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The effects of 'Deepwater Horizon' go beyond the rig

'Deepwater Horizon,' a new film, focuses on the rig accident in 2010, but is it too soon?

Illustration drawn on Sunday, Oct. 2, 2016.

Illustration drawn on Sunday, Oct. 2, 2016.


A few weeks ago, I saw a movie trailer that caused the impossible to happen: It made me not want to see a Mark Wahlberg movie.

"Deepwater Horizon," a film about the doomed deep-sea oil drilling rig of the same name, opened in theaters on Friday. When I saw the trailer, I was intrigued for about 30 seconds. I was focused on the Wahlberg.

Then it hit me that this is a movie about the catastrophic events on April 20, 2010 that led to one of the biggest environmental disasters in history, and I thought, “Really?”

Upfront, I will say that I have not seen the movie yet. It only came out on Friday, and there isn’t a lot of free time in the life of a full-time student and columnist. With that in mind, this won’t be a movie review.

Critics seem to enjoy the movie, and it’s currently holding a pretty decent rating on websites like RottenTomatoes. While I’m sure it is a cinematically sound movie, I can’t help but think about the appropriateness of the movie itself.

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t be remembering and honoring the loss of 11 lives during the explosion and ensuing calamity on Deepwater Horizon. I’m sure the event itself was punctuated with countless acts of individual heroism worthy of documenting in a movie.

I’m not sure, however, if that’s all we should be focusing on, as if that’s the only negative thing to come out of the accident.

For 87 days after the explosion, oil continuously pumped into the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, a critical economic and environmental zone for the entire Southeastern U.S. Authorities were left scratching their heads wondering how they were supposed to cap a leak that was more than 5,000 feet below water.

The spill and consecutive contamination of beaches all along the Gulf coast decimated tourism-based economies for months. No one wanted their kids to swim in oil. British Petroleum, the company responsible for the Deepwater Horizon rig, was forced to cover the costs of advertising campaigns from some southern states, pleading to tourists that their beaches were still safe.

Environmentally, the spill was an absolute disaster. It’s estimated that the Deepwater Horizon spill resulted in almost 20 times the amount of oil spilled than the Exxon Valdez spill, the previous largest oil spill in U.S. history.

Fish were mutated, coral was damaged and thousands of sea-dwelling species felt the effects of oil contamination. Organism variety in the sands of contaminated beaches plummeted, and yes, many birds ended up coated in oil.

That sounds bad enough as it is, until you realize how much of that contaminated seal life is actually fished and eaten in the Gulf. Trevor Sonnier, a Louisiana native, says people are still feeling the spill’s effects when it comes to food.

“As far as seafood goes, people are extremely afraid to eat it now,” Sonnier said, “I hear it all the time, people don’t want to eat oysters, people don’t want to eat Gulf shrimp, people don’t want to eat Gulf fish anymore, ever since the spill.”

“That’s something people didn’t talk about before the spill,” he finished.

Entire industries exist around fishing, harvesting and inevitably selling seafood. It’s one of the main economic drivers for the whole Gulf coast. It’s not easy to make oil-covered shrimp look appetizing on a supermarket or farmer’s market shelf.

I’m not trying to discount the lives lost during the oil rig explosion by being skeptical of the "Deepwater Horizon" film. Rather, I’m wondering if this film misses the forest for the trees. The damage from the Deepwater Horizon explosion ripples miles across the Gulf, affecting people and animals who couldn’t have told you anything about the rig before the accident.

Unlike the well at Deepwater Horizon, focusing mainly on the explosion and not the resulting disasters, just seems sort of shallow.


Reach the columnist at cjwood3@asu.edu or follow @chriswood_311 on Twitter.

Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.

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