The government response was unprecedented in its scope and duration, involving many federal agencies and the state and local governments of five states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Texas.įederal responses to oil spills are conducted under the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan (also known as the National Contingency Plan or NCP), which establishes a multi-tiered National Response System. At the height of the response, the workforce totaled more than 47,000 men and women, including over 42,000 response and cleanup workers employed by BP and its contractors, 1,600 members of the National Guard, and more than 2,400 federal employees. 1įaced with an environmental catastrophe that threatened hundreds of kilometers of coastline, BP hired tens of thousands of workers, many unconditioned to the heat and long hours of work and with limited experience responding to and cleaning up oil spills. history and the first to be declared a Spill of National Significance. Many millions of barrels of oil discharged into the Gulf before the leak was sealed on July 15, 2010, making it the largest oil spill in U.S. The rig, operated by the oil company BP, sank on the morning of April 22, 2010. It soon became clear that the Macondo wellhead, 1,500 meters below the ocean surface, was discharging crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. ‘On the night of April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, located 72 kilometers offshore southeast of Venice, Louisiana, exploded and caught fire, resulting in the deaths of eleven workers. Review of the OSHA-NIOSH Response to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: Protecting the Health and Safety of Cleanup Workers. Federal personnel visited worksites daily, identifying hazards and means of abatement assessed training programs to ensure that workers were adequately trained in languages they could understand monitored chemical exposures and determined that the proper personal protective equipment was deployed insisted on implementation of a heat mitigation program rostered thousands of workers and conducted extensive outreach in communities impacted by the spill.Īdvance planning, immediate deployment, and collaboration across agencies helped ensure that the response operations resulted in no worker fatalities, and relatively few injuries and illnesses.įor future responses, improvements should be made in how safety and health information, as well as the process behind safety and health decisions, are communicated to the public.Ĭitation: Michaels D, Howard J.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health focused extensive resources on ensuring that BP and its contractors provided safe working conditions for thousands of workers involved in the response.

The overall response was led by the United States Coast Guard and involved the oil company BP, federal agencies, and state and local governments of five states. The fire and explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig resulted in an enormous oil spill that threatened large distances of coastline.

Deepwater horizon oil spill