Don't Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs

by Paul Carter

  We did the HUET course once in Asia. The entire crew was hungover, and two guys swallowed so much pool water they vomited as we rolled over. I watched them disappear in the dim light into a cloud of barf. The guy next to me released his harness before he jettisoned his window and so lost any leverage he had to open it, instead opting to kick me in the head until he couldn’t hold his breath any more. I just sat there upside-down with the spare air in my mouth. I could make out Ambu, who had inflated his life jacket inside the aircraft and was now pinned to the floor. To my right it looked like an impromptu rugby scrum, four guys were attempting to use one small door at the same time, and one of them was trying hard to suck air out of his radio transmitter. My air ran out just as they lifted the whole thing back out of the water, with everyone still inside and Ambu still trying to figure out how to deflate his life jacket. The giant pool was littered with bits of gear and vomit. Jack the HUET senior instructor and safety diver was always great and showed superb patience but that day I think even he was tested. His relief when we finished HUET and moved on to sea survival, where we were joined by two pilots, was short lived. Every time they mentioned ‘dangerous flying situations’ we would yell out ‘Hi-Jack’ and wave at our instructor.

  During my Brunei stint, I went back to Perth for a few months’ time off. I rented a small house near the city, purchased a second-hand car, and put the jungle, the rig, Joe and Asia out of my mind, at least temporarily. Ruby was right where I left her. We talked and effortlessly fell into a fast friendship. But my romantic thoughts were shot down quickly. Ruby was direct: ‘You’re just not my type. Sorry mate.’

  Over the next three years, however, Ruby and I became very tight. She could raise hell partying from Friday night ’til Monday morning, come home and go straight to work looking like the front cover of the latest ‘single white female and proud of it’ magazine, whereas I looked like I needed a heart-lung bypass just to get to the front door.

  Living in the jungle of Brunei puts you in touch with life at its most primitive. It’s not for the sensitive products of Western society. In the jungle, you have to kill something if you want to eat. In the jungle, there is always something trying to eat you. Competition is incredible. There are thousands of links on the food chain. I always thought the jungle would smell like boiled Kings Cross, but it doesn’t. It smells great, and the jungle floor is always clean—because the moment something slows down it’s eaten.

  While I was in Brunei, the oil company was spending money on training and team building, positive activities for guys like me who were isolated for long periods of time. One of these team-building exercises for the upper management was held in the Brunei jungle. A few of us ‘commoners’ also got to be involved. It was fun explaining to upper management that there was no shower or cold beer. They thought it would be a piece of cake, like one of those ‘outward bound’ courses. You should have seen their faces drop when the team leader said, ‘If you boys want to eat, you’re going to have trap and kill something.’

  The upper management guys were not used to the thought of having to kill for food. For most of them, hunting and gathering meant rolling down the car window and grabbing a burger, which they could do without too much trouble.

  The upper management exchanged blank looks until finally one of them took charge. The idiot actually tried to lure a monkey from its branch with a fucking banana. Then he attempted to beat it to death with a rock that he cleverly hid behind his back. Of course, the monkey, with a lifetime of guerilla warfare experience, promptly retaliated by getting his mates to systematically piss all over the manager. Wherever he went, it was open season and for the next hour all you could hear was whooping and chattering from the canopy as the monkeys had a laugh at his expense.

  At the end of the day everyone was shattered. Their beds were simple ‘A’ frame hammocks, slung a couple of feet off the ground. One guy was freaked about having to spend the night in the bush, so he popped a couple of sleeping tablets. His hammock sagged during the night and he woke up to discover that half the jungle had crawled and slithered into his shorts—even his bites had bites. He screamed like a madman, rolling on the ground and fishing madly in his crotch.

  It was great to see these arrogant men who enjoy throwing their weight around in the business world so wonderfully far out of their depth. Standing around in the jungle, bunched up, paranoid and alienated, businessmen look as out of place as a 50-foot pyramid of severed heads in Taylor Square.

