumatic stress disorder, really, and his understanding of how he changes and how it clashes with what his life used to be." "I've always thought it was a beautiful story, but now it's just vibing with me on a different level, you know?" "Let's see, this is Sheila Clark." "She's the wife of Donald Clark, who died on the rig." "This is from when she was hearing testimony about the Deepwater Horizon." "And I just saw just such a sadness in her." "So this is Chris Jones." "He is the brother of Gordon Jones." "We sat in the same room when his father started testifying." "And I just saw his..." "I saw Chris just, like, literally close down and try to hold it together." "For me, this is what Stephen looked like for almost two years." "He was just inflated." "I think he just questions why he wasn't one of them." "It's scary to me, like," "I scared myself quite a bit 'cause..." "I can't remember." "I think I had to call the bank or something, and it just turned out to be a disaster." "Before I realized what was happening, I took a pair of scissors, and you can't really see them now, but I had sliced up my arm quite a bit with a pair of scissors." "I don't even think I realized I was doing it." "I think I just wanted to see if I'd feel it, you know?" "And I did, I felt it." "That was, uh..." "That was one of the tougher days, you know?" "I'm looking for our bi-monthly check from Transocean, and it's not here." "Doug went from six figures to less than $1,000 a month." "This is my therapy bill that I can't pay." "After the accident, nobody from his company called to say, "How are you doing?"" "We've had to fight to get him medical care." "There's a lot of anger involved with that, that my husband did such a great job and was so dedicated and went out there extra when, you know, they needed shifts to cover, and he worked really hard" "and then for them to seem to abandon him?" "There's a lot of anger." "I can smell that night now." "I can smell..." "I can smell smoke oil insulation." "They had to cut it off of me 'cause I was having extreme difficulty moving." "Having all this Transocean stuff around and BP stuff, manuals and pictures incorporated in our daily life, it really was affecting Doug." "So I removed everything out of our house." "And Doug would kinda sneak out and look at the stuff, and this is ultimately where he was planning a suicide was... around all this crap." "It's like he felt this magnetism towards it." "He had to see it." "He had to know it was his." "It was like a constant reminder to him of so many accomplishments that he did in his life and his career that he was so proud of." "I, um..." "I've constantly thought if I should just get rid of all of this stuff." "Why haven't you yet?" "What is it about it?" "I still think that there's a lot of positivity with this stuff." "Somehow Doug feels that this stuff defines him." "Doug had three prescriptions before this accident." "It's OK." "It makes me feel guilty 'cause I played along." "A lot of things that I was doing I knew were wrong." "That is not going to be on the film." "Because you didn't do anything wrong." "Yeah, I feel really guilty for working for them." "I feel really guilty for working for BP." "Members of the committee, you cannot allow BP and Transocean to continue to conduct business this way." "I hope that my testimony here today leads to changes that make drilling rigs safer places to work, so that a tragedy like this never happens again." "I had a statement I prepared, and I was really nervous." "You know, I was kind of on autopilot." "I was..." "The doctors had me on some medication." "So I was pretty heavily medicated, and you know, still drinking a lot at that time." "So, you know, I just wasn't feeling very well." "But, you know," "I recognize that it was important, so I wanted to go do that." "When we first went to work on the Deepwater Horizon, we had a fully manned engine room which consisted of six people." "Over the years, after Transocean began lessening the crew," "I and others complained that we need more help." "They just kept telling us that they would see what they could do." "We have heard over and over that the value of BP's stock has fallen." "But BP is selling for about the same price it was a year ago today." "So BP, Transocean, Halliburton, and any other company will be back because they have the infrastructure and economic might to make more money." "But Gordon'll never be back." "Never." "And neither will any of the ten good men who died with him." "Yes, I'm heading down towards Morgan City." "You can go in front of me if you want to." "You see that giant thing with the yellow cranes on top?" "That didn't exist six months ago." "The moratorium on drilling and permitting in the Gulf is over." "Price of oil has stabilized very high." "Money is coming in, and it is being spent." "A few days ago, somebody lit a torch and blew up an oil platform, and a couple of guys died." "I suppose I don't know who else, what, but when you're doing this, it can happen." "Oil is the prize." "Gold, in past lives, might have been the prize, but right now, energy is a currency." "You can buy it with whatever, dollar or euro or whatever you want, but it is great wealth." "And people fight and die over great wealth." "They have forever." "We have more oil rigs operating now than ever." "That's a fact." "We've approved dozens of new pipelines to move oil across the country." "So do not tell me that we're not drilling." "We're drilling all over this country." "It's the first oil and gas lease sale in the Central Gulf since the Deepwater Horizon exploded more than two years ago." "39 million acres of potential oil and gas drilling are up for grabs in the Central Gulf of Mexico, a massive sale, with 48 companies submitting bids on hundreds of tracts." "Anywhere from three miles to more than 230 miles off