Blowout

by Rachel Maddow

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  The Noble Discoverer was clearly feeling its oats on the trip to Alaska; it left the Kulluk and its tugboat in its wake. On July 7, the Disco pulled in to Dutch Harbor, a little port town near the midpoint of the Aleutian Islands, which jut like a tail into the Bering Sea. Other vessels in its little fleet were still churning slowly up the North American coast, probably a week away from the Alaskan port. Shell decided to wait up for the rest of the team; it would anchor the Disco at Dutch Harbor until it was time to make the thousand-mile trip farther north, through the Bering Strait, to its drilling grounds in the Chukchi Sea. But it didn’t take long for things to go wobbly. One late afternoon, a few days into the Disco’s stay at Dutch Harbor, the Arctic winds kicked up to thirty-five miles per hour and got the better of the ship. “We received a report at about 5:18 p.m. that the anchor let go and they were traveling toward shore,” a rather laconic Coast Guard spokeswoman later explained. The Disco reeled aimlessly and out of control for nearly half a mile that night before it ran aground on a remote little spit of land called Hog Island. When first light came up the next morning, it looked bad. But Shell got out ahead of the news and insisted the vessel had not actually grounded but “stopped very near the coast,” maybe 175 yards from shore. By the next afternoon, the company had towed the drillship back to its original mooring position and a dive-team inspection confirmed that no damage was done to the hull or any other part of the ship. However, Disco pride did not escape the incident unwounded. Locals and environmentalists (they seemed to be everywhere the Disco went) had already posted online a series of morning-after photos of the worse-for-wear drillship, resting slightly atilt in the soft sand bed at what actually looked to be only about twenty feet from shore.

  A week later, still in Dutch Harbor, the Disco began vomiting oily bilgewater from its holding tank into the bay, coating the waters nearby with an unsightly sheen. The Disco’s storage tanks were proving unequal to the amount of effluent produced by the ship, even after the crew made secret modifications to what one regulator genteelly called its “decanting system.” “Noble devised a makeshift barrel and pump system to discharge water that had entered the vessel’s engine room machinery spaces directly overboard without processing it through the required pollution prevention equipment as required by law,” a federal inquiry found. “Noble failed to notify the Coast Guard about this system, and took steps to actively hide the fact that it was being used.” But this finding came only much later, long after Shell tied up its operations for the season. Back in July it seemed like maybe the Disco was just getting used to the choppy Alaska seas, and a little green around the gills.

  Three weeks after the unfortunate we swear we didn’t run aground incident, the Disco and the Kulluk and most of the rest of the Shell fleet were all still lying low in Dutch Harbor, more than a thousand miles away from the drill sites in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. A small commercial icebreaker and a couple of other ships were at the two sites, making early preparations, but it was becoming evident that Shell’s paperwork excellence had outrun its operational excellence by a long shot. Even at that late date, the linchpin of Shell’s four-hundred-plus-page Oil Spill Response Plan, the Arctic Challenger—tasked with hauling the dispersants and the big paper towels and the crucial and promised containment dome to Shell’s Arctic drilling sites—was back in Bellingham, Washington, just north of Seattle, still on the maritime operating table. Superior Energy Services was having a hell of a time converting the ship into a certifiable, ice-class oil spill response vessel. Like the Disco, the Arctic Challenger—a vintage 1976 barge—had grown a bit flabby over its long life, and understandably so. It had been inactive for the previous ten years. Superior was working overtime to upgrade the ship’s electrical system, its fire safety system, and its entire piping system, among other things, to gain the required Coast Guard certification.

