horizon oil rig explosion and and and check flow of crude oil into the gulf of mexico. the environmental impact is unfathomable. 11 people died and thousands more have their lives and livelihood forever impacted by the oil spill. tom shroder takes off the and it kind back story of maritime tradition, economics, politics and corporate policy that culminated in the disaster and with clear insight for writing shows what happened and how and to whom. the most compelling thing about this book is it is a very human story. please help me ..come tom shroder. [applause] >> thanks for coming out today on such a gorgeous day. i have to say in advance that i haven't had a chance to prepare as i usually do for these talks because i spent the last couple

weeks in a very scary situation. my son who is becoming a scuba diving instructor got an infection on his elbow and called up and said what should i do? are set if it doesn't get better go to the urgent care place. so we go to the urgent care place the next day and they give him some antibiotics. he wakes up and it blows up to >> he goes to the emergency room down in south florida, and they admit him, and suddenly they are telling us they think he is mersa, the antibiyachtic to the drunk. these reactions can cascade very quickly, and the term life threatening was thrown around, and so, you know, i just remember just lying awake in fear, just having that sense of

a fear occupying my body. i was just so afraid, and i was thinking about these people who lost their loved ones, some of them about sam's age, my son, on the deepwater horizon, 11 of them, and i was thinking, you know, as you do in these situations. you allow your mind to cascade into worse and worse case situations even though you are trying not to, and i remember thinking that, you know, wondering if the worst had happened, you know, how i would even go on with my life. i couldn't even imagine it. fortunately, he had a series of surgeries to treat the wound. the last one was this morning before i came up here. he's coming home today and it going to be fine.

in a few weeks, he won't be happy because he's a tennis instructor, and he's going to miss that and not be happy. he will be fine, but the families on the deepwater horizon will never have that comfort, and i spent -- i spent four months working on this book, 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. i mean, i couldn't stop. i didn't begin writing it until july 4, and we wanted it to come out for the anniversary in april, and i just knew that i just couldn't stop for anything, and i got very close to some of the people, some of the survivors and family of some of the victims, and i thought i felt a strong empathy for them and really kind of understood the pain that they went through, but in the last couple of weeks, i got a new understanding that i think only people who have that

fear clutching at them can understand about what this means. this is something that takes away your breath, that makes you wonder how you will wake up the next morning and go through another day, and all these people who have suffered as a result of this are never going to get the relief of knowing that everything is okay and that all it's going to take is a few weeks, and then their loved ones, my son in my case, will be playing tennis, laughing with friends, staying out too late, and doing all those things that just speak joy into life, and so i just, you know, once again felt that the pain that these people felt, and so when i started back in april of last year when this happened, you know, i was like a lot of

people. you know, i didn't think much about where the gasoline in my truck came from. i knew it was too expensive for my liking. you know, i knew that there were oil wells and they were doing offshore oil drilling, and i was concerned for the environment, and i kind of pictured it of this platform sitting on pilings on the sand or something in the gulf of mexico and, you know, i didn't think much about it. i wonder about the guys, i understand they spent weeks out there and came home for weeks and then went back out there, and i thought that was an unusual way to live, but i didn't think how they did it or who they were, and then the way this book came about was a guy named john conrad who is an oil rig captain himself wrote to my agent and said i think people

are missing this story, and he was right because, you know, like me, and like so many others, he was horrified by the images of that oil coming out of that hole that you could see online 24/7, you know, just this amazing gusher of unstoppable oil, and just this idea that nobody knew how to turn it off, and it was going on for months week after week, and there was no end in sight, and every time there was some hope, you would hear a weird phrase like okay, they are going to try o top kill now, and that involved dumping tons and tons of junk in the hole to stop it up which seems like a solution a 12-year-old might come up with, and it was just, you know, i grew up in sarasota, florida, i lived a few blocks from the beach, these crystal white sands on the beautiful water in the gulf of mexico. i dove in the waters, fished in

those waters. you know, i had a deep and abiding love for it, and just this horror that this black river of oil was flowing into the gulf of mexico really bothered me and got to me, but what john conrad was saying in his letter to my agent was people are missing the story because can't possibly understand what happened here or what it meant unless they understand this very unique and very special culture of gasp shore drilling, and the first thing that he said that caught my attention was this was not any kind of platform we're talking about. the deepwater horizon was one of the most exceptive and technology advanced industrial machined ever built. it cost a half billion dollars to build back ten years ago, and

