Fire on the Horizon

by Tom Shroder

  There’s a maritime saying that in rough weather, a sailor needs one hand for himself, and one for the ship. So when any Schuyler cadet got in over his head in a crowded Lisbon bar, talking to the wrong woman within earshot of the wrong man, he could yell “one hand!” The streets, perpetually filled with shipmates, would empty at the call, and a dozen guys from the Bronx would come surging through the door.

  The SUNY Maritime cadets discovered the more literal meaning of “one hand” on the summer training cruise of 1996. One beautiful morning the sunrise was particularly colorful—the entire western horizon glowed red. Despite the old nautical saw “red skies in morning, sailor take warning,” few of the officers, some of whom were veterans of winter North Atlantic runs, Alaskan swells, and transits through subarctic oceans, were worried.

  But the ship was heading toward a monstrous storm with hundreds of cadets aboard. One of the few who saw what was coming was the senior deck training officer, an eccentric nautical sciences professor named Gregory P. Smith, forever referred to by his initials, GPS. His ability to grab a sextant, shoot a sun line, and calculate it without looking at tables seem in retrospect bizarrely predestined. Now Smith looked at the sky and the barometer and realized what was bearing down on them just as the digital weather forecasts began to spit out of the ship’s fax at a fever rate.

  To the cadets’ amusement, Smith began tying down all his belongings as if the ship were about to be turned upside down. He suggested they do the same. He urgently shared what he claimed to be the only true cure for seasickness: a strict diet of diluted lemon juice and saltine crackers. The cadets laughed among themselves at what they considered a craggy professor’s melodramatic concerns.

  But Dave Young wasn’t put off by eccentricities. In GPS he saw someone with smarts and hard-won experience, and he knew that when someone like that issued a warning, he needed to heed it.

  While most on board continued their daily rituals, Dave took proactive measures. He packed his belongings in his foot locker, then tied it down with heavy manila rope and stashed a supply of lemons and saltines. His friends, who had rarely seen Dave worried about anything, soberly took note and did the same.

  Then, like a hammer, the first wave hit, a swell the size of an office building. The wind worked itself octave by octave into an unceasing wail. Soon bodies, desks, magazines, footlockers, pillows, heavy tools—everything aboard that had not been securely tied down to welded steel—shot through the air. The walls caught the mess as they turned into floors and ceilings, the ship rolling on its port side, pausing as if to catch its breath, then rolling on an equally merciless angle starboard. One particularly naïve or reckless cadet had ignored the warnings to such a degree that he was casually running on a treadmill when the first wave hit. On the upward roll, his jog became a desperate scramble up Everest’s peak, which, on the downward roll, transformed into a toboggan ride to hell. Sick cadets vomited on decks, creating a dangerous game of summer slip-and-slide, and prompting one extra-large cadet to skid down a hallway and plunge through a wall.

  For days, work ground to a halt. Doors leading topside were dogged shut to keep water out and cadets mad with seasickness in, for fear they’d stumble onto the deck and be swept away by a towering wave. Dave alternated between nights spent in bed with his life jacket and Gumby suit (a wet suit designed to totally encapsulate you in neoprene), wedged beneath his mattress to pin him comfortably to the wall, and days spent aboard a lawn chair he’d suspended from the ceiling. As the ship pitched wildly, he swung like a pendulum high above his shipmates, smiling widely, looking serene and slightly unworldly up there, Buddha-like.

  But after a few days of enjoying the relative safety created by their preparations while their shipmates retched and rolled miserably in their berths, the boys got bored and decided to leave their secure zone and venture out. First stop was the bow store, a gymnasium-sized space that, due to its distance from the ship’s center of gravity, gyrated most dramatically in the waves.

  Dave waited until the bow reached the top of a wave, then jumped just as the floor fell beneath his feet and the ceiling plunged toward his outstretched hands. Grabbing a lattice of pipes on the ceiling, he held tight until the bow began to fall again, cushioning the twenty-foot drop back to the deck.

