by Sonia Shah
Excavating holes in the shifting sea-floor under man-made islands is extremely dangerous work, even under the best conditions on the most well-maintained rigs. In 1993, the Centers for Disease Control reported that around the world, the rate of accidental death among oil and gas workers soared above that of all other U.S. industries combined. The rate of injuries to U.S. oil and gas workers (mostly to fingers, hands, and arms) dwarfed that of any other private industry in the United States. Worse, the dangers intensified when the giant pipes and machines that crushed and twisted oil workers delved into the depths of the ocean rather than the land.5
On the night of July 6, 1988, as day-shift workers turned in their beds, something was leaking on the Piper Alpha, Occidental’s hulking platform of 34,000 tons of steel on the North Sea. At ten o’clock that night, there was an explosion. A second explosion followed, engulfing the platform and its sleeping workers in flames and smoke. In a fury, blocks of steel, drill bits, and other equipment flew through the sky and the platform started to tilt, its metal floors reeling at perverse angles. A handful escaped the flames for a 150-foot freefall into the frigid waters below. One hundred and sixty-seven workers perished.6 The platform, rent and torn and on fire, bubbled under the sea, 120 miles off the coast of Scotland. It was the worst accident in the history of offshore oil production, which a damning government inquiry attributed to corporate neglect. Yet, Occidental was never fined for the Piper Alpha disaster. Two workers who died on the platform were later held responsible for the explosions.7
Jake Molloy was on a platform a few hundred miles north when he heard the news. “We found it hard to believe, to really comprehend! To see a platform, the size of Piper, just disappear! You’d never believe that was possible!” he recalls.
Jake Molloy had the physical strength and technical know-how to take on the stormy seas. Molloy grew up in Dundee, Scotland, which “should have really been the oil capital of Scotland, but Aberdeen pinched it from below our feet,” he says.
Molloy is fair with droopy pale blue eyes and a laconic expression. “I worked on this guy’s house . . . he worked for Chevron and he said, ‘You ever thought about offshore work,’ and I said, ‘I’m a plumber, what am I going to do offshore?’ He said, ‘Well, there are maintenance jobs! In fact I think the platform is looking for a plumber, I’ll put your name forward!”
He laughs, rolling his “r’s” in a rapid, sing-song burr. “I went up to the shop on Union Street, and there was a wee girl sitting behind the desk and she says, ‘What size chest are you?’ ‘Sorry?’ I say. ‘You are the plumber, right? What size chest, what size boots? Right, there you are, here are a pair of overalls, some boots, and a hardhat. There’s a taxi waiting downstairs, meet you at the airport.’ ‘Where am I going?’ I asked.”
The twelve-seater airplane Molloy flew on in 1980 was his first plane ride. It took him to a helicopter pad in the far north, “in the middle of nowhere.” He tied his life jacket around his waist and got in, thinking he’d just work on the platforms for half a year and save some money.
Molloy joined a crew of five, for two-week shifts on the platforms, working the cranes and helicopter decks. It was hard work, followed by hard play. “We all went offshore together and went onshore together. We’d have a few beers as soon as we hit the beach. Every six months or so, we’d get a weekend away together,” he remembers happily.
The workers on the North Sea platforms hailed from all over Britain. “We’d take the wives and girlfriends together for a weekend in a different part of the country where one of us lived. There was a guy from Liverpool, from Skye, from way up north. It was like family. This guy from Liverpool would often say, ‘This is the guy I go to bed with six months of the year, and this is my wife!’ You felt as if you were all pulled together and you had somebody you could depend on as it were.”
They quickly bonded. “If somebody was leaving, you’d go and throw a bowl of custard or a cream pie or something like that [at them]. Well, it happened to me once but the silly bugger had forgotten to defrost the cake, so I ended up with a bruise! We used to organize games nights, horse racing. We set up a track in the games room, where there was table tennis and a snooker table and a darts board. Fantastic nights! It would pull everybody together. It wasn’t just one crew, but the drilling crew, and the engineering crew and the catering crews. Everybody was there. Cinemas used to be a great place to go at night,” he says. The camaraderie “was brilliant.”8
The dangers of dilapidated rigs, neglected maintenance, and profit-driven management in the North Sea’s hostile environment soon became real to Molloy. Just a month after the Piper Alpha went down, on New Years Day 1989, Molloy was enjoying a small New Year’s celebration offshore. There had been some problems with a forty-by-ten-foot vessel that cooled oil and gas on the platform.
