Rust: The Longest War

by Jonathan Waldman

  As such, a pig in a pipeline is like a cannonball in a giant cannon, and more than a few roughnecks have been killed—impaled or decapitated—by looking down the barrel. Trying to dislodge a forty-five-pound cleaning pig that had gotten stuck in the trap of a twelve-inch-wide pipeline, a New Mexico man narrowly skirted death. He’d just opened the trap door when the pig, with 250 pounds per square inch behind it, struck him at ninety miles per hour. His skull and neck were fractured, his elbow dislocated, and his hand crushed. Examining the pig that came to rest three hundred feet away, investigators later found a two-inch piece of the man’s arm bone lodged inside it. He survived.

  That’s why, at Alyeska, the crews were so slow and deliberate when loading and launching the pig. Once it was in the pipeline, though, fingers were crossed, because a lot could happen to the pig, as Alyeska has learned by experience.

  On the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, pigs that avoided malfunction and escaped ingestion have gotten stuck at check valves and chomped by ball valves. In 1978 a pig got crushed by a valve at Pump 10 and came out in pieces in Valdez. The following year, a pig got stuck at a valve at mile 158 and wasn’t removed for a month. A pig stuck at mile 15 on a Friday in 1984 made controllers so mad that they refused to hear about it—or deal with it—until after the weekend. Because of the refinery offtake in Valdez, pigs have come in with eight-inch bites taken out of them, as if attacked by sharks. Transmitters have been sucked off. In 2000 a pig passing through a valve at mile 467 took the valve’s seat ring with it to mile 524, and a smart pig behind it pushed the ring from there to Valdez. In 2006 a scraper pig came apart in the line at Pump Station 7. Half of it was ingested at a relief valve there, and the other half continued down the line—becoming “the phantom pig.” Since 1984, Alyeska has put a transmitter on every pig inserted in the line and done everything it can to keep every one from getting stuck.

  MILE 144

  Of all the pump stations along TAPS, Pump 4, nestled in a valley on the northern flank of the Brooks Range, is the most dramatic. At 3,200 feet, it’s the highest pump station on the line, and more than any other, it felt like a ski lodge. The road in was frozen and washboarded and covered in drifts. Ridges on a peak to the northeast hinted of the Grand Jorasses. Pump 4 also distinguishes itself by two appurtenances in its manifold building. The station has a pig receiver and a pig launcher—making Pump 4, at least from a pig’s point of view, the only true rest stop on the line. Between Prudhoe Bay and Valdez, only here would the pig take a break. This break would allow Neogi to confirm that the tool was performing as planned. On the morning of March 18, the pig made its way into Pump Station 4.

  Neogi (who’d flown back to the North Slope) and his team were in the long, narrow building. It was dark, with little working space between the receiver and the launcher. From Baker Hughes, there was Devin Gibbs, who seemed to live in a thick blue jacket. He had run pigs in Mexico, Colombia, and Algeria. In a deep voice, he said, “That’s the one country I want to go to: Australia. Check that one off the list.” He recalled tracking a pig in a Korean gas line that ran under fields of rice paddies. The crickets sounded exactly like the equipment. “We had no idea where that pig was,” he said. He was determined to succeed in tracking this pig across the North Slope, into Pump 4, and across the rest of Alaska. When the pig arrived at nine forty-five, Gibbs tracked it past the last valve and confirmed that it was squarely positioned in the receiver.

  As with the launch at Pump 1, a dozen men in Tyvek suits and booties participated in the pig’s receipt. They walked carefully on a floor lined with two layers of plastic and a layer of white oil-absorbent pads. They were prepared for the pig to emerge filthy. Among the crew was one new man: Baker Hughes’s data analyst, a confident thirty-three-year-old named Matt Coghlan. He was there to confirm that the pig’s sensors had worked and gathered the data.

  Over a couple of hours, the Pump 4 techs closed the valves behind the pig, drained the trap, and opened the yoke on the end of the pipe. Then, slowly, they pulled out the tray with a winch. The pig lay on the tray. When Gibbs first saw it, he let out a big sigh. It was oily, but it was barely covered in wax, and he was greatly surprised and relieved. The pig was so clean that the other contractors called off their plan to steam wash it. Instead, rags and cans of brake cleaner were sufficient. Neogi called the pig’s cleanliness a great success, and his boss agreed. He said it was cleaner than any pig run he’d ever been on.