  Surprisingly, most of the businessmen really enjoyed the jungle experience. They learned new things about themselves, like how not to beat a monkey to death, and dropped a few pounds in the process. Although, as soon as they got back to Singapore, it was beers and dinner and ‘Thank God that’s over’.

  In the oil business, like most industries, it’s the accountants and lawyers who call the shots, and these people make decisions that ultimately put crews in situations that affect lives in ways they could not possibly comprehend. How these team-building exercises were supposed to help them make better lawyers and accountants I don’t really know. A wise man once said,‘The road to hell is paved with lawyers and accountants.’

  SHELL LAUNCHED A MASSIVE ‘work over’ campaign during my second year in Brunei. A work over is basically an existing producing well that needs a service. The rig simply retrieves the old pipe and runs a new pipe back in the hole (the completion string). Any special items on the string other than the pipe itself are referred to as ‘jewellery’. These can be any number of things, from down-hole motors to mandrels and radioactive sources for survey purposes.

  In the work over, part of the new ‘string’ was a down-hole titanium gauge. This was very expensive jewellery. Our one-of-a-kind-specially-made-don’t-fuck-this-up-titanium gauge was getting picked up off the supply vessel. Because the seas were a bit rough that morning the crane was using the whip line. But the whip line promptly snapped and there went the we-only-had-one-of-those-you’re-in-big-trouble-now gauge into the sea.

  Usually there is a back-up for every conceivable thing that could go wrong. But this jewellery was one-off, and replacing it was not an option. There was simply no time to specially make a replacement gauge, let alone the mammoth cost of airfreighting a 30-foot long hunk of metal halfway around the world. This was going to be a retrieval, using a crane barge and a saturation dive crew.

  Saturation diving is very dangerous; the men who do it are a breed apart, a group within the group on a rig. It’s rare to see them on a rig these days as more oil companies are utilising ROV’s instead. A ROV is a Remote-Operated Vehicle, basically a submersible with mechanical arms that can perform all manner of tasks on sub-sea equipment. The ROV is piloted from the rig via a cable tethered to the sub—it’s like playing a really cool computer game.

  I have met a few ‘sat’ divers and the things they told me raised the hair on the back of my neck. Most of the horror stories involved the hyperbaric chamber, where the crew goes to decompress after a job. The chamber sits on the deck of the rig, a cramped metal tube-like container with only one small round window. Its internal atmospheric pressure matches the depth pressure that the dive crew had been working at. They have to stay in there for days, as the nitrogen in their blood slowly escapes, totally relying on the support staff to bring them food, monitor their progress and take care of their lives.

  One ‘sat’ diver came to grief in the toilet. He was unfamiliar with the old hyperbaric chamber they were using. He went to the toilet, located in the only separate section in the chamber, sealed the hatch and did his business. Flushing the loo in a hyperbaric chamber is a complicated affair, especially when you’re knackered after a long job. You have to operate a number of levers and valves that seal the toilet and then the poo is sucked out into a container. This process happens in a fraction of a second—your poo equalising to atmospheric pressure instantly. This diver got the levers back to front and ended up with his bum creating a seal around the toilet while his insides were sucke
d out in a millisecond, killing him instantly. Another guy decompressed too fast and the expanding airspace between his fillings and his teeth had him rolling about in agony on the deck as his teeth exploded.

  Our ‘sat’ divers arrived within twenty-four hours of the gauge going down but in that time the weather had turned nasty and all operations were shut down until it was safe. The divers had been briefed on the job and knew what could and couldn’t be done in Brunei. Although it’s a Muslim country, expat workers are allowed to bring in one litre of alcohol each. The eight-man ‘sat’ crew followed procedures to a tee, but the weather was against them so they settled into the only decent hotel in the village to wait it out.