it would cost a billion dollars to build one now, and it was actually a ship. he was the captain and went to a maritime college to learn how to pilot ships, and that's what the horizon was because it had this complicated system by using computers and thrusters and all the censers that measured the wind,ed tide, and the wave height and kept this machine like the size of two football fields put together hovering over a spot directly over the well stable enough to go down there and drill the well so i wanted to bring home, and the

people who go out there are like a band of brothers out there. they -- that's their other family. they live there as much as they live home. they make a living there that a lot of the guys are high school graduates or not even, but, you know, they are making $6 $60,000-$100,000 a year in a economy that's not offering any other jobs. anyway, i wanted to convey that also there's an amazing story of suspense here. i'll quickly read this natural sort of horror movie type of thing that happened. mike williams was talking with his wife on the phone in his technician shop when something came on the speakers. he was not listening, but his wife was. she heard a natural gas level

being announced and asked if he needed to get off the phone to take care of it. no, it's just an indication to make sure everyone is aware. i don't even hear them anymore. the levels were read off as a number. when the number was 200 parts per million, that's when mike started paying attention. he heard a hissing noise and a thump and thought they were running the riser skate right into the office next to his door. want operators were always slamming against the backstop hard enough to shake his office. that could account for the thump, but what about the hissing? he said, hey, i need to check this out and see what's going on. he hung up and immediately heard something beeping through the system. the vents crossed over. beep, beep, beep, beep, beep was continuous and knew it was the alarms, but had no idea what alarms. they kept coming one on

another. there was nothing routine about this. his heart pumped a rush of blood to his head. he was trying to see what was going on. were these false alarms? his mind was whirling putting the pieces together, the thump, hissing, the beeps. he arrived that he needed to get up and find out whackly what the -- what the hell was happening. he could feel the well boiling now. all thoughts of other explanations blew away. the gas was coming. that simple. it entered the well, moved up the column. the pressure decreased until the gas was gas, and expanded pushing everything before it. it was almost there. lunged pass the for the panel and shouted call randy. anyway, i wanted to convey the

the -- oh, sorry about that. i just got a 10 minute signal when actually i'm kind of halfway through, so good. [laughter] so i wanted to convey -- what i decided to do was to tell the portrait of the rig from the time it was built in korea ten years to the day almost to the day it exploded in the gulf of mexico. i wanted to tell the life of the people on the rig. this is -- this is the technology drilling at a mile below the surface of the ocean is like drilling on the surface of the moon. the technology is comparable. a human being couldn't get a quarter of the way down to where

they are drilling. a nuclear sub ray mean -- submarine would be crushed like a grape halfway at the depths they are drilling at. there's no way humans can drill on the sea floor. they have to do this up credibly complex thing. it's like building an inverted skyscraper into the bottom of the ocean starting a mile.name where no human can approach, and then continuing down another 0,000 feet or -- 20,000 feet or so, and imagine if you were given that task. i mean, where would you even start? you know, there's unbelievable equipment. there's like a three story high valve basically, the blowout preventer. before they start, they have to get it down to the sea floor. this is like, you know, 350 tons. the piece of equipment is like,

you know, millions and millions of dollars in and of itself, and so they have to figure out how to get it down there, how to get it all put into place all using, basically what they are trying to do is build a skyscraper using a mile long pole from a ship that is floating on the surface of the ocean in all different winds, tides, and conditions. people spend careers and lives, some incredibly smart people, devising the tools in with which to do this. the language is so complex that whenever people tried to explain how this happened, they would use terms that when you got the definitions of those terms, you needed somebody who define the definitionings for you, and then you still couldn't understand it. i mean, it was, and that's part of the problem because no -- it's so complicated and so

technologically advanced, that all the regulators in the government who are undermanned together, you know, they are paid less than the people, the engineers hired by the oil companies. they don't know the stuff as well as they do, so basically they just have to believe what the people in the oil companies tell them, and what happened in the deepwater horizon was in the an accident. what happened in the deepwater horizon was a series of decisions that people made because it cost them a million dollars every day that they had the rig out there drilling, and that means that every hour is costing them tens of thousands of dollars, and so that pressure -- and it's a billion dollar piece of equipment, and it's staffed with almost 150 people, all making big salaries so the economic stakes are very high, and the cost of drilling is so expensive that they have

