A Sea in Flames : The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout

Carl Safina has been hailed as one of the top 100 conservations of the 20th century (Audubon Magazine) and A Sea in Flames is his blistering account of the months-long manmade disaster that tormented a region and mesmerized the nation. Traveling across the Gulf to make sense of an ever-changing story and its often-nonsensical twists, Safina expertly deconstructs the series of calamitous misjudgments that caused the Deepwater Horizon blowout, zeroes in on BP's misstatements, evasions, and denials, reassesses his own reaction to the government's crisis handling, and reviews the consequences of the leak--and what he considers the real problems, which the press largely overlooked. Safina takes us deep inside the faulty thinking that caused the lethal explosion. We join him on aerial surveys across an oil-coated sea. We confront pelicans and other wildlife whose blue universe fades to black. Safina skewers the excuses and the silly jargon--like "junk shot" and "top kill"--That made the tragedy feel like a comedy of horrors--and highlighted Big Oil's appalling lack of preparedness for an event that was inevitable. Based on extensive research and interviews with fishermen, coastal residents, biologists, and government officials, A Sea In Flames has some surprising answers on whether it was "Obama's Katrina," whether the Coast Guard was as inept in its response as BP was misleading, and whether this worst unintended release of oil in history was really America's worst ecological disaster. Impassioned, moving, and even sharply funny, A Sea in Flames is ultimately an indictment of America's main addiction. Safina writes: "In the end, this is a chronicle of a summer of pain--and hope. Hope that the full potential of this catastrophe would not materialize, hope that the harm done would heal faster than feared, and hope that even if we didn't suffer the absolutely worst--we'd still learn the big lesson here. We may have gotten two out of three. That's not good enough. Because: there'll be a next time." From the Hardcover edition "The first book about the BP disaster by a world-renowned oceanographer, A SEA IN FLAMES examines the environmental and social consequences of the spill from the perspective of those directly affected by it. It will be published on the one-year anniversary of the spill, in April 2011. The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is among the greatest environmental catastrophes in U.S. history. Carl Safina's Blowout provides an extraordinary perspective on it. Consisting of three parts, it reveals and details: this shocking manmade environmental disaster, its occurence with respect to the oil industry's and the government's complete inability to adequately respond, and the inevitable environmental effects. By telling the stories of three working families, Safina goes behind the scenes with fishermen, oystermen, and oilmen whose lives--and habitats--have been irreparably changed. But will energy and environmental policy change as well? Safina addresses these issues in a rich, deeply personal investigation of a catastrophe he has reported--and blogged on--from the beginning"--Provided by publisher. Know before you go Diaster Chain. Blowout ; April ; Deja vu, to name but a few A Season of Anguish. Mayday ; Late May ; Early June ; High June ; Late June ; Like a thousand Julys ; Late July Aftermath. Dog days ; Late August ; Early September ; The new light of autumn.