Fire on the Horizon

by Tom Shroder

  Along with its relatively modest depth, Macondo Prospect would be a straight shot from the seafloor to the oil deposit directly beneath, an easier proposition than taking the circuitous, slanting route from the wellhead to the oil, referred to as directional drilling, as some wells required.

  Easier, perhaps, but definitely not easy.

  The Macondo well would be far more than a hole in the ground. It would be an inverted skyscraper, a towering structure of steel and cement, telescoping downward ten times the length of the Empire State Building. That would be impressive enough, even if you ignored the most salient fact about what BP and its Transocean partners intended to do: The drilling would begin at the bottom of the ocean, where not a single worker could venture. Every bit of the construction of this hanging tower, the penetration of the rock, removal of debris, installation and sealing of the walls, had to be accomplished at the end of what was essentially a five-thousand-foot pole.

  Even so, BP’s plan for the well anticipated a drilling time of just seventy-seven days, at a cost of $96.1 million. The number of days and the number of dollars were inextricably linked. In business and industry, delays are always costly. But rarely is the cost of a delay quite as daunting as in the offshore oil business. Considering BP’s costs—the nearly half-million-per-day rig lease, plus another half million a day, sometimes more, to pay for the rig’s insatiable consumption of fuel, the daily helicopter flights bringing workers to the rig, drilling supplies, contractor services, food and catering—this meant that every day of drilling cost BP a minimum of a million dollars, every hour more than $40,000, every minute almost $700. That’s day and night, seven days a week, as long as the rig was up and running.

  The Marianas arrived at the Macondo site on October 6. Unlike the Horizon, which could do the work of drilling using its eight thrusters to remain virtually stationary above the well, the Marianas was attached to anchors set strategically around the target. Given the weight of the rig, and the huge potential costs of mooring failure, ordinary anchors—the kind tattooed on Popeye’s forearm—wouldn’t do. These were sixty-foot-high hollow steel cylinders with open bottoms that were driven deep into the silt of the ocean floor. Once sealed by the ocean bottom, air was pumped out the top, creating a powerful suction that kept the anchors firmly rooted. Now tethered securely in place above the target, the Marianas was ready. On October 7, the work began.

  Although BP had officially set seventy-seven days as the projected length of the job, which would have meant that Macondo would be complete by Christmas Eve, they had dreams of going even faster. Well planners had drawn up a “target” of completing the well construction in fifty-two days, or by the end of November, which would give BP plenty to be thankful for—a savings of more than $20 million.

  Nearly immediately, those aspirations took a hit.

  Between the high pressures found deep in the earth, and the explosiveness and toxicity of the payload, poking a steel straw into an oil deposit that had slumbered peacefully for millions of years could turn ugly fast. The rig’s massive blowout preventer—known as the BOP—was designed, in case of an extreme emergency, to shut down the well and sever its connection to the rig with the push of a button. It was a 53-foot-high, 325-ton, $15 million complex of valves installed on top of the wellhead at the seafloor. It controlled the flow of drilling fluids and cement into the well—and oil and gas out of it. The BOP’s most powerful components were called “rams.” If a well started to go out of control, the hydraulically driven devices—there were multiple sets arranged along the BOP—could clamp down on the drill pipe, closing off the hole until pressures were brought under control. If the situation went from bad to worse, one set of rams, the “blind shear rams,” nicknamed “pinchers,” were designed to cut straight through the drill pipe and sever the BOP stack into two parts, sealing the well below and allowing the upper part of the BOP to lift off the bottom and the rig to move away from danger.

  Two separate control units, called the blue pod and the yellow pod, are attached to the top of the BOP and each can initiate any and all of the functions of the BOP when directed by signals that come down from the rig via communications and hydraulic cables. Even though it theoretically required only one pod to do the job, regulations—and common sense—dictated that both pods must remain fully operational at all times the rig was drilling to provide a safe margin of redundancy.

  Less than a month after the Marianas began to drill, they hit an unexpected pocket of natural gas that got into the well and began to rise toward the surface. The buttons were pushed on the rig signaling the rams to close. The lower ram failed. The upper ram did close around the drill pipe, but its rubber seal was stripped away. Subsequent testing showed that the yellow pod had lost the ability to activate the shear rams, the last-resort pinchers.

  Continuing drilling under those circumstances would have been illegal, and foolhardy. But the cost of fixing the problems was severe. The BOP had taken days to install. Now it had to be disconnected, hauled up on the rig, and repaired. Then installed all over again. Depending on how long repairs took, Transocean and BP were looking at a loss of between a couple of weeks and a couple of months.

