A Sea in Flames

by Carl Safina

  BP’s report says that they’d gained 1,000 barrels of liquid volume before anyone tried to activate the blowout preventer. The report adds, “Actions taken prior to the explosion suggest the rig crew was not sufficiently prepared to manage an escalating well control situation.”

  The gas quickly overwhelms the separator’s capacity and mud begins flowing onto the rig floor.

  The blowout preventer is attached to the wellhead at the seafloor and to the riser pipe that connects to the rig at the surface. Its many components are often used during routine operations like pressure testing, sealing around drill pipe, and pressure control in the well. It doesn’t just sit there unless there’s an emergency. And it is tested routinely. It was tested just a few days before the explosion.

  The blowout preventer is controlled from the rig through two cables connected to two redundant control “pods”—blue and yellow—and with a hydraulic line. Remotely operated vehicles can also control the blowout preventer by directly operating the pods.

  The BP investigation team will conclude that, if the blowout preventer had been closed at any time prior to 9:38 P.M., the flow of hydrocarbons to the riser and up to the surface would have been reduced or eliminated.

  They missed it by four minutes.

  Remember, by pumping the extra 200 barrels of spacer fluid just to save disposal costs, they’d wasted fifteen minutes.

  At 9:42, the crew did try to activate the blowout preventer, tightening a gasket against the drill pipe. At first it did not seal. It does appear that the blowout preventer was sealed around the drill pipe at approximately 9:47. The part of the blowout preventer that they closed simply tightened a rubber gasket against the pipe, a chokehold. What they needed was to close the blind shear rams and sever the pipe—to chop its head off and seal the well.

  It was too little. And then, it was too late.

  Randy Ezell, a Transocean senior tool pusher, was asleep when his room phone rang. He recalled,

  Well, I hit my little alarm clock light and, according to that alarm clock, it was ten minutes till 10:00. And the person at the other end of the line there was the assistant driller, Steve Curtis. Steve opened up by saying, “We have a situation.” He said, “The well is blown out.” He said, “We have mud going to the crown.” And I said, “Well—.” I was just horrified. I said, “Do y’all have it shut in?” He said, “Jason is shutting it in now.” And he said, “Randy, we need your help.” And I’ll never forget that.

  And I said, “Steve, I’ll be—I’ll be right there.”

  So I put my coveralls on; they were hanging on the hook. I put my socks on. My boots and my hard that were right across that hall in the tool pusher’s office. So I opened my door and I remember a couple of people standing in the hallway, but I kind of had tunnel vision. I looked straight ahead and I don’t even remember who those people were.

  I made it to the doorway of the tool pusher’s office when a tremendous explosion occurred. It blew me probably twenty feet against a bulkhead, against the wall in that office. And I remember then that the lights went out, power went out. I could hear everything deathly calm. My next recollection was that I had a lot of debris on top of me. I tried two different times to get up, but whatever it was it was a substantial weight. The third time something like adrenaline had kicked in and I told myself, “Either you get up or you’re going to lay here and die.” My right leg was hung on something; I don’t know what. But I pulled it as hard as I could and it came free. I attempted to stand up. That was the wrong thing to do ’cause I immediately stuck my head into smoke. And with the training that we’ve all had on the rig I knew to stay low. So I dropped back down. I got on my hands and knees and for a few moments I was totally disoriented on which way the doorway was. And I remember just sitting there and just trying to think, “Which way is it?”

  Now there was mud shooting out the top of the rig and the loud and continuous whoosh of surging gas. More explosions followed, igniting a high-intensity hydrocarbon fire fueled by incoming gas and oil.

  Up until the explosions, the crew had two different ways to activate the shear rams that could cut the pipe and seal the well. They did not activate them. Then the explosions damaged the control cables and hydraulic line to the blowout preventer, costing the rig crew the ability to control the blowout preventer.

  The loss of connections should have triggered the blowout preventer’s automatic emergency mode—and closed the blind shear rams. However, the yellow pod had a defective solenoid and the blue pod’s batteries were weak, so the blind shear rams did not activate.

