By Ms. Sowerberry
February 25, 2030
Tony Hayward, the infamous former CEO of oil giant British Petroleum during 2010’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill, died February 17 at his Sevenoaks, Kent estate last Friday. He was 73.
Hayward was born in Slough, England in 1957 and spent the majority of his adult life working for BP in positions that took him to China, France, Venezuala, Russia and the US before replacing Lord Browne as BP’s head honcho.
On April 20, 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizons oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, where it was digging an exploratory well. With the exception of eleven workers, the rig’s crew was safely evacuated from the vessel before it sank two days later.
After making numerous public relations gaffes in his official response to the catastrophe, Hayward was relieved of his position as CEO and returned to his native England. Hayward later toured Eurasia as the opening act for war criminal George W. Bush’s “Boo-Boo Bourgeois” comedy review. Unfortunately, Hayward’s new career was cut short in 2023 by the unexpected return of the eleven workers presumed dead in the explosion. The forgotten crew members had been sailing the high seas as a band of cutthroat pirates called “the Gas Guzzlers.”
Their blockbuster memoir, “Shiver Me Fuel Tank,” was a searing indictment of the international oil industry and Hayward himself. The tell-all book confirmed that the Deepwater rig’s crew had reported ongoing concerns about well control for weeks prior to the explosion and revealed that on the day of the tragedy, Hayward was celebrating “four-twenty,” a holiday for marijuana enthusiasts. This information shed new light on Hayward’s internal communications with the rig on April 20th, which included the phrases, “Just burn one down,” and “Go with the flow, amigo!”
Hayward spent the years between his public disgrace at the hands of the Gas Guzzlers and his death aboard his private yacht and in the confines of his extensive home, listening to old Barbra Streisand records and breaking mirrors at the slightest provocation.
A source close to Hayward’s family reports that, in his final days, “[Tony] spent a lot of time in the bathtub,” where he had constructed a scale model of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Obsessed with the disaster that ended his career, Hayward would reenact the explosion, alternately drowning the future Gas Guzzlers and saving them while always trying to devise a better solution for the resulting leak, which had transformed the southeastern United States into a toxic peat bog filled with mutated land and marine life.
Hayward is survived by his wife and two children.
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