to do it as efficiently as possible. every delay. if something happens while drilling, that's a serious budget consideration for them. the time pressure makes them start cutting corners. they start doing things that are simpler and faster to save money even though the risk goes up higher, and it's sort of like the more, you know, deepwater horizon on the day that it blew up, the vips from the two companies involved, bp and transocean. bp the oil company, and transocean owned the rig. they came out to give them award and they operated seven years without a loss time incident. that again tells you how important not losing time to them is. time is money in everything, but in the oil business, it's a lot of money, and so, you know, so

what happens is the longer they go without a serious accident, the more they feel justified in taking chances because they keep getting away with things, and it's just like in, you know, when we have a 36 inch snowfall, we are angry it takes three days to get the streets plowed, but if they were raising our taxes to pay for enough snow equipment to deal with a 36 snowstorm every year that happens once every 100 years, we'd be angier. there's no way we would be willing to pay for the capacity it takes to deal with the 36 inch snowstorms. this is the same. okay, if you're going to increase your chances of a disaster by a quarter of a percent, and you can avoid that by spending $10 million, is it worth it? so what happens is that people

start being under pressure to save time and start cutting corners. what happened in the deepwater horizon was that they made those decisions and they made a lot of those decisions. when they were drilling the well, they got to the bottom, and what they needed to do was seal off the well from this highly pressurized oil deposit. if you pumped up some hot dangerous liquid to incredible pressure, and it was held in place by like a container, and then you jammed the steel straw through the container, what happens? it explodes out. they want it cocome out, but not explode out because it's flammable. what happened was the engineer said, look, this is dangerous. they did a computer modeling program that showed if you do it the way you plan to do it, it's

going to come out, and we need to do something that's going to take longer and be more expensive to make sure that it doesn't blow out like that, and they said, the poncho said no. we're not going to do that. you find a way to make it work the way we want to do it which is cheaper and faster, and so the engineers got back together, and they said, okay, here's what we can do. you have to use these extra things to make the steel pipe fit exactly in the center of the hole because that way the cement is solid and there's no pockets where the cement didn't go outside the steel pipe, and the cement is what seals it. what did they do? they said, thanks, but no, we're not going to use those extra devices, so they didn't. then they said, okay, but you have to make sure that the cement has sealed it properly, so you need to run an expensive

test that takes a half a day afterwords. they said, well, thanks for the advice, and they ignored that as well. unbelievable. what happened then was the crew on board was confused and misread a reading that could have told them a blowout was coming so they were not prepared for it. they made conscious decision after conscious decision that allowed the oil and the gas to up vade the well -- invade the well, it sure enough did, misread the signs it was coming up the column, and it burst out, and then there was this -- i mean, it was just like a giant cloud of methane gas over the rig, and the engine revved and that caused it to spark and blew it up. what preceded was an hour and a half of sheer hell on earth for the people who were there, and 10 people died instantly in the explosion, and then a crane

operator fell to the ground, and they could not rescue him because the fire was beating them back. they lost 11 people and caused the worst ecological disaster in the history of the united states, and so, you know, so these questions of how can we prevent this in the future? you know now that after that happened, bp stock fell 50%. where is it today? back up to where it was. right after, there were all these calls for increased regulation and for moratorium on oil drilling. where are we today in back to where they were right before. once again, because people don't like baying $4.05 for a gallon of gasoline, they say we are now going to aggressively expand offshore oil drilling again. what that means is -- then they say there's some additional safety regulations. well, there's no, i mean, the people who are enforcing the

regulations can't possibly be involved in every single decision on every single rig out in the gulf of mexico, and what's going to happen is they are going to go some years, and nothing will happen, and then they will start taking the same chances. there was a character we focused on who was the first chief mate of the rig, and he had this hobby where he liked to go on these hydroplanes, small hydroplanes, not much bigger than a person at 80 miles per hour in his offtime. after this explosion where, you know, there's this whole thing in the book where he's acting heroically. there's this nipping thing, and two of the lifeboats are blown away, the other two leave without the captain and the last remaining and him and another does p people, so they have to lower rubber life rafts as the