  He was just getting started. Dave, Matt Michalski, and Rich Robson decided that for the next trick they would climb monkey island, the topmost deck, so named for the abundance of antenna and halyards that any young monkey would dream of playing on. Going up by the outside staircase, exposed to the waves crashing on deck, would be suicide, so they walked through the dark heat of the ship’s engine room, then climbed a ladder inside the ship’s smokestack—just feet from the evaporating steam and burnt smoke of the ship’s boilers. Luckily, the hatch at the top was one of the few that had been left unsecured—no one else had wanted to make the climb to secure it. They threw it open and pulled themselves onto the flat deck. Huddling behind the steel protection of the mast as the storm thrashed the ship, Dave and Matt and Rich stood against the weather feeling fearless in each other’s company.

  Five years later, after he had finally subdued the engineering curriculum, Dave Young sat beneath a cloudy sky, surrounded by the protective stone walls of Fort Schuyler and bored out of his mind. His butt went numb as the graduation ceremony droned on. He and his fellow cadets were dressed in their “salt and peppers”—white nautical dress shirt and black pants—listening to the speeches, just waiting for the moment when it would be over. He was two years late to this ceremony, but he’d beaten the odds. Three out of four who began freshman year with him hadn’t made it at all, and most of those who had made it had opted for easier tracks of study. His degree had been a tough get. Still, he knew his indifferent academic record was not likely to entice the leading naval architectural firms to knock on his door. Nor did Dave plan to make any effort to solicit their invitations for employment.

  During his summers sailing the North Atlantic, Dave had been bitten by a bug that had ruined the higher aspirations of countless mariners before him: He had fallen in love with the independence, camaraderie, and excitement of a life at sea.

  As Dave’s mother, brother, and father all sat dutifully in the family section to the side of the stage, cadet after cadet proceeded up the stairs and across the platform from right to left, pivoting for the sheepskin handoff and breaking for daylight. Dave could only curse his surname, which had doomed him to be one of the very last. But finally his turn came. He grabbed the rolled diploma and stepped down onto the beautiful lawn. He faced east, into the salty spring breeze pouring over the pentagonal stone walls of Fort Schuyler from Long Island Sound, and looked into the future.

  Dave was thinking ships, sailing the seven seas, that kind of thing. In his six years at Maritime, not once had anyone ever suggested a career on offshore oil rigs.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  KING NEPTUNE

  May 2001

  The Indian Ocean

  As Dave Young grasped his diploma, the Deepwater Horizon was halfway around the globe, sixty days into a seemingly interminable maiden voyage.

  It hadn’t helped that the Horizon’s derrick, rising 320 feet above the water, meant that it was too tall to fit under the Suez Canal’s Mubarak Peace Bridge. The crew faced a course that would wind fifteen thousand miles around the southern tip of Africa and bring them to the Gulf of Mexico.

  Slowing the journey further was the rig itself. Many earlier rigs had been able to take advantage of a remarkable marine technology that came of age in the very shipyards that built the Deepwater Horizon and its ilk. Called heavy-lift transports, they were essentially gigantic seagoing flatbed tow trucks. Using the same ballast control principles that worked in the Horizon’s pontoons, the transports were able to submerge their long, flat, low-lying cargo deck thirty feet below the surface, allowing a rig to float into place above it. Then the heavy-lift ship blew out the ballast and rose up in a gushing fountain of displaced water, li
fting the entire rig from the sea.

  It was an expensive operation, but the advantage was huge: It could carry a rig at three times the speed the Horizon could make on its own.

  And now more than ever, speed was essential. The Horizon was no sooner out of the drydock than it was signed to a three-year lease to drill in the Gulf of Mexico for British Petroleum, the fourth-largest corporation in the world. BP, once partly owned by the British government, was now a publicly traded multinational corporation that operated 22,000 service stations in more than 80 countries and produced nearly 4 million barrels of oil a day. In 2000, BP logged annual revenue of $148 billion, and that number would double over the next decade. The company had successfully developed offshore oil fields in the North Sea and was now a key player in the race for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. To lease the Horizon, it was willing to pay the 2010 equivalent of $350,000 a day for the bare rig, an amount that would only grow over the years—to half a million dollars a day.

