to Bourbon Offshore and Transocean." 2008 fatalities In 2008, two Transocean workers were reportedly killed on the company's vessels. Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion (2010) On 20 April 2010, a fire was reported on a Transocean-owned semisubmersible drilling rig, Deepwater Horizon. Deepwater Horizon was a RBS8D design of Reading & Bates Falcon, a firm that was acquired by Transocean in 2001. The fire broke out at 10:00 p.m. CDT UTC−5 in US waters of Mississippi Canyon 252 in the Gulf of Mexico. The rig was off the Louisiana coast. The US Coast Guard launched a rescue operation after the explosion which killed 11 workers and critically injured seven of the 126-member crew. Deepwater Horizon was completely destroyed and subsequently sank. As the Deepwater Horizon sank, the riser pipe that connected the well-head to the rig was severed. As a result, oil began to spill into the Gulf of Mexico. Estimates of the leak were about 80,000 barrels per day – for 87 days. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency on 29 April, as the oil slick grew and headed toward the most important and most sensitive wetlands in North America, threatening to destroy wildlife and the livelihood of thousands of fishermen. The head of BP Group told CNN's Brian Todd on 28 April that the accident could have been prevented and focused blame on Transocean, which owned and partly manned the rig. Transocean came under fire from lawyers, representing the fishing and tourism businesses that were hit by the oil spill, and the United States Department of Justice for seeking to use a Limitation of Liability Act of 1851 to restrict its liability for economic damages to $26.7 million. During Congressional testimony, Transocean and BP blamed each other for the disaster. It emerged that a "heated argument" broke out on the platform 11 hours before the accident, in which Transocean and BP personnel disagreed on an engineering decision related to the closing of the well. On 14 May 2010, US President Barack Obama commented, "I did not appreciate what I considered to be a ridiculous spectacle… executives of BP and Transocean and Halliburton [the firm responsible for cementing the well] falling over each other to point the finger of blame at somebody else. The American people could not have been impressed with that display, and I certainly wasn't." Transocean later claimed that 2010, the year in which