the Louisiana coast." "One bid, Exxon Mobil Corporation:" "$920,550." "Lot 822, one bid..." "The oil concessions that are granted offshore belong to the government, and in order for BP or anyone else to drill, they have to submit an application and bid and get a permit, and then they're given a lease to extract that oil" "that belongs to our government." "Our government then gets paid by whoever produces that oil as a royalty interest." "So our government is encouraging companies to go out and exploit these oils because our government gets paid." "It is a bit disingenuous for a US Agency to be issuing permits and then receiving huge revenues from that, but yet then politicians beating up on those very same companies for their activities in the Gulf." "Generally it takes some kind of a traumatic event to change people's behavior." "I'd hoped that the Deepwater Horizon was gonna raise everyone's consciousness, but it didn't." "We had a moment in time where everybody was paying very close attention, where we could actually change the way we think about burning hydrocarbons in this country." "And the political pressures from the Congress, from the Senate, and in the White House pushed those issues to the side and voted to stay status quo." "When BP made a commitment to the Gulf, we knew it would take time, but we were determined to see it through." "I'm glad to report all beaches and waters are open for everyone to enjoy." "I hate the commercials." "I hate that they can spend all this money and tell everybody how great things are down here." "I guess if it wasn't having a good effect for them, they wouldn't still run the commercials, 'cause they've been doing it for a year and half at least." "And they've really picked it up now that the trial's going on." "The trial that's going on is the biggest civil-damage trial there's ever been." "Maybe there'll ever be, for all I know." "Now, I'm not on the trial team, so I don't need to be here." "But nothing is going on in the world that's more important to me." "I want to hear all the evidence." "I want to be there when the world finds out what these people have to say." "In this trial, the fine may be many billions of dollars." "This is money we're talking about that runs countries." "That's the kind of money that strongly affects the United States budget." "I certainly think that the people who have the most stock, that being an awful lot of executives at BP, that means that they would really feel it." "And somebody with BP ought to start feeling something." "Sometimes somebody ought to feel something other than greed." "Production in the US Gulf is probably three years behind schedule because of the Macondo well." "But that's also the next frontier, too, the US Gulf, in terms of, for production and discoveries." "It's unbelievable really." "The renaissance in United States drilling is unbelievable." "What people don't realize on energy is that effectively, energy has been cheap in the United States from day one." "I really believe the US economic advantage for the last 100 years has been cheap energy." "Yeah." "And it's gonna turn to that again." "It's turning right now." "What about the impact of shale gas?" " Exactly." "" " And oil." "Both." "Coal." "Coal." "We have enough coal to last 150 years." "We're the Saudi Arabia of coal." "It's too dirty, but the engineers..." " You know, between carbon sequestration..." " They're shutting them down." "You know where the dirty coal's going?" "Going to China because they don't care, and they're going to burn it all." "If it's the cheapest BTU, China takes it." "Bill Richardson was at this hotel the other night, giving a talk, they said, "Mr. Secretary, what do you feel about the future for solar and wind?"" "And he said, "Well, let me tell you this." "The sun don't always shine, and the wind don't always blow."" "So natural gas is our future." "And I agree with that." "In the next 10 to 20 years, I agree with that totally." "I think longer term, solar will have a place." "At the end of the day, people are concerned about the environment." "And what plays into gas is we had an explosion in the Gulf." "We had the nuclear meltdown in Japan." " Which is scary." " Which is scary, so..." " Wanna pay more for that?" " So what's your poison?" " Like, Al Gore once..." " Let's not say poison." "Let's say, what's..." " What's your preference?" " What's your cost tolerance?" "What's your cost tolerance for something you think is politically acceptable?" "Yeah, but why is it that the oil industry doesn't do a better job of educating the public when we're the most high-profile industry out there and yet..." "Led by the big international majors, Exxon, Shell, and BP, they didn't think they have to answer to anybody." "They thought it was going to be beholden to the legislators to be open and transparent." "They didn't want to talk to anybody." "There was an arrogance there, too, was a problem." "There's a huge arrogance." "Why should we have one dollar gasoline?" "Or two dollar gasoline or three dollar?" "Why should we have that?" "Personally, I think we should tax the living hell out of gasoline, I think we should..." "That's a political statement, not an energy statement." "OK, but in general, if you want to curb emissions, right, curb energy use..." "People will be looking for cars that drive 30 miles a gallon." "Do you really want to?" "I don't know." "Do you really want to?" "Is it a false god we're trying to worship?" "Americans in general believe they should have cheap gasoline." " Gasoline should be cheap." " Americans in general believe that." "Well, why should we have cheap products?" "They love their cars, and they like to drive." "They think it's our birthright." "I don't think people realize how lucky we are." "Baby..." "You don't get burned." "You need four?" "Lord, hear our prayers."