  The pig was also in fine shape. The cups, brushes, and sensor heads were no worse for wear. All appendages were present. In the tool’s rolling ring, Gibbs discovered a three-quarter-inch ding and figured that the damage was sustained as the pig clambered into the trap. “Not a concern,” he said. “We’re still good.” It was so good, he said, that he could have turned around and put the pig right back in the line.

  Together, the Baker Hughes guys and the crane guys lifted up the pig, moved it, and placed it on a tray. The Pump 4 technicians then began closing the trap. Neogi didn’t have an assigned duty per se. Within minutes, after a colleague unscrewed a small cap in the rear of the pig—pretty much the pig’s rear end—Coghlan plugged in a USB cable. He connected the cable to his laptop and began checking the data. First he checked the pig’s event file, to make sure the tool’s systems had suffered no gross injuries. The file was small; nothing had gone wrong. It then took four hours to download the data.

  Neogi spent many of those hours pacing. Wasson tried to keep him occupied and out of the way. That was his new logistical challenge. Once he got the data, Coghlan went nowhere without his laptop, bringing it to the cafeteria when he needed fuel, and Neogi trailed him like a junkie. Over Coghlan’s shoulder Neogi peeked, bugging him, asking about the data. Just let me know anything, anything at all, Neogi said. He asked Coghlan to check in with him hourly.

  As long as his laptop purred, Coghlan stayed awake. He stayed up all night, until, after breakfast the next morning, he had preliminary good news for Neogi: between Pump 1 and Pump 4, the pig had retrieved 100 percent data. Analyzing it would take months, but the data were there.

  Relieved, Neogi and his team got some rest. Neogi flew home to Anchorage to spend time with his family. Wasson flew home too and went fishing. Meanwhile, the Baker Hughes team remained at Pump 4, sprucing up the pig. The section it had just completed was merely the warm-up. The next 656-mile segment would be twenty-five times the length of a normal run, two times longer than anything Gibbs had ever worked on, and full of unique hydraulic challenges. As Neogi put it, it would be the mother of all smart pig runs.

  The first time I met Neogi, I asked him if there was anything he’d ever prepared for so extensively as this pig run. He answered quickly: his fish tank. It took a month of listening to him tell stories, and actually seeing the tank, to learn exactly what he meant.

  Neogi fell in love with fish in Lugazi, Uganda. On the northern shore of Lake Victoria, he caught his first and kept them in the bathtub. He was a little kid—a Muindi—and he was in Uganda because his father’s work as a civil engineer had taken his family there. From Calcutta, the family had already uprooted to Bangladesh and then to Mombasa and Nairobi. Neogi grew accustomed to adapting.

  In Lugazi, Neogi’s mother insisted on sending Neogi to the best school in Uganda. That it was an all-girls school didn’t matter. For three years, before his family moved on to Dubai, he remained, becoming a serious and thoughtful kid. By fifth grade, he’d learned that he could make friends through sports. So he got good at sports. He ran and played soccer and badminton, and has stuck with these to this day.

  By the time his family relocated to Tanzania and Ethiopia, Neogi knew Bengali and Hindi, and had learned Luganda, Urdu, and English. In addition, he learned Swahili, or tried to. Throughout the variations in his education, only science and math remained constant.

  His first year at University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where a relative taught, went swimmingly until his grades arrived. They were Cs and Ds. Because he was nearly acing tests, he
hadn’t bothered doing homework. A school counselor explained that in America, homework wasn’t just practice but required. Then, on account of his low GPA, his scholarships were revoked. Because he couldn’t afford any other way to get around, Neogi resorted to a bicycle. Six months into his biking project, someone stole his seat. He kept riding, seatless. When it was 40 below, it kept him warm. He rode through four Fairbanks winters.

  He barely had food money. On the invitation of a friend, he attended a thesis presentation on silicon semiconductors where there was free pizza. He realized thesis presentations always began with food, so he started hunting for theses. On bulletin boards, he found announcements for presentations on engineering, biology, biochemistry, geophysics. He went, and ate, and always listened. Over four years—through college and into graduate school—Neogi attended 150 thesis presentations, more than any faculty member. Sometimes he was the only attendee. He’d have chips and salsa, some carrots, and sit there, learning.