  The fifty-two-day target schedule was history, and now even the seventy-seven-day schedule was beginning to look unlikely.

  Then the hurricane hit.

  On the same day the managers on the Marianas reluctantly decided to pull their blowout preventer for repair, a small tropical depression entered the Caribbean. Within days it had strengthened to a hurricane. On November 5, Hurricane Ida passed over Nicaragua and headed north, straight toward Macondo. Rigs that could move under their own power, rigs like the Deepwater Horizon, scattered in retreat but managers of moored rigs like the Marianas had no choice but to pull all the crew off and leave the rig to ride the storm alone. The warm Gulf waters reinvigorated the disorganized Ida, which regained hurricane strength as it passed over the Marianas late November 8 into the next morning.

  As the first helicopter approached after the storm had passed, the rig’s senior managers could see that the Marianas had survived, but as the days passed, odd electrical glitches appeared. Electricians hustled to chase down the problems, but it soon became clear that the rig’s wiring had been extensively damaged in the storm.

  On Thanksgiving Day, the Marianas crew threw in the towel, unmoored the rig, and hitched her up to be towed in for repairs. A month had been lost. BP’s dreams of a Christmas bounty were dead.

  The holidays weren’t looking much merrier for Transocean execs. On December 23, workers aboard their North Sea rig Sedco 711, who had sealed off a well they had just finished drilling for Shell Oil in the North Sea, heard a loud noise and looked up to see dark liquid shooting out of the well and spraying across the deck. A blowout. Shocked that a well they thought had been locked up tight could erupt, drillers fought to bring it back under control before the gas ignited and the rig exploded in a fireball. Everyone else mustered at the lifeboats and prepared to evacuate.

  Fortunately, the BOP functioned in accordance with its design. An operator on the rig pressed the buttons on a control panel. The signal traveled down a cable from the rig to a control unit on the BOP, opening a valve and forcing hydraulic fluid into the ram system. The pistonlike devices clamped down on the well pipe and sealed it off. The flow from the well stopped, injuries were averted, and just three barrels of heavy drilling fluid spilled overboard.

  But executives from Transocean were shaken. Their analysis determined that the blowout happened when a mechanical seal—designed to be closed at the time—had been mistakenly opened when the Sedco crew was trying to scrape debris out of the well. They found that early warning signs of an impending surge from the well were missed because the drilling crew believed the well was complete and didn’t see a blowout as a possibility. The incident could have easily ended much differently—in fire and death and an unstanched flow of oil into the ocean. They decided to rewrite the core well control procedures an
d hold conference calls to discuss lessons learned.

  Senior rig managers filed into their conference rooms at the appointed hour, pulled up chairs at a long table with microphones spaced along it, and turned their eyes to the screen mounted above them as the call hooked up and the big bosses appeared in two dimensions to talk about this freak accident in the North Sea. The two most significant points the bosses wanted to make: There had been a failure to remain vigilant about pressure changes within the well, and a lack of clarity on how to control them. They emphasized that a sense of “complacency” at the end of a well could lead to disaster. They also noted that the blowout had cost them eleven days of work, more than $8 million, and a “significant loss of reputation.”

  The last thing anyone wanted, they all agreed, was for the same mistakes to lead to a far bigger catastrophe.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  X MARKS THE SPOT

  January 2007

  Port of Baltimore

  If anything had become clear from Dave Young’s adventurous career at SUNY Maritime, it was this: He would not be happy with an assignment on some run-of-the-mill merchant ship. He needed something more stimulating, to both mind and body.

  Dave was a classic high-energy personality. Even now that he was safely through to the other side of adolescence, a time for a man to begin the process of settling down, he never could grasp the concept of “sitting and relaxing.” He was always doing something—and the riskier the better. He devoted ever more time and energy to building and racing those tiny, crazy-fast fiberglass boats he’d learned to build with his dad. He took them out on the Sound and pushed them until the water steamed in his wake and the boat leaped and slammed through the waves, shuddering on the edge of disintegration. Then after races he’d go out to all-night parties in the Hamptons, drinking with his friends and looking for women. He found quite a few, but only one stuck, a particularly beautiful and unusually understanding woman named Alyssa.

  It was an ancient story. Flirtation turned into love, love turned into commitment, and a spirited young man found himself making a career and a family instead of another blender of lime daiquiris.

