MEXICO CITY — It started with a burst of gas through the drilling well. Workers scrambled to close the safety valves but within moments, the platform caught fire and collapsed. Tens of millions of gallons of oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico. Numerous attempts to stanch the spill failed.
Three decades later, the 1979 Ixtoc disaster remains the Gulf's — and the world's — worst oil spill.
The parallels between that disaster and the current BP oil spill offer sobering lessons. There were no quick fixes for Ixtoc: It took 10 months to stop the leak, with Mexico's state-owned oil company, Pemex, trying methods similar to those that BP has attempted at its Deepwater Horizon rig.
Pemex managed to slow the spill a little using several methods including forcing metal spheres into the well. But it couldn't stop the leak until two relief wells were drilled — and even that didn't work right away: the oil kept gushing for another three months after the first well was completed.
In the end, Ixtoc spewed a record 140 million gallons of oil. Massive slicks reached the northern Mexican Gulf coast and Texas, where it would eventually coat almost 170 miles (275 kilometers) of U.S. beaches.
By comparison, Deepwater Horizon has spilled an estimated 21 million to 45 million gallons of oil. But if the Pemex disaster serves as a precedent, the BP spill could continue even after the two relief wells are expected to be finished in August.
By then, it could surpass Ixtoc as the worst oil spill in history, said Tad Patzek, chair of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at the University of Texas-Austin.
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