  He went through an aeronautics phase, a jet propulsion phase, and eliminated medicine from contention. He double majored in chemistry and mechanical engineering. He stayed for graduate degrees in mechanical and environmental engineering. Through the engineering department, he got a job doing research on fuel cells. Through the same department, he met the woman he would marry. Neogi had been teaching an air pollution class and saw her across the hall, smiling. Months later, he bumped into Bonnie at a party. She didn’t seem interested. After midnight, he asked for a ride home; on the way there, he offered to repay her by buying her ice cream. They went to the only place in town that was open twenty-four hours, a Denny’s—the northernmost in the world—and stayed until five in the morning. On their second date, he made Indian food at his place. She noticed Neogi’s itty-bitty 1.5-gallon fish tank, containing guppies, and thought, “Okay, that’s normal.”

  By the time they got married, eight months later, he’d upgraded to a 55-gallon tank, and then a 180-gallon tank. For their honeymoon, they went to Las Vegas and stayed at the Mirage. Neogi’s wife picked the hotel because it had a 20,000-gallon aquarium in the lobby. Fifty feet long and eight feet wide, it held a thousand fish. Neogi loved it. He didn’t gamble. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke. Every evening, for an hour, he sat in front of the aquarium and stared at the fish: snappers, sharks, Australian harlequin tuskfish, a queen angelfish. The sparkling water soothed him. Twice he asked the front desk if he could see the filtration system, but was rebuffed.

  Like most engineers and owners of spinning minds, Neogi needs to be busy and in control, and he struggles to relax. Water is all that releases him. Snow doesn’t do it; he’s not even a little skier. Nor does hunting. Fishing certainly doesn’t. (He won’t put a hook on the end of a line, but he will use a dip net.) He didn’t drink at the Mirage because he’s never drank. He doesn’t allow himself to partake in anything he could become compulsive about: coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, fast cars. He’d never gotten a speeding ticket, but once, while talking about pigs, he got going fast enough for a cop to flash his lights at us. He admits that he’s terrible at finding balance, and zooms in so far to most pursuits, like photography, that he gets lost. His only exception is fish. When it comes to fish, he has indulged.

  Returning to Fairbanks, Neogi upgraded to a 240-gallon tank, a 270-gallon tank. A 600-gallon tank, and a 1,000-gallon tank, weren’t far off. Neogi said watching fish is meditative; that it fights winter depression. Neogi loses himself in the water. When he heard that I had free time in Alaska, he suggested I make my way to Seward, home of the Alaska Sea-Life Center, curator of three 100,000-plus-gallon aquariums, the biggest in the state. He knew the place well. But it’s not just the fish or the water that he loves. It’s managing the system. Keeping fish demands the range of his skills. He couldn’t have picked more technically challenging pets.

  While pursuing his graduate studies, Neogi received an invitation from Schlumberger, the oil services company, in Texas. South he went to check it out. North he returned, horrified of Houston. After a youth defined by relocations, he yearned to stay in Fairbanks. He thought about becoming a professor. He thought about work up on the Slope: two weeks on, two weeks off. In 2000 his advisor arranged an interview with Alyeska. He was hired as an engineer in Alyeska’s integrity management group. He’d never thought about corrosion before.

  He was supposed to start in Fairbanks on a springtime Monday. The Friday before, his boss-to-be called and told him he’d need to get up at five in the morning and drive to Valdez because a pig was coming in. It was an ultrasonic pig, made by NKK, the Japanese company that had milled the pipe comprising the pipeline. In Valdez, the Japanese crew bowed and called him “Bhaskarson.” The pig came in covered in wax, having failed to collect sufficient data. That’s how he started: with a bad pig run.

  During his first years as an engineer and engineering coordinator and engineering advisor—before he began calling the pipeline his “baby,” before he began spending more time worrying about it than about his wife and kids, before the pipeline consumed him—Neogi had enough stamina to play competitive badminton. He’d first played as a six-year-old in Bangladesh and had played on Uganda’s national team. He played six days a week, sometimes twice a day, and competed in Miami, Boston, Chicago, San Diego. He taught his wife to play, and competed with her, the two of them making it to the semifinals of a 2005 tournament. He befriended Piotr Mazur, the Polish pro, and hosted him at his house. Mazur stayed for three years, and, competing as a men’s doubles team, Mazur-Neogi briefly became the country’s number three ranked team.