bunson burper is come -- burner is coming around the rig. he's like holding the thing to the rig as the heat is coming up and burning his arm and he's trying to keep a grip while his arm is singing. it's dramatic, exciting, and scary. he survives this thing and goes home to recooperate, and the next thing you know, he's racing these boats, and the boats flip and he's wearing a caff lar suit, but cuts through the leg of the suit and almost se veers his leg,. his wife instantly goes online and puts all his boats for sale. [laughter] he sweet talks her and convinces

her he's going to be safe now and then she has to go to a race again. she said he was being more cautious, but, you know, a few years are going to go by, and he'll take the same chances again that got him in this position because that's what humans do, and, unfortunately, that's the truth, and so the only way, john conrad says he thinks the way to make this happen is to encourage our best and brightsers to think about -- brightest to think about careers in industry like this so there's really good people doing this incredibly important and incredibly complicated work. i mean, that's important. i mean, that's one thing, and the other thing is to make the penalties for this sort of thing so egregious, so strong that the people who really prevent these things, the people running the

companies and making the day-to-day decisions have an up sentive to overcome this -- incentive to overcome this gigantic financial incentive they have to go faster and cut corners. anyway, does anyone have any questions, you know, about anything related to the gulf oil spill or -- if you do, step up here. don't be shy. yeah? >> there's so much criticism -- [inaudible] i just don't know how you feel about the government's response and i know it changed as tile went by, but do you have a general sense of what they could have done differently? >> well, i think the problem was is that, you know, this is -- well, as i was saying, the conditions a mile deep in the ocean, the pressure is so inaccessible and the pressure so

great that that pressure changes the physics of everything that it makes it very difficult so it wasn't so much that they could have done something else, although they did develop some technology in the process of trying to stop this that will come in handy if this happens again, but i think what it showed is when you have a situation that can occur that you can't stop and that you can't deal with, you better make damn sure it doesn't happen in the first place. i think it really says we really need to find to take the prevention of this more seriously. it's not the thing to say, well, you know, we can make it 99% sure this won't happen again because it will happen. that 1% will happen just like that 36 inch snow will happen given enough time just like with the earthquake in japan. you know, that was -- that was a once in a century event too, but, you know, centuries go by,

and we could be living in the part of the century where that happens, and as a result you have a whole part of japan that's going to be a problem for generations to come, and so, you know, i think we really need to restructure our thinking about risk and to understand that if the harm is great enough, then you can't just say, well, this is only a 1 in 100 year event, because that will happen, and it's going to happen again too, and right now there's nothing that's been done, absolutely nothing that's been done to make what happened the deepwater horizon less likely to happen because as i said, what is the lesson to bp? the lesson is a $20 billion cost of dealing with the spill. hell, we make that up in six months, so it's much better to deal with it after the fact than

it is to spend the money it takes to prevent it in the first place. okay, well -- yes, go ahead. step up to the microphone. >> sir, did you have any ah-ha moments where you learned something you didn't expect to learn during the research? >> oh, yeah, absolutely. i mean, the ah-ha moment i had was as i was saying was so complex that even the reporters covering this day-to-day couldn't quite understand what was going on, but when i discovered that they actually -- that the engineers actually warned them that this was going to happen, exactly what was going to happen, and theyignored them not once, but three times. that's the moment where i thought this was not that complicated or an unavoidable thing due to complexity. this was something that people

just chose to take the risk because they wanted to save the money. it's that simple. it's really not anymore complicated than that, and i don't think -- i don't think that most people even now quite get that's what happened. okay. yes, go ahead. >> as you talked to people, did you find conflict with the communities over the role of the economic importance of the economies versus the environmental hazard? >> well, in the communities where this is, you know, where they recruit people for the rigs, this is the economic lifeline, so -- i mean, really to them it's sort of like food on your table or possibility of tar balls on the beach. you know, there's not really much of a context there. you know, these are people who, you know, there's no work in their home communities. they are making money and go out

to buy atv and big fancy barbecues, and they are able to send their kids to college and buy suvs and do all the things that people in urban areas, you know, people in areas like this take for granted. otherwise, that would be completely inaccessible to them. no, there's not really much of a conflict there. you know, i think that, you know, and that, you know, i think we would all make more decisions as people there if that was our option for providing for our families and giving them all the things that we see all around us everybody else having. yeah. you know, the other ah-ha moments were personal revelations. one of the main characters here was the chief mechanic namedded doug browne, and he was the guy i became pretty close to, and he

