We should all be pretty familiar with the iconic images of the Deepwater Horizon exploding; the catastrophe was captured on camera by the U.S. Coast Guard, and those BP Gulf spill photos of the oil rig going up in flames were ubiquitous back in the summer of 2010.But maybe those shots weren’t quite apocalyptic enough. So Reddit user joedamadman has uploaded some new images of the Deepwater Horizon going down in high res, and well, it’s a different ballgame.If the Coast Guard’s photos made for a jarring depiction of the tragic consequences of human hubris—drilling in the deep sea with no contingency plans—then this new batch is our highest-tech oil-sapping machinery actually getting sucked down into the depths of hell. These should lend some new perspective as to how devastating this accident really was; the scale of the tragedy that left 11 people dead when that giant rig collapsed.
Oh yeah, and went on to cause the biggest offshore environmental catastrophe in U.S. history.
Remember, such was the scale of BP’s epic ‘my bad’ that we couldn’t plug the thing for months; the oil just kept gushing.
Anyway. We know all that. But these brutally high-res photos should help reanimate our thinking about the massive environmental disaster that too rapidly slunk into the apathetic recesses of the near-past.
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