  Two days went by with no change. Late at night on the second day the divers got really bored. There was no night life in the village, of course, so they each drank their allocated bottle of scotch and made their own fun. When a ‘sat’ crew is on stand-by, and there’s nowhere to go, no women to chase, or bars to demolish, the make-your-own-fun scenario usually ends badly. These include some of the more amusing near-death by misadventure stories you hear. For our boys Brunei was not a fun-rich environment, with a distinct lack of things or people to fuck with, so they went for the biggest thing in town . . . the mosque.

  Boltcutters easily breached the main gates. Access into the main building, via an open window, was even easier. At the top of the big tower in the middle, they found what they were looking for. Years ago the Koran was belted out from the tower via a megaphone and an open book, but these have been replaced with a time-delay tape deck. The prize sighted, the divers exchanged tapes. They also changed all the padlocks they could find on their way out with the locks from their offshore kit bags. The 5 a.m. call to prayer was not a good one; most of the village was head-down-arse-up as Johnny Cash’s ‘Burnin’ Ring of Fire’ wailed over the rooftops. The religious police got involved, and it took hours for the locals to get in and turn off the tape. The divers were lucky they only got kicked out of the country with ‘Religious Offender’ stamped over their passport photos. We never got our gauge back.

  I went to see my parents in Thailand and had a great time. Mum showed me just about every side of Songkhla from the best local restaurants, hotels and temples, to umbrella factories and the boot camp where they take teenage girls from the kampong and teach them how to shoot a bizarre array of inanimate objects out of their genitals, including bananas, ping-pong balls, even a blowgun. They can open bottles, smoke a cigarette, draw a picture, solve a Rubik’s cube, all with the holiest of holies. It’s a sad place, where innocence is burned alive for a quick profit from a drunk tourist.

  Mum was going to the orphanage on the edge of town twice a week to teach the kids English and she took me into the building where they try to look after the HIV-positive babies. Born into death, they didn’t stand a chance. It shook me like never before and tears ran down my cheeks—we’re useless to them. I walked out ashamed of my ignorance, my easy life, and how lucky I have been.

  I also experienced ‘Songkran’, the Thai water festival. I had no idea it was a special day as I walked to the market. An old woman opened her front door, babbled something at me and hurled a bucket of water at my face. So I walked home, completely bamboozled, changed into dry clothes and re-emerged on the main street only to get hammered with water bombs by a truckload of teenage boys. Home again I learnt about ‘Songkran’—the Thai new year celebration where people throw water at each other as a symbol of purification—and returned to the main street prepared, with John’s large fire extinguisher in my big backpack. Looking like a wannabe ‘Ghostbuster’, I was ready to join the fun.

  One morning I woke to the screams of my mother and ran to the kitchen in my underwear. She had seen a big snake go under the fridge, but she told me not to worry as John had made a ‘snake stick’. This was a two-metre long steel pipe, about an inch in diameter, with a sharpened U-shaped prong welded to the end. With this high-tech device I was somehow supposed to get said snake out from under the fridge and onto the front lawn where it would remain perfectly still while I cut its head off.

  I took the stick from my mother who said she would be upstairs phoning John in case I stuffed up. I stuck the stick under the fridge and poked about towards the back. The two-metre cobra, who was perfectly cool and happy under there, took the stick away from me and chased me out to the front lawn, where I’m sure he hoped I would remain perfectly still so he could cut my head off.

  Then Mum screamed from the upstairs balcony, ‘Oh my God Pauli, there’s another one behind you.’ The cobra’s mate that no-one had noticed was making her way around behind me.

  They had trapped me. With nowhere left to go, I climbed up the ‘Spirit House’ in the centre of the front lawn. About two metres high, the Spirit House is a small model temple that most Thais have in the garden. Every morning, a glass of water and some food and sometimes flowers are placed by the Spirit House as an offering to Buddha. I knocked all that stuff off as I scrambled up. The cobras circled for a bit then began climbing too.

  Thankfully John’s foreman arrived in a truck. He took one look at me, perched on the Spirit House in my undies then casually walked up, picked up both snakes, smiled up at me and put them in a bag, waving as he drove off. I climbed down and spent the rest of the day recovering upstairs with Mum.