  When major incidents happened on the pipeline, Neogi usually had a racket in his hand. On October 4, 2001, when Daniel Carson Lewis punctured the pipeline with a high-powered rifle, Neogi was playing badminton at the University of Alaska’s Patty Center. His boss called, and Neogi ran over to the bleachers to answer his cell. He put down his racket, went to work, and stayed up all night. A year later, during a big earthquake that threatened the integrity of the pipeline, Neogi was in the Patty Center when his boss called.

  While playing badminton in Hawaii, Neogi met Amar Bose, the Bengali entrepreneur and audio equipment tycoon. They became friends, bound with mutual respect. Neogi admires Bose’s rejection of luxury despite his wealth, and calls Bose the smartest guy he knows. Neogi tried to get Bose into pigging, and Bose tried to get Neogi into sound research. He offered Neogi a salary of $250,000 to be his director of research, which would have put him in line for the presidency of the Bose Corporation. Neogi spent a couple of days thinking about it and then turned down the offer. He wants to get where he goes on his own. He wants to make his own way.

  I once asked Neogi what he would do if he won the lottery. He said he’d quit work and just take classes forever. Evolution. Linguistics. Astrophysics. Bioengineering. Oceanography. Ichthyology.

  After 2006, when BP spilled five thousand barrels of oil at Prudhoe Bay, a lot of people tried to hire Neogi, whose colleagues invariably describe him as “super intelligent” or a “genius.” BP tried to get him as an integrity engineer. Conoco-Phillips tried to hire him, too. He was offered a job as a regulator. Every few months, offers came in—from Houston, Denver, Chicago, Edinburgh, Alaska. Thwarted, inquisitors often asked about other good candidates. Qualified piggers are hard to find.

  Bhaskar and Bonnie had two children. They named their son Brij. Their daughter, born a couple of years later, they named Brianna. The license plate on Bonnie’s van is B TEAM. Since having children, Neogi has stopped playing badminton so competitively and taken up soccer. He started and ran the soccer league in Fairbanks, and played on the team that won the state championship five times. The team is called the Rusty Buffalo.

  The year 2011 was a rough one for Neogi. In January his mother, stricken with breast cancer, fell into a coma and died. Meanwhile, he was resigning himself to a life in Anchorage, where Alyeska wanted him. In March he drove his thousand-gallon fish tank down toward the coastal mudflats. He’d planned the trip tho
roughly and figured his fish had enough oxygen for eight hours, the duration of the trip. Halfway to Anchorage, the differential in his Grand Cherokee went out. Ammonia built up in the tank. Oxygen fell. “I thought I had thought of everything,” he recalled. He didn’t have ammonia-absorbing pads or an oxygen tank. The trip ended up taking twenty hours. Of two dozen fish—some of which he’d had for a decade—only four survived. More than sorrow, he felt pain. For not being prepared, he blamed himself.

  Reflecting on that year, Neogi said, “What makes someone successful is how they react to failures.” He tries to study failures because he sees them as the best way to learn. In sports and school, with friends and fish, even pigs in the pipeline, the lesson has sunk in.

  Buying a house in Anchorage, Neogi had specific and unique criteria. Could the floor handle the weight of an even bigger fish tank? Was there a room he could devote entirely to filtration? Could he install a sound barrier? On the hills of Anchorage’s east side, he found just the place. Upstairs it’s got white carpets, tall windows, a large deck with nice views. Downstairs the basement is more or less divided in two. One half contains a media room, a treadmill, a bed, and a large TV, where Neogi likes to watch the great Lionel Messi play soccer. The other half is devoted to fish.

  Neogi’s current fish tank holds 2,400 gallons. It’s eighteen feet long, six feet wide, and three feet deep. Its acrylic walls are two inches thick. It took a crane to get it in his house. Outside of the aquariums in Seward, it’s probably the largest fish tank in Alaska. In its crystalline water, a dozen tropical fish—yellow, black, and blue, worth thousands—flit about. Four pumps move 20,000 gallons of water an hour through it. To deal with that much water, Neogi built his own filters. These reside in a closet that Neogi has converted to a fish tank control room. It contains its own custom ventilation system but remains hot and humid. Behind a door in suburban Anchorage, 61 degrees north, conditions are downright Tallahasseean. A smaller tank of coral provides additional purification. Because gunk and sludge still clog the lines that lead from the tank to the filters, Neogi pigs them once a month. He uses two-inch foam pigs that his father-in-law sends up from Wyoming.