- Last Updated: June 26, 2026
With our minds consumed by COVID-19 over the past few months, many people may have missed that, earlier this year, the world celebrated a grim anniversary. It was just 10 short years ago, on April 20, 2010, that an explosion rocked BP’s Deepwater Horizon Macondo oil platform operating in the Gulf of Mexico, instantly claiming the lives of 11 workers, and resulting in the largest marine environmental disaster in history.
Oddly, this milestone sparked anew my interest in the incident. One of the aspects I find most intriguing about the event is that on the morning of the disaster, senior officials at BP and Transocean, the contractor operating the rig, had arrived at the platform to celebrate a safety milestone: the site had operated for 7 consecutive years without a lost-time injury. And yet just 12 hours later, the platform, damaged and burning, toppled into the sea taking 11 lives with it.
Read more: SIF Prevention Starts with Better Investigations.
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