Some of us were involved, we topped up oils, we checked pressures, and we knew there was a problem with this vessel. The vessel itself could only take about 3 bar of pressure, but outside there was a tube bundle and high pressure gas or oil comes through these tubes outside the vessel. The tubes could take something like 50 bar pressure. And everyone knew there was leak in the tubes because the pressure was building inside the vessel.
But to repair the leak, the whole platform would need to be shut down. That would have meant not fulfilling natural gas contracts in the middle of winter, so instead, production continued as the crews lined up for their New Year’s Day rations. “You get a can of beer and a wee bottle of wine,” Molloy recalled. Because all the workers were queued up, there was no one nearby when the cooling vessel exploded. “There was this massive blast! This vessel was like a Coke can, when you just twist it back and forward until it just tears in half. It was just like that, but this was quarter-inch thick steel plate, just ripped in half.” The modest New Year’s celebration had kept the workers safely inside, away from the explosion. Like Piper Alpha, incompetent workers were fingered to take the blame for the explosions.
Two months later in the ice-encased North Atlantic, a 987-foot single-hulled oil tanker called the Valdez filled up with Alaskan oil. What happened next would bring the problems of poor maintenance in the high-pressure oil industry to world attention.
The risk of catastrophic oil spills had steadily grown as tankers ballooned after Nasser’s seizure of the Suez canal in 1956. Giant tankers, which ferry about a third of the oil Americans consume,9 are “astonishingly” fragile, commented Newsweek magazine.
Relative to their vast size, their hulls are so thin that author Noel Mostert labeled tankers ‘floating balloons.’ . . . Fully loaded, a typical supertanker draws up to one hundred feet of water, and it is not uncommon for one to lumber into port with less than two feet separating its keel from the sea bottom. Stopping a supertanker from cruising speed often takes more than three miles with the engines full in reverse—and while the engines are in reverse, the ship cannot be steered.10
For decades, oil companies resisted buttressing their balloon-like oil tankers to protect the seas from their noxious cargo, even though others transporting cargo by sea did. Since the early 1900s, military and other cargo ships had reinforced their most vulnerable parts with a second layer of steel, in double bottoms and double hulls. This would create a shell of empty space between the two layers, which cost-conscious ship owners would fill with fresh water and fuel so as to free up more space elsewhere for income-generating cargo. For giant oil tankers, the double hull would create a proportionately large gap of useless empty space, far more space than was needed for fresh water or fuel. To avoid it, oil companies assured worried government officials that their “highly sophisticated navigational equipment” onboard rendered the space-stealing double-bottoms superfluous, as shipping historian René De La Pedraja describes.11
With tanker costs running to $6000 a day and thirsty oil consumers to slake, oil companies pressure their tankers’ captains to empty their holds of oil as rapidly as possible. They take the most direct routes possible, sw
erving near fragile coasts and through dangerous straits if necessary.12 In the tropical waters of the south Pacific, thousands of cost-conscious oil tankers navigate their combustible loads between the coral heads of the Great Barrier Reef and the Aussie coast every year, even though most don’t stop at coastal ports.13 Around the frozen ports of Alaska’s Prince William Sound, captains would veer off shipping lanes to bypass the floating ice, sometimes with disastrous results.
