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Deepwater Horizon - Reflections from 6 years ago

Posted on October 13, 2016 by Nigel Bennett  |  5649 Views

On April 20, 2010, CNN reported a massive explosion on an oil rig in the Macondo oil field of Gulf of Mexico and shortly after our phones at Aqua-Guard’s head office in North Vancouver, Canada started ringing off the hook. Little did we know what would come over the next several months and years after the Deepwater Horizon accident.

This fall a major motion picture was released called “Deepwater Horizon – Hero”, with a focus on the 11 men and women that lost their lives and the 17 others that were injured - all heroes.

While this story was unfolding Aqua-Guard Spill Response, with most of our global counterparts and competitors, rallied to put the largest oil response effort in history together.

For months, Aqua-Guard’s team of design engineers, fabricators and strike team worked around the clock to manufacture and move large quantities of equipment from our bases in Vancouver, Canada to staging areas around the Gulf of Mexico. 

The tide of oil in the Gulf quickly spread to form a slick extending over thousands of square kilometers with up to 10 million gallons (38 million liters) of crude oil being spilt over the period of the spill.

Aqua-Guard’s team along with others, equipped vessels with Aqua-Guard’s state-of-the-art RBS TRITON™ oil skimming technology and sent them offshore as quickly as possible to help in the response effort. By June, 1,100 miles (1,770 km) of coast line from Mississippi to Florida was contaminated.

Even with the mobilization of U.S., Canadian and global oil spill response efforts, there still was not enough mechanical containment and recovery equipment available to respond to such a massive spill.  Thus, the choice to use massive amounts of dispersant was made and 1.84 million gallons of oil dispersant was sprayed on the spill, both on the ocean's surface from planes and subsurface directly at the wellhead..  The permanent environmental damage caused by this choice is still unknown.

A large thank you goes out to all those that supported Aqua-Guard and the international spill response effort during this horrific time.  These people went the extra mile to get things done for the recovery of the Gulf of Mexico and its environment.

Nigel J. Bennett
Co-founder / Principal
Aqua-Guard Spill Response

About Aqua-Guard

Aqua-Guard provides a range of state-of-the-the-art oil spill response solutions including the URO Skimmer System and the RBS TRITON™ range of oil skimmers—all built on Aqua-Guard’s patented RBS TRITON™ technology to deliver some of the highest efficiency and recovery rates in the industry.