Longreads

On a Sunday afternoon in late May, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck stood before a horde of television cameras in the sprawling parking lot at Dodger Stadium. His voice wavering with emotion, Beck told a riveted city he was confident his detectives had caught one of the men responsible for the beating of a San Francisco Giants fan in that same lot weeks before.

Fourteen months after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded 50 miles southeast of Venice, La., killing 11 men and setting off the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, Transocean, the company that owned and ran the ill-fated 32,600-ton vessel, finally issued its official account of what happened and why. It produced a report on June 22 of no fewer than 854 pages, divided into two volumes, and spared no detail. The bottom line, though, isn’t complicated:It was BP’s fault.