The Valdez was the flagship of the Exxon fleet, designed for a single purpose: to haul Alaskan oil to Panama.14 On March 23, 1989, the oil-engorged Valdez hurried southward from Alaska. An iceberg appeared in its path and the rushing tanker veered off the shipping lane to avoid it. This wasn’t anything new. According to the chair of the Alaska Oil Spill Commission, oil companies routinely encouraged their captains to speed towards their ports, and “if there was ice in your path . . . leave the tanker lanes and go around the ice.”15 A device onboard—no doubt one of the many highly sophisticated ones touted by the industry—bleeped a warning signal of danger ahead, but the harried seafarers at the wheel ignored it. The device had malfunctioned before. The giant tanker continued on, silently slicing through the black, ice-chunked waters. Then, in the inky hours just after midnight came a low crushing rumble of metal on rock. The tanker had crashed into a submerged reef.
Over 250,000 barrels of oil rushed out of the hold, in one of the worst oil spills in U.S. history. The oil matted the fur and feathers of Alaska’s seabirds, otters, and seals, and hundreds of thousands of some of the most hardy cold-water creatures froze to death.16 Pictures of the gunk-covered birds horrified television viewers and newspaper readers across the planet.
The Valdez spill put Big Oil and the U.S. government on a collision course. The following year, Congress enacted the Oil Pollution Act, setting strict standards for the training of crews, the engineering of tankers, and the liability of oil companies for the spills their ships commit. Single-hulled tankers such as the Valdez would be banned from U.S. waters after 2015.17 The Valdez itself, along with any other tankers that had spilled over a million gallons of oil, was banned from Alaska’s Prince William Sound forever.18
Still, oil companies couldn’t possibly avoid accidental spills, industry officials thought. “No matter how desirable it is to reach a zero accident goal,” said a Shell exec in 1990, “we will never get there. Even if we operate on the basis that every accident is preventable, accidents will, unfortunately, still happen.”19
As public opprobrium at Exxon’s perceived negligence toward the environment intensified, less high-profile tragedies continued to unfold among the rotting rigs of the North Sea. In March 1992, Molloy was working as a safety rep on a platform in the North Sea. “The wind chill was twenty below. It had been so cold during the night. We came on shift at six in the morning and we couldn’t get the cranes started. The cranes work on diesel, and the diesel had actually frozen,” he says.20
So we spent several hours trying to get the cranes working. Then somebody thought that if the diesel is frozen in the cranes perhaps we should try the lifeboats. The lifeboats run on diesel, too. We found that we couldn’t get the lifeboats started. Not that anybody thought we’d have to evacuate but nonetheless we should be in a state of readiness. So we spent most of the day trying to get the platform warmed up as it were, and bring everything back up.
“But at the time there was major work going on in the field,” says Molloy. “One crew had to be flown to a different rig on what is called a shuttle service. It is a helicopter, flying the guys back and forth from the platforms.”
There was a helicopter coming offshore in late afternoon with a piece of equipment; it had been deemed unsafe to fly people that day, but late in the afternoon there had been a major failure on an installation, a piece of equipment had been stuck on a helicopter and needed to be brought in. So this dinosaur of a supervisor decided to utilize this helicopter to do some shuttling.
Molloy complained that the frozen diesel, sixty-knot winds, snow, sleet, and below-freezing temperatures made the plan unsafe. “We tested the equipment and found that the equipment was indeed frozen. So we spent the next couple hours, believe it or not, this is cutting-edge technology, actually using buckets of hot water, throwing them on the pipeline to try to unfreeze the firefighting systems. Which we managed to do.”
By then, the wind had dropped and Molloy’s arguments had become futile. The helicopter landed on the platform. “It was about six o’clock and we were going off shift again, and the helicopter had come back to take the guys back. I went on deck and I spoke to the pilot and he said to me that he had some reservations about what he was doing but nonetheless felt he was able.” One worker refused to board the helicopter, but was threatened with dismissal and so got on anyway. Molloy and the others on the platform “knocked off shift and had a meal. I went up to the cabin to get showered and changed. It was twenty past seven, I think it was, when word came in, he had gone in the sea, just twenty miles up from us.” Eleven men were killed.
Commentators said that it wasn’t so much that the pilot flew the helicopter into the sea as the sea’s huge monster swells had swallowed the helicopter. The craft had dipped down to get lift, as usual, and was engulfed by the sea.
