Editor's note: NRDC's Peter Lehner and Bob Deans have written the first book to be published on the Gulf oil disaster. In Deep Water benefits from the combined resources of the 400 scientists, activists, and researchers at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

From the Introduction

The Deepwater Horizon disaster has put three urgent questions before the country. What happened? How did we arrive at this point? And where must we go from here? The way we answer these questions will have a profound impact on the future of the Gulf of Mexico, its people and, indeed, Americans everywhere.

The implications for our economy and national security, our environment, and our entire way of life can hardly be overstated. This book is an attempt to address those questions, providing answers where they exist, clues where they do not and guidance as to where we might find them.

As the questions are urgent, the book is meant to be timely, a first draft  of sorts. The narrative that we tell is the story so far, with much remaining to discover and learn. We hope the various analyses underway, as well as the president’s commission investigating the blowout (on which NRDC President Frances Beinecke serves), will bring us all to a more thorough understanding.

On the face of it, what happened is clear: the fourth-largest corporation in the world drilled a well beneath a mile of water in the Gulf of Mexico. Operating at the frontier of knowledge in conditions more challenging than even deep space, this well was inherently dangerous. There were a series of judgments, operations and technological shortcomings running from the planning and design of the well to the effort to seal it that set the stage for disaster. When the well blew out on the night of April 20, equipment designed to be the last line of defense against disaster failed to shut down the well.

Eleven men were killed that night and more than two hundred million gallons of crude oil gushed into the ocean during the three months it took for the oil company, formerly known as British Petroleum, to cap the well. More than six hundred miles of coastline were oiled and a slick the size of South Carolina covered the fertile Gulf. Ocean, coastal and wetlands habitat and birds, fish, marine mammals, sea turtles and other animals and plants were damaged or destroyed. Thirty-seven percent of American waters in the Gulf were closed to fishing; thousands of watermen and others were thrown out of work; and the future of a complex and vital region was cast into uncertainty.

Our country arrived at this point because our demand for oil has driven companies like BP into deeper and riskier Gulf waters at precisely the time the political consensus had broken down for the public safeguards we need to protect our safety, health and environment. Our watchdog agencies, in short, were defanged.

And so, just as companies pushed the outer limits of their technological capability and operational expertise to drill for oil in water up to two miles deep, the agency responsible for ensuring the industry’s safety was steadily becoming compromised, losing its ability to keep up.

That agency, the Minerals Management Service, an arm of the Department of the Interior, was addled by rules and authority that were years behind the fast-changing offshore oil industry. The agency had five-dozen inspectors to keep tabs on four thousand offshore platforms, some of which serviced more than two-dozen wells, across the Gulf of Mexico.

The close-knit culture of the region, and a near-incestuous relationship between the agency and the industry it was supposed to oversee, created an atmosphere in which oil company engineers sometimes penciled in their own responses to inspection forms and federal inspectors later traced over those replies in ink. Off shore oil companies treated inspectors to private hunting expeditions, skeet shoots and fishing trips.

Beyond such cultural proclivities, there were institutional mandates as well. President George W. Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney were both oil company executives before they came to the White House. Waging war in Iraq, home to the fourth-largest proven oil reserves in the world, those men also put in place energy policies aimed at boosting domestic production. In the Gulf, that meant speeding the permitting process for offshore wells like the one BP lost control of in April, and waiving requirements for adequate environmental review and sufficient oversight of blowout response plans.

When BP’s Macondo well blew out, the company had no idea how to stop the runaway well and no equipment in place to cap it. From the president on down, Americans watched in helpless fury as two million gallons of crude oil a day gushed into some of the most diverse and productive fisheries in the world.

The Gulf is home to scores of species of fish, from the majestic bluefin tuna to the common carp, numerous endangered species, such as whales and sea turtles, and birds both migratory and resident. It is the source of seventy percent of the oysters and shrimp produced in this country and hundreds of millions of pounds each year of snapper, grouper, tuna and other seafood.

Drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, it turned out, is an activity that puts an irreplaceable resource at risk. There are only two rational responses: reduce the risk and reduce the need for the activity.

We can do both; we must do both -- or else further catastrophe awaits. In this book, we show how we can make offshore drilling safer by investing in the safeguards we need, the institutions required to enforce those safeguards and the professionals we can count on to protect our safety, health and environment.

Next: Chapter 1: Blowout