was in the engine room when the engine exploded. a steel door knocked him down. he had head injuries, and, you know, his legs were screwed up, and he also -- this is the hardest part. it's hard to tell. he had brain injuries so there's some behavioral change that could occur with that, but he clearly has ptsd. he could fix anything. he loved his job, his engines, and i talked to him recently, and his wife was there and said, you know, he's standing in front of the garage just in front of the refrigerator just trying to put a screw into where it needs to be, and his hand is shaking so bad. he can't do that. he's not working anymore. his full pay has run out. he's living on 60% of his salary

because he worked three weeks on and three weeks off. his wife never had to develop a career. there's parties to suits, but those take years to play out. in the beginning when i was saying it's easy for the rest of us to go on and sort of forget about this, but when it's in your life when it happens to you, it's something that just, you know, it's sort of like a 300-pound white sitting on -- weight sitting on your chest day after e day, and i really feel for him, and i have a tremendous respect, and that's one thing i really tried to say in the book is that these people do -- sorry, these people do difficult, dangerous work that accomplishes miracles. you know, what they are doing would have been impossible in

any other era. the technologies unbelievable. you know, actually this blowout preventer, they actually move it down to get it off the rig into the water, they have a system so like at one point this guygan tick -- gigantic machine goes over the hole in the center of the rig ready to be dropped down and it's exactly like a reversed moon launch because it's going down to the bottom of the world instead of up to the top of it, and the equipment they have to do it, as i said, is every bit as sophisticated. i have enormous respect. you know, the engineers do brilliant things, and, you know, these are not evil characters who make these decisions. we make similar decisions. you know, think about, you know,

you have a headlight that's out, okay? technically, you should not be on the road like that. you are supposed to get that fixed before you drive it again, but we figure, oh, i just got to get some milk. it's late. i need milk, and, you know, so what are the chances of anything bad resulting because of this? we make the same kind of decisions. it's human nature, and that's why we have to really understand that in order to even begin to deal with the fact that the technologies we're applying whether it's nuclear power, whether it's offshore oil drilling, you know, they are powerful technologies, but the consequences of them screwing up can be something that will haunt all of us for generations, and forever. we have to learn a new way of human nature in order to deal with this stuff otherwise we're

just going to have this happen over and over again, and, you know, and the quality of all of our lives are going to be diminished slowly over a period of time like the frog in a pot of water slowly heating until it's boiling him. the frog is cooked. anyway, thank you so much for coming out. i really appreciate it, and i enjoyed talking to you. i'll be over in the tent signing books for awhile. [applause] >> thank you, everyone, for atepidding. tom will be signing books over in the autographing area. please fill out our surveys # # and sign up for the news letter. een joy the rest of your day and phil trupp will be coming up momentarily. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> tom shroder on the untold story of the gulf oil disaster. in a couple of minutes, phil trupp joins us discussing his book "ruthless." we'll be right back with more of the good gaithersburg book festival in maryland.

>> now, phil trupp on ruthless, how ordinary up vesters beat the biggest scam in wall street history. >> good morning, and welcome to the second annual book festival. i'm danny and proud to be a long term resident here in the city of gaithersburg. i'm a planning commissioner in the city, and i am a member of the gaithersburg book festival committee. a quick couple of announcements. for your consideration and for everyone, please silence any devices you may have that make any noise of any kind.

your feedback is critical in helping us continue to improve this event and surveys available here at the info desk over here and on our website. anyone who submits a survey is entered into a random drawing for a nook color. please be sure to fill out the survey. we welcome c-span's booktv and viewers across the country. if there's time for questions, be sure to use the microphone in front so everyone here and in television audiences will hear you. phil trupp will be signing books immediately after this presentation. his books are on sale in the barnes & noble tent. phil trupp is an author, journalist, and adventurer with a career spanning more than three decades. he's been a daily news reporter, a major magazine feature write,

author, editor of more than a dozen books. he's working on three novels as well as a future length film with a spy-thriller theme. he was associated with private mercury in the early days of nasa and is an official noaa leading the team of journalists to live and work beneath the sea and was one of the first journalists allowed into fidel castro's cuba and explored the rain forest and found sunking treasure. you may think he's the most interesting man in the world and his mother has a tattoo that says son on it. [laughter] now to his book, "ruthless" how investors reclaimed investments and beat wall street. this book recounts how the ars, auction rate securities market, went from a sound