A year later, a friend of Molloy’s ventured out one night to test the release equipment on one of the lifeboats that hung suspended on the sides of the platform. “Well, for some reason that was never explained . . . the boat free-fell ninety feet and he was inside it. He was killed on impact. The boat went underneath the platform. When the first rescue crew from the standby vessel got to him, he was dead.”
Molloy’s frustration with the poor maintenance of the rigs by unaccountable companies had grown incrementally since Piper Alpha. It was becoming clear that “trying to make companies accountable for their actions and failures is impossible to do,” he says.
Like the coal miners before them, he and other oil workers started to organize sit-ins on the platforms for weeks at a time, forsaking their pay and building a bad reputation among the contractors. Molloy’s wife and young children at home stopped getting paychecks, but he persisted nevertheless.
Meanwhile, Exxon was shelling out over $2 billion to clean up the oil they’d spilled in Alaska,21 along with over $1 billion in damages.22 At the pump, consumers were shunning Exxon’s now-dirtier-seeming gasoline. Young engineers fled from rapidly emptying petroleum engineering departments, and oil companies started to lose a generation of experts. “The Valdez spill,” sniffed one petroleum-engineering professor years later, “that just killed us.”23
In an attempt to turn the tide of public opinion welling against them, the Exxon PR department targeted the friable minds of the young. In 1993, they offered free videos about the company’s stellar cleanup efforts in Alaska to ten thousand science teachers across the land. Maryland teacher Susan Steele showed Exxon’s video, “Scientists and the Alaska Oil Spill: The Wildlife, The Cleanup, The Outlook,” to her seventh-grade class, but even the twelve-year-olds weren’t biting. As Steele rewound the tape, one commented, “Mrs. Steele, we’ve just seen a commercial.”24
With the potential loss of brand loyalty on the line, oil companies had to figure out some way to wash their hands of dirty oil spills. Bystanders in the shipping industry watched as the oil industry started to divorce itself from the shipping of its product. Once, the fleets of the oil companies had been the largest in the world. The Valdez was proudly owned by the Exxon Shipping Company; Shell emblazoned its tankers with the Shell logo. Not anymore. “The oil companies that used to operate their own ships had to insulate themselves from consumer reaction against the damage caused by ships carrying their products,” explains Peter Morris of the International Commission on Shipping, an independent watchdog group. “They now contract it out. It is a ruse to conceal the ownership.”25
The Exxon Shipping Company was axed; on its broken corpse rose a new company that carted Exxon oil: the innocuous-sounding outfit,
SeaRiver Maritime. Long before the beaches off Prince William Sound were de-oiled, the Valdez underwent a $30 million repair job on its still-single hull, re-christened itself the SeaRiver Mediterranean, and set to work hauling oil across the Mediterranean.26
Other oil companies in search of anonymous outside companies to shoulder the risks of carrying vast amounts of oil around pristine coasts and waterways followed Exxon’s example, and turned to the independent tanker industry.
The independent tanker business isn’t an easy one. Tankers are expensive ships to build, with a price tag of at least $125 million each.27 Operating costs, for the most part, are fixed. Registering the ship, insuring it, and other such expenses can’t be avoided.28 Legislation like the 1990 Oil Pollution Act had raised the standards for engineering and maintenance of tankers. Powerful unions and the labor standards they helped enact in North America and Europe had raised the cost of well-trained, experienced Western seafarers.
Tanker owners can coax a couple decades out of their tankers: by 2000, the average oil tanker was at least fourteen years old.29 Most are still single-hulled.30 Besides that, there are only two variable costs to play with: labor and maintenance. Still, even here tanker owners don’t have much wiggle room.
As an influx of new contracts from publicity-fearing oil companies swept in, the pressure for tanker owners to cut corners in order to outbid competitors grew. Escaping the tough labor and safety conditions required by U.S.-and European-flagged ships, Western shipowners flocked to register their ships in Panama, Bahamas, Liberia, and other countries with notoriously lax shipping laws.31