  Sensors for fire, gas, and toxic fumes were working; any irregularities appeared on a screen. But their audio alarms were inhibited. This is understandable, but many rigs don’t allow it. The Deepwater Horizon had hundreds of individual fire and gas alarms. Having the general alarm go off for local minor problems would cost workers sleep, a safety concern. And people would start ignoring alarms—also a safety concern. The idea was: have a person monitoring the computer, and let them control the general audio alarm. Sound it only when conditions require.

  But chief electrician Mike Williams has asserted that inhibiting alarms also prevents the computer from activating emergency shutdown of air vents and power. Such a shutdown could have prevented the rig’s diesel generator engines from inhaling the gas and surging wildly.

  The over-revving engines send surges of electricity that make lights and computer monitors begin exploding. The engines spark, igniting the gas, triggering explosions.

  Transocean’s chief mechanic, Doug Brown, knew there was a manual engine shutdown system. He also understood that he was not authorized to activate it. He later said, “If I would have shut down those engines, it could have stopped as an ignition source.”

  Mike Williams hears loud hissing. Hears the engines revving. Sees his light bulbs getting “brighter and brighter and brighter,” knows “something bad is getting ready to happen,” hears “this awful whoosh.”

  He reaches for a door that’s three inches thick, steel, fire-rated, supported by six stainless steel hinges. An explosion blows the door from those hinges, throwing him across the shop. When he comes around, he’s up against a wall with the door on top of him. He thinks, “This is it. I’m gonna die right here.”

  When he crawls across the floor to the next door, it too explodes, taking him thirty-five feet backward, smacking him up against another wall. He gets angry at the doors; he feels “mad that these fire doors that are supposed to protect me are hurting me.” He crawls through an opening. He thinks, “I’ve accomplished what I set out to accomplish. I made it outside. I may die out here, but I can breathe.”

  Williams can’t see. Something’s pouring into his eyes. “I didn’t know if it was blood. I didn’t know if it was brains. I didn’t know if it was flesh. I just knew I was in trouble.”

  There’s a gash in his forehead. He’s on one of the rig’s lifeboat decks. He’s got two functioning lifeboats, right there. But he thinks, “I can’t board them. I have responsibilities.”

  He hears alarms, radio chatter, “Mayday! Mayday!” Calls of lost power. Calls of fire. Calls of man overboard. People jumping from the rig.

  Transocean’s subsea supervisor Chris Pleasant wants the rig’s master, Captain Curt Kuchta, to activate the emergency disconnect system, or EDS. With the blowout preventer unresponsive, the last-ditch response is: disconnect the rig from the pipe that is delivering the gas that’s feeding the fire. Kuchta replies, “Calm down! We’re not EDSing.” Jimmy Harrell, Transocean’s man in charge of all drilling operations, has just had his quarters destroyed in explosions while he was in the shower; he now comes running, partially clothed, partially blinded by fine insulation debris. He tells Chris Pleasant to activate the emergency disconnect system. Pleasant tries it. All attempts to disconnect the pipe fail.

  Having survived the explosions and freed himself from entrapment in debris, Randy Ezell is trying to get his bearings from where he sits, stun
ned. “Then I felt something and it felt like air,” he later recalled. He says to himself, “Well, that’s got to be the hallway. So, that’s the direction I need to go. That leads out.” Crawling over debris, he makes it to the doorway. But then he realizes, “What I thought was air was actually methane and I could feel, like, droplets; it was moist on the side of my face. So he continues crawling down the dark hallway. Suddenly he puts his hand on a body. He hears a groan. In the dark, Ezell can’t see who it is. (It’s Wyman Wheeler.) Next, he sees a wavering beam of light. Someone is coming down the hallway, their light going up and down as they duck debris hanging from the ceiling and make their way around jutting walls and over a buckled floor. As the approaching person rounds the corner, Ezell recognizes Stan Carden. While they are pulling debris off of Wyman Wheeler, another flashlight arrives, wielded by Chad Murray. Ezell and Carden ask Murray to find a stretcher while they continue removing debris from Wheeler. Thinking it might be quicker to try to help Wheeler walk out, Ezell helps him to his feet, but, after just a couple of steps with his arm around Ezell’s shoulder Wheeler, overcome by pain, says, “Set me down. Set me down.” So Ezell lets him back down. Wheeler says, “Y’all go on. Save yourself.” To which Ezell replies, “No, we’re not going to leave you.”

