Louisiana officials have complained that BP was not doing enough to stop or collect the spill. (April Buffington/NYT Institute)

Ramon Antonia Vargas, a reporter at The Times-Picayune, rolled out of bed at 5 a.m. on April 21 to check the local news and came across the press release from the Coast Guard.

The press release said the previous night an oil drilling rig, known as the MODU Deepwater Horizon, had exploded and caught fire at 10 p.m. in the Gulf of Mexico, about 45 miles southeast of Venice, La.

“It was about a minute after I had woken up and I had already made my first call to the Coast Guard,” said Vargas.

In those same predawn hours, 16-year-old fisherman Nguyen Johnson was sitting in his father’s boat, east of Venice, smoking a cigarette, when he saw a glow on the horizon.

“I thought it was the sun,” he said. As he stared at the glow, his father told him it was a burning oil rig.

In New Orleans, Vargas was one of two reporters who were the first to arrive in the newsroom that morning. Vargas’ first call led to the earliest post about the accident, at 6:10 a.m. on April 21.

Vargas reported that seven of the 126 crew members had been injured on the drilling rig, which was operating in deep water. “I’m pretty much responsible for anything that happens overnight and early in the morning, and that just happened” while he was on duty, he said.

Shortly after, 90 survivors arrived on a crew boat at Port Fourchon in Lafourche Parish and the search for other survivors began.

Rescue boats were sent to and from Port Fourchon to the smoldering rig. Eleven workers were missing. Their bodies have not been found.

The day after the explosion, a second blast at 10:22 a.m., caused by 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel on board the smoldering platform, caused the rig to sink.

So far it seemed like a tragic, but not unprecedented, industrial accident.

But on Saturday, April 24, Coast Guard officials reported the first sight of leaking oil spurting from the pipes that had snaked a mile down into the ocean.

“That’s when I knew it was going to become an environmental crisis,” Vargas said.

BP, the oil giant that was drilling the well from the Deepwater Horizon, first estimated that the well was leaking about 42,000 gallons of oil a day. But it soon raised that estimate to 210,000, gallons a day, a figure that many scientists said was still too low. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began tracking it.

Brennan Matherne, the public information officer for Lafourche Parish, said: “When the rig exploded, our first thoughts were about the workers’ families. We were aware of the possibilities of damage to various businesses throughout the parish but until we saw the NOAA trajectory that would put us at risk for the oil to start affecting our parish directly, we did not declare a state of emergency.”

Within that first week, Matherne said, “we noticed that the plume of oil would not be staying to the east of the Mississippi River,” and that there might be the potential of oil touching the shoreline and perhaps “lasting effects for the oil and commercial and recreational fishing industries. We knew that there could be long-term effects.”

A week later, BP had tried two methods to control the leak: offshore burning of oil on the surface of the ocean and the use of robot submarines to try to close valves on the well.

A pungent smell tinged the Louisiana air as a growing slick estimated at 48 miles wide and 39 miles long began to head toward the coastline.

More than 400 species of marine life, from whales to shrimp, were at risk, and Louisiana state officials began to shut down fishing grounds off the coast, endangering the livelihoods of thousands of people who depend on seafood.

Early in May, BP had made an ambitious attempt to stop the oil flow by lowering a 100-ton box on top of the leak, with the intention of siphoning off the leaking oil. The attempt failed when ice crystals clogged the four-story box as it descended far into the depths of the ocean.

As the oil flowed unabated, BP continued to try to break up the crude with a dispersant called Corexit 9500. Fears that the dispersant might be as dangerous as the oil itself led the federal Environmental Protection Agency to ask BP to try to find a less toxic dispersant. But the company said there was no safer dispersants and continued to use the Corexit, though it said it would use much less of the chemical.
Politicians began to arrive, among them President Barack Obama, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.
By now, the spill had reached the fragile Louisiana marshes that pockmark the Mississippi Delta, and dead birds, turtles and fish began washing up on shore. Beaches were closed as globs of oil washed up or as booms were laid to try to prevent that.

And still the oil flowed.

By the end of the May, the amount of oil flowing into the Gulf was being estimated at between 500,000 gallons and 800,000 gallons a day — meaning between 18 million and 29 million gallons had spilled. That makes the Deepwater Horizon spill the largest in the nation’s history, eclipsing the 11-million-gallon spill from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989.

Following three weeks of failed attempts to plug the well, the oil company hooked up a mile-long tube to funnel as much of the crude as it could into a tanker ship. Then, on May 26, BP tried a “top kill” of the well, pumping mud and concrete directly into the well’s entrance, with some success.

As the attempt to seal the well continued, President Obama returned to the Louisiana coastline to get a closer look at the devastation.

“We’re going to keep at this every day until the leak is stopped, the coastline is cleaned and your communities are made whole,” Obama said in Grand Isle, a fishing port just over 100 miles south of New Orleans. “That’s my promise to you. It’s a promise on behalf of a nation, and it’s one we will keep.”

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