  The agreement came with one overwhelmingly significant proviso: If the Horizon wasn’t drilling, BP wasn’t paying. Every day the Horizon crawled across the ocean toward the Gulf, Transocean was out a half million dollars. So cutting the crossing by two-thirds would translate to a savings of tens of millions of dollars.

  But the Horizon had to make the crossing the old-fashioned way. Ironically, it was the rig’s ability to propel itself that was the problem: The eight thrusters hanging beneath its pontoons made hitching a ride on a heavy-lift transport impractical. Disassembling the thrusters that had just been assembled would be troublesome and time-consuming. Besides, Transocean engineers thought they had an alternative: The Horizon would hook up with a tow ship that would pull as the Horizon pushed, theoretically doubling the rig’s maximum solo speed of only 4.6 knots.

  Theoretically.

  The Horizon motored on its own power through the China Sea to Singapore, then out into the Indian Ocean, where it rendezvoused with the tow ship for the longest leg of its journey, the six-thousand-mile trek to Cape Town, South Africa. The mariners on the Horizon worked with the tow ship’s crew for a week. They didn’t really know what to expect, as they had never worked with the particular drag coefficients of the pontoons and the thrusters, which projected nineteen feet below. They ran through all possible combinations of thruster direction and throttle, but all they accomplished was to burn more gas. They adjusted the cable connecting the two vessels, trying to find the perfect length, one that would minimize the yo-yoing between slack and taut, and ensure that both ships crested the waves at the same moment. But nothing helped. Every inch, every ounce of the Deepwater Horizon had been built for stability, not speed. That was its deepest nature, and it wasn’t budging. All the tugging and engine revving in the world couldn’t change that, a strength of its industrial character that its crew noted with something akin to pride—even as it condemned them to months at sea. There was nothing to do now but ride it out, cut the tow ship loose, and go the whole route at the Horizon’s natural ambling pace—which meant that the voyage they’d hope to make in under fifty days would take ninety-eight, costing the company millions of unbudgeted dollars.

  For the crew, it meant a suspension of life as usual, the only long stretch in its history where the Horizon would be more ship than rig. Used to having helicopters fly them to the nearest airport and connections home every few weeks, the crew would have to get used to the idea that until they arrived in Cape Town, they’d have no more options than the crews of nineteenth-century sailing vessels—and even less available speed.

  Of course, they wouldn’t be drilling, either. But that didn’t mean they weren’t busy. In fact, the sailors on board were more occupied and urgently necessary than at any time in the rig’s life, completing half a circumnavigation of the world, dealing with fine points of navigation, winds, currents, propulsion, and all the unexpected contingencies they’d trained for years to meet. Doug had a blessed stretch in which to bond with his engines and work out all the remaining kinks in the rig’s other machinery, and in his own crew of mechanics. And the toolpushers, the drilling foremen, were like nineteenth-century gunnery captains who, with no enemy within a thousand miles, nonetheless exercised the gun crews night after night, urging them on to faster and more accurate practice, so that when a foreign sail did appear on the horizon, they’d be ready, and deadly.

  In the Horizon’s case, of course, they weren’t running cannons out gunports, but conducting performance tests on the cranes and drilling equipment, tuning up the blowout preventer and chasing all the bugs out of the rig’s software. And their “enemy” wouldn’t bear up on a stiff wind, but would be waiting for them at destination’s end—if there was an end—in the form of a BP test well where the Horizon and its crew would have to prove themselves before they could go on to their first working assignment and begin to earn their keep.