  After conferring with the Coast Guard, local reporters suggested that those prospects didn’t look great: “As of August 4, about 400 items still needed to be completed, inspected or reviewed.” Even as the Disco and the Kulluk and the tugs and icebreakers loitered in Alaska, watching the days tick by on the calendar, neither the Challenger nor the containment dome it was to carry was ready to take the in-water tests required before the Coast Guard could certify the ship for Arctic duty. “The opportunity to drill exploratory wells this year in Alaska’s Arctic is rapidly diminishing,” was the lede of a McClatchy wire story on August 14, 2012, “and it’s a situation of Shell’s own making, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters.” Salazar, who was on a personal visit to the drill sites in the far north of Alaska, sounded a little peeved. “The waters in the Chukchi around the so-called Burger find are in fact already open,” he said. “So it’s not a matter of ice. It’s a matter of whether or not Shell has the mechanical capability to be able to comply with the exploration effort that had been approved by the government.”

  When the Challenger did finally get out into open waters in Puget Sound a month later to show inspectors from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement what it could do, things went from bad to worse. “During the inspection, BSEE staff observed the absence of clear lines of authority on the vessel, and the operation was beset by problems such as the tangling of a remotely-operated vehicle in the dome’s rigging, a loose connection on one of the winches, and a serious miscalculation of the amount of weight attached to the dome to keep it submerged,” read a later Interior Department review. “The containment dome, which had been positioned at a depth of more than 100 feet, rose rapidly through the water and breached the surface. A few minutes later, the tanks providing buoyancy to the dome vented, and the dome quickly plunged. It sank too rapidly to allow for pressure equalization, and the upper chambers of the dome were crushed.” The Challenger would not be leaving Puget Sound that season. Its vaunted oil containment dome was now basically a stomped-on soda can. Turns out Shell had a terrific Oil Spill Response Plan—really excellent paperwork—but no way to effect it.

  By the time Shell’s drillships finally completed the trip from Dutch Harbor to their final Arctic destination, their mission had been greatly circumscribed. The company had received official permission to complete “top holes” only. That meant Shell could drill down about fourteen hundred feet into the seafloor, to a depth where its engineers were in no danger of actually hitting oil or gas, just to install a few preliminary well necessities, cap the hole, and leave it in place for the next season.

  The Shell execs and the crew on the Disco showed a brave face to the world in spite of the setback. Shell posted a video of a Disco drill bit ready to spin down into the Arctic seabed. And this was no ordinary spin of the drill. “This marks the culmination of more than six years of effort by Shell,” shouted the website on September 9, 2012. “This is the first time a drill bit has touched the sea floor in the U.S. Chukchi Sea in more than two decades.” Managers on-site in the Arctic, meanwhile, were starting to shout something else. Something more like Get the hell out of there! An ice floe thirty miles long and ten miles wide, with a keen Arctic gale at its back, was already bearing down on the Disco. Twelve hours after that historic touch of the drill bit, the Disco had to disconnect, draw up its heavy anchors, and boogie. The ice floe did pass by, and the Disco crew was able to get back to work to finish up its top hole. The mission even generated a little press, and not all of it bad. A Wall Street Journal reporter, Tom Fowler, choppered out to the Disco several weeks after operations recommenced. He spent a few days observing the goings-on and reported back to the mainland. “The rig’s 124-person crew included a half-dozen wildlife spotters hired from native Alaskan firms,” he wrote near the end of October. “While federal environmental laws don’t require such spotters, Shell brought them on board to ease concerns among the Inupiat people, who worried about impacts on their annual whale harvest.

  “Jennifer Scott, one of the biologists on watch, sa
id there were some signs of life amid the empty expanse: in addition to humpback and bowhead whales, a polar bear swam by the vessel one day, and a snowy owl took up temporary residence above the bridge. The drilling crews on deck didn’t have time to notice. They moved steel casing and pipes into place as the ice-slicked decks heaved with the waves, trying to make the most of the lowered drilling expectations. In a few weeks the area will be encased in sea ice again, blocking Shell’s progress for another year.”

  At the end of the short drilling season that included dodging ice floes and Native Alaskans who would not allow their semiannual whale hunt to be impeded, Shell had little to show for its now $5 billion investment: one Disco-drilled top hole in the Chukchi, one Kulluk-drilled top hole in the Beaufort, a smattering of press. And there would be more of only one of those three things in the coming months.

