As the oil spewed, was BP more concerned with the environmental disaster — or its own image? A report from the toxic shores of the Louisiana Coastline.

By Peter Heller

The BP training center turned crisis headquarters could not be contained. The new nine-acre parking lot plowed out of the field didn’t come close to holding all the cars. Vehicles spilled down the shoulder of Highway 311. Homeland Security and state police trucks crowded the entrance. Cicadas whined out of the dense woods, competing with the skill saws and compressors in a side lot where contract crews couldn’t set up office trailers fast enough. At the glass front doors, Coast Guard officers poured in while Army guys in camo, jumpsuited airmen, and scientists in khakis poured out. This was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill Houma Incident Command Center in Louisiana, one of the largest interagency incident commands in the history of catastrophe.

Just past the thronged lobby, in the big situation room, the thing they called the Blob was duplicated on two huge monitors; it pulsed a brilliant devil red. It even looked like a devil: wavery arms reaching for Alabama and Florida, a pointed tail curling back toward the marshes of Louisiana. This was real time. With great subtlety, the way a stalking predator shifts position, the Blob was closing in.

A row of uniformed Coast Guard men sat beneath the monitors in rapt attention. Behind them, scores of men and women seated at rows of portable tables, tapping on laptops, and working phones all seemed to have one eye on the Blob. Me too. I couldn’t stop watching it. It had the terrifying charisma of a mushroom cloud. It was the dark spirit that impelled this entire operation.

“How far across?” one Coast Guard officer asked, pointing to the tail. With him was an official from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “179.32 miles, sir,” replied a technician. The Wildlife official crossed his arms. He did not look happy. Like most here, his agency was complicit in the disaster, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service having given the okay for BP to drill in the Gulf even though the petroleum giant had no real plan of its own to save the region’s marine and bird life in the event of a major spill.

This was June 8, day 50 of the ruptured BP wellhead that had been gushing crude into the Gulf of Mexico nonstop, and the Blob  — a toxic mass of oil arrayed in slicks, sheens, sludges, bubbles, and tar balls — now measured more than 2,500 square miles, the size of Delaware and then some. In the weeks since the Mississippi Canyon Block 252 well began spewing oil into the Gulf, BP had gone all out, laying more than 1,000 miles of inflatable boom in Louisiana alone to prevent oil from reaching the shore, hiring more than 300 skimming boats to try to capture the oil at sea, and managing more than 4,000 people from this center to clean up its mess — a tab that by midsummer was estimated at $3.5 billion. But despite all that and the best technology available, no one could say for certain where the Blob would strike next.

The big room began to fill for the morning briefing. SRO. Officials from dozens of agencies — feds, state, military. NOAA, USGS. Consulting scientists, digital mappers. Deputy Incident Commander Meredith Austin stepped to the middle of the crowd and talked about how to handle stress. “The sheen is out there, and you want to do something about it, but you can’t do anything about it,” she said. Her voice was flat, and she looked tired. She glanced at the Blob. “You want to smack the living daylights out of it.”

Everybody in the room wore a colored vest: red for operations; blue, planning; brown, documentation; white, command. Everybody but me. There was no color for press because press was not supposed to be here. When I was first badged in — to do a good-news profile of a veterinarian named Michael Ziccardi, one of the world’s leading experts on rescuing oiled wildlife — I was told by a press agent that I had to be accompanied by a “buddy” wherever I went. “Except in the bathroom,” she smiled tightly. I noticed that her badge said shaw incorporated contractor. The Shaw Group was vilified in the aftermath of Katrina for accepting no-bid contracts from the federal government to hook up FEMA trailers. According to the company, it was helping BP with “staffing.” A few days before, it had been awarded one of the biggest state contracts of the spill response: the construction of barrier island berms, which were supposed to protect the coast, but which numerous critics were calling a boondoggle. (The company declined to put a dollar figure on the contract, but the Associated Press estimates it ran to $360 million.)

In the Wildlife Operations room, Ziccardi had explained how the 25 state and federal officials packed around the tables deployed hundreds of boats and six helicopters to respond to oiled-animal calls. He had shown me the hotlines where the calls came in, telling me proudly that a rescue crew was dispatched for every legitimate call. A helicopter had even flown 60 miles out to an offshore rig to rescue a single oiled bird. Then we moved to the restricted Situation Room.

Once there, I could see right away why BP wanted to ride herd on the media. The message coming from the company was consistent: This spill might be terrible, but the company is on the case. Let the doomsayers moan; we’re going to beat this thing. And yet, one look at the Blob metastasizing across BP’s own screens revealed the lie. Nobody had come close to controlling the oil, nor would it be possible to contain its effects in the water column, the marshes, or the food web even after they plugged the hole. What’s more, many of the strategies BP had embraced to address the spill — and, frankly, to control the story — were, it was only beginning to emerge, doing more harm than good.

“Good morning!” boomed a tall man with a white goatee, flowing gray hair, and a clean-pressed oxford shirt. This was BP Incident Commander Mike Utsler. He stood in the center of the room. He got an uneven “Good morning!” back, but the 100 or so Coast Guard regulars made it resounding.

“Hoorah!” Utsler said next, waving his cordless mic. “Yesterday was a good day!”

It was? Wasn’t yesterday the day that NOAA and the University of South Florida announced the discovery of oil deep in the water column, 46 miles from the gushing well?

“Yesterday was a good day because we recovered between 11,000 and 15,000 barrels. We had 15 burns accomplished!” Clapping.

Utsler pointed to the screens. “Our vessels are working to control the Dragon’s Tail. Every day we have like yesterday, we gain on Mr. Blob.” Then he invoked the previous day’s NOAA findings, giving them some top spin.

“NOAA and other scientists are saying we have underwater plumes,” he said. “You be the best source of information. Scientists have confirmed that the presence of oil below the surface is less than 0.5 parts per million. Do you know what less than 0.5 parts per million looks like?” He held up his Abita Springs water bottle. “It looks like this.”

A few minutes later, I spoke to Utsler in his office. I told him he’d given a rousing speech. Did he really believe it? His mission, he said, was like Apollo 13, the movie. “Failure is not an option. Every drop of oil that hits the shoreline, that impacts our wildlife, is a temporary defeat.” But, he insisted, “the defeats are temporary.”

“Workers are getting better and better at the response each day,” he went on. “We won’t quit until we’ve succeeded. We will address the source, we will address the shoreline, the subsequent impact on the environment and the people for the long term.” Another film came to mind. “For this team,” Utsler said, “it’s Groundhog Day. Every day we wake up, and the mission is the same.”

Surreal. The dude was talking about movies. But as I passed darkened computer map rooms, I reconsidered: The Command Center was like a movie, a movie about the unleashing of a monster. Then I made a tactical mistake: I told the PR woman I wanted to know more about the Blob. She blinked, stricken. “That’s a different story,” she said.

Within 10 minutes her supervisor arrived, shaking with anger. She revoked my badge and showed me the door. If I wanted to know about Ziccardi’s BP-funded wildlife rescues, that was cool. If I wanted to better understand what Ziccardi and the Gulf’s people and sea creatures were really up against, I was on my own.

Click here to read more about The Well from Hell.