  As the crew busily attended to their varied pursuits, the divisions between them that had been largely ignored in Korea began to peek through in small ways. The drilling crew, anticipating its deepwater destiny, might pester the mariners, constantly asking, “What’s the water depth here?” The mariners, concerned with winds, currents, and making their way across the surface of the ocean, couldn’t care less once they were far enough from land not to worry about grounding the rig, and didn’t have equipment to calculate such great depths in any case. They’d react to the inquiries as if they were dealing with annoying kids in the backseat constantly piping up with “are we there yet?” Even something as prosaic as the derrick lights might become proxy for a low-grade culture war. The drilling crew would turn them on, and the glare off the sea spray would blind the watch-standers, those constantly on the lookout for obstructions floating in the dark water. When the crew complained that lack of lights was creating a safety hazard on deck, the mariners told them to carry a flashlight, that hitting another ship because they couldn’t see was a far more significant safety concern. Inevitably, it would take one of the mariners who had been around, who knew how to translate in a way Yankees and southerners and even Left Coasters would all understand. The conversation went something like this:

  INTERPRETER: Pretend this is your pickup truck, and your kid, sitting in the backseat, turns on the interior light; makes it kinda hard to see, right?

  DRILLER: Yeah, but these are outside lights!

  INTERPRETER (PATIENTLY): Okay, think about fog. Would you turn on the high beams of your four-by-four in fog? Now think of the sea mist as small particles of fog and the derrick lights as giant high beams…see the problem?

  That did it. The drill crew not only complied but in the weeks ahead would eagerly search the decks after each sunset looking for rogue lights on the derrick to switch off, a recognition that they were, in the final analysis, all in the same boat.

  Six hundred miles off the southern tip of India, the Horizon crossed the equator. Jason Anderson had been here just the year before as one of the crew sea-testing an unfinished rig, Transocean’s Cajun Express, which was being towed from Singapore to Grand Isle, Louisiana, where it would be completed. Shortly after the journey, Jason left Transocean for a job with R&B Falcon and ended up here, about to cross the equator for a second time. So he knew what was coming—an ancient and abundantly bizarre initiation called the shellback ceremony.

  Shellbacks like Jason, those who had been initiated on a previous voyage, took control of the deck as the crossing neared. The highest-ranking shellback became King Neptune, in this case a wild-man electronics technician named Gene Frevele, whose coils of brown hair streamed from under a tinfoil crown embossed with some kind of crustacean. He ruled over the proceedings with a trident of welded metal rods. Jason, an irrepressible extrovert, enthusiastically played the second lead in this production, as the “Sea Baby.” He wore the headband of a welder’s face mask trimmed with colored rags that hung down like hair. His shorts had been ripped into rags and his work shirt cut off below his chest, leaving exposed in all its glory his hairy melon of
a belly—which he had smeared with grease. He loved his opportunity to ham it up for the new kids, the “pollywogs,” who, as the tradition demanded, would be subjected to all kinds of imaginative humiliation and abuse before they could emerge from their embryonic state and join the society of shellbacks.

  In the navies of previous centuries, the initiation ceremonies could be brutal. Pollywogs were covered with filth, forced to eat noxious substances, beaten with boards and salt-stiffened ropes, sometimes even tossed overboard and dragged in the surf. Injuries were common and deaths not unheard of. As late as 1995, in a shellback ceremony captured on video aboard an Australian submarine, a pollywog was sexually assaulted with a stick.

  Naval regulations have been instituted to curb abuses, but on commercial vessels, individual traditions still determine the nature of shellback initiations.

  The guiding ethos on the Deepwater Horizon could be summarized as “good-natured gross-out.” The conspiring shellbacks had been saving the food waste from the compost barrel in the mess hall for two days, which they ladled out of noxious-smelling pots and poured into an improvised wading pool. The blindfolded pollywogs had to “drink” the brew (they spit it out) and crawl through the slops, then rinse off in a tub of yellowed oily water the shellbacks called “whale piss.”

  For their final act of obeisance, the ’wogs were led, still blindfolded, to Baby King Neptune. They were ordered to kneel, whereupon Jason magnanimously accepted the initiates into his kingdom by rubbing their faces in his Vaseline- and food slop-encrusted belly.

  When it was over, the slime washed off in the shower, but the bond—of the ceremony and of the shared, interminable crawl across a vast and empty ocean—remained.