  The Disco was the first drillship to pull up anchor and head down to Dutch Harbor, the way station in its three-thousand-mile trip back to the Vigor shops in Seattle, for a tune-up and resupply in anticipation of the 2013 season. But as the Disco neared Dutch Harbor on November 6, vibrations in its propeller shaft became so violent the ship’s main engine had to be shut down. The Disco was towed, sheepishly, back into Dutch Harbor again. Ten days later and still in the harbor, when the crew attempted to start the main engine, it detonated a backfire explosion powerful enough to be felt—not just heard, but felt—by people hundreds of yards away. The attempt also ignited the insulation in the engine room, leaving the crew racing to extinguish the flames. The Disco had to be dead towed to port in Seward, Alaska, for a full-on Coast Guard inspection—an inspection that brought to light all the Disco’s dirty little secrets. Here were a few of the notable Coast Guard findings, beyond the drillship’s ongoing and unseemly oil-laden bilgewater pukefests: “Objective evidence revealed systematic failure and lack of main engine preventive maintenance, which caused loss of main propulsion and exhaust system explosion….Multiple fire screen doors throughout accommodation spaces that would not self-close….Main engine piston cooling water is contaminated with sludge and oil. Crew skims the oil off with a ladle & bucket during rounds.” What state-of-the-art multibillion-dollar project doesn’t include a little ladle and bucket duty? “Exhaust system back-fires on a regular basis. Chief engineer suspects this is due to change to exhaust system in order to accommodate helicopter deck installation….Current propulsion arrangement does not result in sufficient speed at sea to safely maneuver in all expected conditions….Observed oil soaked structural fire protection insulation in way of exhaust….No evidence of at least one monthly Emergency Evacuation Plan drill between September 23, 2012, and October 26, 2012….Observed multiple dead end wires and improper wire splices throughout main engine room.”

  The Coast Guard took the unusual step of placing the Disco under port state detention, the maritime equivalent of double secret probation, which raised the Disco immediately into the top 1 percent of safety violators. Coast Guard officials were also inspired to take the even more rare action of making a criminal referral to the Department of Justice, which resulted in Noble Corporation eventually copping a plea to eight separate environmental and maritime felonies. Noble forked over $12.2 million in criminal fines and community service payments, and this was in addition to the $710,000 in civil fines Shell paid for the Disco’s twenty-three separate violations of its Clean Air Act permits. Apparently, the Disco’s actual noxious emissions were considerably north of negligible or nonexistent. Shell chalked up its “excessive hourly nitrous-oxide emissions” to what its president had called “new learnings revealed.” “Following a season of operations,” a Shell spokesman said as the company made out the check for its civil fine, “we now better understand how emissions control equipment actually functions in Arctic conditions.”

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  Shell’s opportunities for new learnings about functioning in Arctic conditions had not been entirely extinguished at the end of that November, thanks to the Kulluk and its dedicated tugboat, the Aiviq. The Aiviq had by then hauled the Kulluk through the Slushee-like Beaufort Sea and back into manageable water near Dutch Harbor. Shell had the option of shoveling the snowdrifts from the Kulluk’s deck and leaving the drillship parked safely at Dutch Harbor (its anchor system was far superior to the Disco’s, and it had a customized rounded berth) until the new season opened up next summer. But the company was anxious to get the Kulluk back to Seattle for a couple reasons. First, the Arctic battering had left the ship in need of the expert ministrations of Vigor Marine. Second, Shell executives were hoping to outrun an oil-facilities tax levy from the State of Alaska. Shell was under the impression that if the Kulluk remained in the state past January 1, it would owe about $6 million to Alaska. “It’s fair to say the current tax structure related to vessels of this type influenced the timing of our departure,” a Shell spokesman wrote in an email to a local reporter in Dutch Harbor.