  Suddenly Ezell hears another voice saying, “God help me. Somebody please help me.” He looks. Where their maintenance office had been, all he sees is a pile of wreckage over a pair of feet. Removing that debris requires the efforts of all three: Ezell, Carden, and Murray. When they get the debris off, they realize it’s Buddy Trahan, one of Transocean’s visiting dignitaries. Trahan’s injuries are worse than Wheeler’s, so he gets the first stretcher.

  Stan Carden and Chad Murray convey Trahan all the way to the lifeboat station. Ezell stays back. “I stayed right there with Wyman Wheeler because I told him I wasn’t going to leave him, and I didn’t,” he recalled later. “And it seemed like an eternity, but it was only a couple of minutes before they came back with the second stretcher.”

  Carrying Wheeler outside of the living quarters, Ezell notices that the main lifeboats are gone. Then he notices a few people starting to deploy a raft. The men carrying Wheeler continue down the walkway to the raft and set the stretcher down. “And after several minutes,” Ezell will recall, “we had everything deployed and got in the life raft. But the main thing is, Wyman was there, you know—he didn’t get left behind.”

  But unbeknownst to those in the boats, others are left behind.

  Mike Williams, who minutes earlier could have had both now-departed lifeboats to himself, watches eight other survivors drop an inflatable raft from a crane.

  In weekly lifeboat drills they’d practiced accounting for everyone. There is no longer such a thing as “everyone.”

  Now left watching are Williams, another man, and twenty-three-year-old Andrea Fleytas. Williams experiences several more blasts that he’ll later describe as “Take-your-breath-away explosions. Shake-your-body-to-the-core explosions. Take-your-vision-away explosions.”

  Fire spreads from the derrick to the deck itself.

  Williams sees in Andrea’s eyes that she seems resigned to death. He says, “It’s okay to be scared. I’m scared, too.” She says, “What are we gonna do?” Williams outlines the choice: Burn up or jump down.

  From where they are, it’s ten stories to a black ocean. Bloodied, backlit by raging fire, Williams takes three steps and jumps feet-first. “And I fell for what seemed like forever,” he later recalled. He thinks of his wife, their little girl. “A lotta things go through your mind.”

  Love conquers all. But only sometimes.

  He crashes into the sea and the momentum takes him way, way beneath the surface. He pops up thinking, “Okay, I’ve made it.” But he feels like he’s burning all over. He’s thinking, “Am I on fire?” He just doesn’t know.

  He realizes he’s floating in oil and grease and diesel fuel. The smell and the feel of it. He sees that the oil that has become the sea’s surface beneath the rig is already on fire.

  Says to himself, “What have you done? You were dry, and you weren’t covered in oil up there; now you’ve jumped and you’ve landed in oil. The fire’s gonna come across the water, and you’re gonna burn up.” He thinks, “Swim harder!” Stroke, kick, stroke, kick, stroke, kick, stroke, kick. As hard as he can until he realizes: he feels no more pain. He thinks, “Well, I must have burned up, ’cause I don’t feel anything, I don’t hear anything, I don’t smell anything. I must be dead.”

  He hears a faint voice calling, and next thing, a hand grabs his lifejacket and flips him over into a boat. Then the boat finds one more survivor. Andrea.