  For the next twelve months I fluctuated between the ‘work over campaign’ offshore and the new well getting drilled deep in the jungle. Each offered up its own unique issues, but never got remotely dull or repetitive.

  One hot and humid morning during the monsoon season in Brunei, we got the call to go immediately to the heliport and catch a flight to a land rig deep in the rainforest. We were going out to replace a crew who had been there for way too long. There is supposed to be an industry cut-off point for time spent on remote closed-in locations like that, but I have yet to see that implemented properly. This crew had broken all the records; they had been there for months.

  Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in the jungle will eventually either love it, and not want to leave, or hate it, and end up flipping out. On this occasion the crew consisted of locals who were completely at home in the jungle, so they were fine. The crew chief, on the other hand, was a Texan on his first job in South-East Asia, which is quite an adjustment, let alone the jungle. I was told on leaving the base that he had stopped talking a few days previously, and had spent the last twenty-four hours locked in his cabin.

  The jungle can suffocate your mind. Over time a man can start to slip mentally without realising it. I had to replace the Texan immediately before he degenerated to the point when the medic had to give him a shot, put him in a straightjacket and send him home where he would be told to sit up straight, suck the drool back in and try to get a new job. I was looking forward to getting out there—I always felt completely safe in the jungle, much more so than on a Sydney street—and most of the previous six months I had spent offshore, so the prospect of working in the bush again was exciting.

  The land rig was 150 kilometres north of our base, and the pilot was planning to shut down and stay there for an hour to refuel and get something to eat. That would give me enough time to talk to my disturbed American colleague and get him safely on the chopper for home. My boss’s departing words were, ‘Make it quick, and no fucking about okay?’ And off we went.

  Life is fragile enough without the occasional hint of death that lands in your lap. Enough time had passed since my last hint and I had lapsed back on my laurels, confident in the illusion that I was indestructible. My illusion dissolved just after take-off. It was only supposed to take forty minutes, over the jungle, down a valley, over a small river, and there it was, a hole in the canopy, a green tube illuminated by floodlights, with lots of noise, Diet Coke and cigarettes. I was already there in my mind, telling stupid jokes and catching up with the boys, but no.

  Within ten minutes of take-off our chopper, a twelve-seater Sikorsky, was enveloped in dense lo
w cloud, and it was obvious that there were not going to be any spectacular panoramas that day. So I talked to the crew, or rather screamed at the crew over the noise of the turbine, and tried not to notice the violent turbulence or succumb to my once well-hidden paranoid fantasies that had us all screaming as the rotor blades shattered and we began to make that fall into the abyss. I have always hated old choppers. I’m not fond of most choppers but old bouncy choppers really shit me to tears. They carry too few personnel to attract more than a passing nod when they crash, as they do quite regularly.

  Every time I read Upstream, an oilfield newspaper, there’s an article like this:

  Bumfuck Nowhere: all nine passengers and crew died yesterday when a twelve-seater Sikorsky helicopter operated by Doom Air crashed in a really big ball of flames shortly after take-off from Bumfuck Nowhere regional airport. Witnesses said the helicopter fell for, oh wow, ages before vaporising into the jungle at 1592 miles an hour.

  So I just sat there and went to a happier place in my mind, which progressed into lurid thoughts of naked cheerleaders playing with a giant beach ball . . . Perhaps that had more to do with the way a chopper vibrates. I kept looking out the hole where the window should have been into the murk, when suddenly the aircraft shook and threw us all over the place as it became caught in a massive monsoon storm. These can appear out of nowhere in the jungle. Hot steamy air races across the jungle canopy and collides with cold offshore sea air, and a very big storm ensues. I was getting worried and could see the same look on all the faces around me; we were flying through one of those ‘Dr Frankenstein . . . it’s time’ electrical storms. Lightning cracked down through the rain, vaporising all the moisture around us, the sonic boom making everyone jump in unison.