  And so, the decision was made in early December to execute the two-thousand-mile trip back to Washington State before the Kulluk would turn around and come back up to try Alaska again next season. The trip would become one of the most documented sea voyages of the twenty-first century. The Department of the Interior, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the National Transportation Safety Board all investigated and weighed in with reports. The combined page count of the government reports and their investigation notebooks neared, if not exceeded, that of Moby-Dick. McKenzie Funk wrote a riveting ninety-two-hundred-word piece for The New York Times Magazine that detailed, among lots of other things, the weight of the eighteen crew members chosen to ride the Kulluk back to Seattle. (The smallest was about 235; many tipped the scales at over 300.) Observant marine and offshore drilling professionals called the voyage “a shambolic misadventure” and a “clown circus.” Many, many new learnings were revealed.

  There were things that should have given Shell pause about embarking on the towing operation in the first place. Shell’s preferred marine-warranty survey company would not sign off on the tow plan. Too risky in an Arctic winter. So in order to keep its insurance in force, Shell had to scramble to get a different company to sign off, which the new company did, after a hasty and incomplete inspection of the Aiviq, the Kulluk, and the (always excellent) paperwork. The surveyor assigned to the inspection “did not conduct an independent assessment concerning the overall adequacy of the towing equipment,” the Coast Guard report noted. “He stated that conducting this type of analysis was not in his scope of work as a warranty surveyor.” Add to this that Shell did not send its tow plan to a single federal or state agency for review. Add to this that Shell’s experienced operations manager chose that moment to go on holiday. His designated replacement, who gave final approval to the tow plan, was a new employee who, according to the Coast Guard, “had never reviewed a tow plan within Shell, and had not participated in any of the planning meetings…had not received training in the tow planning or review process, and had not received any specific instructions, de-brief or guidance from his supervisor on this process.” Other than that, he was the perfect man for the job.

  Consider a few other things that were ill-considered by the various decision makers. The conical design of the Kulluk complicated any towing operation. The 266-foot-high, twenty-eight-thousand-ton unit was likely to rock and spin in heavy seas, causing huge swings in the amount of tension on the tow chains. It was “like towing a large saucer for a tea cup,” said a tugboat master who had actually tugged the Kulluk. “Like a buoy the size of a football field,” said one coastguardsman. Then, too, there was the fact that the Aiviq would have to execute the entire two-thousand-mile tow by its lonesome, without a backup tug on hand. In its defense, the Aiviq was one of the most powerful ice-class tugboats on the water, and its crew had great confidence. “Do you have any major engineering issues?” the marine-warranty surveyor asked its chief engineer in their one brief meeting, on the day the towing operation embarked. �
�No,” the Aiviq’s chief engineer answered. Okay, good enough!

  But the truth was, the Aiviq was a little worse for wear on that day of departure, December 21, 2012. The tug’s fuel injectors had been on the fritz for nearly four months, which caused occasional losses of propulsion. One of its thrusters was unusable; a fuel tank cracked; one of its generators occasionally failed, which diminished the tug’s electrical output. The Aiviq had first suffered serious damage when it took on water while towing the Kulluk north in heavy seas at the end of August. Ten weeks after that, on the return trip from the Beaufort Sea to Dutch Harbor, one of its engines failed mid-tow, and the electrical system had gone completely dark. None of the Aiviq’s mechanical deficiencies was reported to the Coast Guard, even though notification was expressly required under the Code of Federal Regulations.

  Still, the officers on the bridge of the Aiviq remained confident and confidence inspiring as they pulled the Kulluk out to sea on December 21. The seamen had proper licensing and training and, as far as the Coast Guard was concerned, “could have towed anything, anywhere in the world.” But this was their first duty in Arctic waters in winter, and there was something of a learning curve. They had been warned to expect gales approaching fifty knots and dangerous, thirty-five-foot-high swells. “The Aleutian Low looms over the North Pacific as a climatic warning to mariners navigating the Alaskan waters,” read the annual guidebook published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “This semi-permanent feature is made up of the day-to-day storms that traverse these seas in a seemingly endless procession. With these storms come the rain, sleet, snow, the howling winds, and the mountainous seas that make the northern Gulf of Alaska and the southern Bering Sea among the most treacherous winter waters in the Northern Hemisphere.”