  A ship that had been tending the rig, the Bankston, retrieves those in lifeboats. Not aboard the Bankston: Jason Anderson, of Midfield, Texas, thirty-five, father of two, tool pusher, the supervisor on the floor at the time of the accident who’d worried aloud to his wife and dad about safety on the rig and who’d spoken of the “bladder effect” causing the pressure discrepancies they were seeing; Aaron Dale Burkeen, thirty-seven, of Philadelphia, Mississippi, father of a fourteen-year-old daughter, Aryn, and a six-year-old son, Timothy; Donald Clark, forty-nine, an oil industry veteran married to Sheila, living in Newellton, Louisiana; Steven Ray Curtis, thirty-nine, the driller who’d named this the “well from hell”; Roy Wyatt Kemp, twenty-seven years old, who lived in Jonesville, Louisiana, with his wife, Courtney; Karl Kleppinger Jr., thirty-eight, of Natchez, Mississippi, Army veteran of Operation Desert Storm, leaving behind a wife and son; Keith Blair Manuel, fifty-six, father of three daughters, avid supporter of Louisiana State University sports teams, and engaged to be married to his longtime love, Melinda; Dewey Revette, forty-eight, of State Line, Mississippi, having been with Transocean for twenty-nine years, and leaving a wife and two daughters; Shane Roshto, just twenty-two, of Liberty, Mississippi, husband to Natalie and already father to three-year-old son Blaine Michael; Adam Weise, twenty-four, of Yorktown, Texas, a former high school football star who loved the outdoors; Gordon Jones, twenty-eight, of Baton Rouge. A few days after Gordon died, his widow, Michelle, gave birth to their second son.

  Mike Williams says, “All the things that they told us could never happen, happened.”

  For two days, a fireball. So hot it appears to be melting some of the rig. Which finally sinks.

  Accusations: BP’s own report will later say, “A complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human judgments, engineering design, operational implementation and team interfaces came together to allow the initiation and escalation of the accident. Multiple companies, work teams and circumstances were involved.” BP’s recap: The cements failed to prevent the oil and gas from entering the well. Staff of both Transocean and BP incorrectly interpreted the negative pressure test by tragically explaining away the pressure they were seeing on one gauge. This led them to release the downward fluid pressure on the well by replacing the heavier fluid with seawater in a well that they falsely believed—because the kill line was clogged with the “snotty” spacer—was not exerting upward pressure. It was. The pressure in the drill pipe, which they chose to ignore, was telling them that the cement had failed. They didn’t notice other warning signs because they bypassed gauges and routed displacement fluid and their irregularly concocted spacer overboard. But as gas reached the rig, when the crew might have prevented disaster, they routed the flow to a mud-gas separator whose capacity was soon overwhelmed. Gas flowing directly onto the rig got sucked into generators, causing them to surge and spark, igniting a series of explosions. Fire and gas emergency systems that should have prevented those explosions failed. The blowout preventer should have automatically sealed the well but it, too, failed.

  Unlike a tanker running aground and spilling oil—a simple cause-and-effect accident—this is a chain disaster. Each of the distinct failures of equipment and judgment, combined, was required to cause the event. And if any single component had not failed, or had been handled dif
ferently, this blowout never would have happened. And we’re not done yet, because a failure of preparedness to deal with a deepwater blowout will cost many pounds of cure over the coming months.

  APRIL

  The Coast Guard’s Gulf region chief, Rear Admiral Mary Landry, who, we are told, is “leading the government’s response,” says, “You’re getting ahead of yourself a little when you try to speculate and say this is catastrophic. It’s premature to say this is catastrophic.”

  Though eleven men died and the rig sank.

  She’s just much too cool. Right off the bat, her statements set my confidence in the Coast Guard on a wobble. I realize immediately that it’s going to be one of those events where, from all sides, the truth gets pinballed back and forth among bumpers of spin and flippers of distortion. And other than herself, who’s Landry kidding? The immediate impressions: (1) she’s still wait-and-seeing; and (2) because of No. 1, the official response is slow.

  President Barack Obama says the federal response to the disaster is “being treated as the number one priority.” He may think so, but it doesn’t feel that way. It seems as though no one is prepared for oil shooting from a mile-deep pipe.

  Oddly, just one day after the rig sinks, one major press agency is calling the Exxon Valdez spill “vastly bigger than the current one in the U.S. Gulf.” That may be because right after the rig sank, Rear Admiral Landry said that no oil appeared to be leaking from the wellhead and nor was there, at the surface, “any sign of a major spill.” Landry said at the outset that most of the oil was burning off with the fireball, leaving only a moderate rainbow sheen on the water.

  The impression given: fuel oil had spilled from the rig, but from the well no oil was leaking. She said, “Both the industry and the Coast Guard have technical experts actively at work. So there’s a whole technical team here to ensure we keep the conditions stable.”