  He abandoned the bar scene for domesticity, and a job behind the controls of a fiber-optic repair ship out of the Port of Baltimore. Charged with maintaining the thousands and thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables that crisscrossed the ocean and made the World Wide Web possible, the ship’s demanding missions and technical complexity focused Dave’s mind and, for a time at least, satisfied his cravings. The ship defied wind and tide to hover over an exact point on the ocean floor while malfunctioning cables were diagnosed and repaired, relying on the same kind of sophisticated thruster system that held oil rigs stationary over a well site. Every cable break was an emergency, minutes mattered, and the ship’s crew had to function calmly while dealing with urgent commands from shore-based management.

  Dave didn’t think about it this way, but his experience on the cable ship was perfect on-the-job training for work on a self-propelled oil rig. Quite a few of his classmates from SUNY Maritime had discovered that mariners were sought after—and very well paid—in the offshore oil industry. The new semi-submersible rigs and drillships, now floating off Korean drydocks at an accelerating rate, all required a crew of certified mariners, even if the vessel spent nine-tenths of its life treading water. Not only was the pay superior to salaries on other commercial vessels, but the schedule—three weeks on, three weeks off—was more family-friendly than that of a merchant ship, which could head out to sea for six months at a stretch.

  Dave’s pals, convinced his skills and personality would make him a good fit for the unique world of exploratory drilling, urged him to apply for a rig job. But he resisted.

  Despite the pay differential, a lot of mariners didn’t want to work on oil rigs. For one thing, there was the “outhouse standing on a garbage scow” problem. As one captain given command of a rig put it, “What am I going to do when other captains break out pictures of their ships—show them this thing?”

  And then there was…standing still. Especially for someone like Dave, someone with a passion for speeding over the water, it wasn’t easy to contemplate a career where your “ship” could be mistaken for a “platform” and might stay hovering over the same oil well for months at a time. It was true that the fiber-optic work did require periods of hovering, but they were relatively brief interludes between long stretches of plying the ocean from one cable break to the next.

  Sailors like to talk about how “salty” something is. It’s simple mariner bravado but, roughly translated, a person or an object is salty to the degree it is linked to the great seafaring traditions reaching across the ages to the Phoenicians, and beyond. Sea beards are salty, black coffee with a pinch of salt is salty, and tattoos of naked mermaids are truly salty. And while plowing through high seas in a midnight gale at ridiculously high latitudes might qualify you as an old salt, spinning circles around a wellhead while the driller calls the shots would certainly not.

  It wasn’t that Dave was the kind who felt the need to brag to his peers about the shape of his ship or job description. It was just that for the moment he was happy doing what he was doing. But as his family grew—he and Alyssa had a girl and a boy now—he was tiring of the unpredictable needs of the cable ship, which was always on call. Its mariners had to respond like firefighters whenever a ship’s anchor snagged and severed a cable or a repeater station resting on the seafloor sprang a leak. Except for Dave, the alarm bell was his cell phone and instead of leaving a warm firehouse, he was leaving his family. The need for fast response also meant he had to live in Baltimore, and Dave and Alyssa both yearned to get back closer to home. If he were on a rig, at the end of each work hitch the company would pay to fly him—or any employee considered a supervisor or technically skilled—to any airport in the lower forty-eight states, regardless of how out of the way, or how high the airfare. He and Alyssa could live anywhere they chose.

  Even when he was on the rig, communication home would be vastly easier. The average merchant ship had only a single communal e-mail address. The captain printed out the e-mail messages sent to individuals, then put them on the bridge for retrieval, where anyone could, and often did, read them. Only one or two phones served the entire crew, and the five-dollars-a-minute satellite connection charge was deducted from monthly paychecks. On a rig, multiple phone lines were available free to crew members. There was also full Internet access, a feature very few companies running traditional ships can afford to provide. With the entire rig sharing the equivalent of one DSL or cable modem’s worth of bandwidth, speeds frequently slowed to that of dial-up but were sufficient to send messages, pay bills, view photos of the kids, or stay up with the latest news and sports scores.

  Between the allure of the perks and the mounting bills for diapers, formula, preschool tuition, and college savings plans, the higher salaries available on oil rigs—nearly twice that of merchant ships—began to speak to him. It took a year from when Dave’s friends inside Transocean began to court him. In Dave’s mind at least, the advantages of making the move finally outweighed the disadvantages of starting over in new territory.

  He had been told that anyone simply e-mailing a résumé directly to Transocean was likely to be disappointed. You had to have someone inside to promote you, and he did. He sent his résumé to a couple of friends who were mates on a Transocean rig, the friends tweaked the résumé to emphasize the skills they knew Transocean was looking for—particularly his experience with dynamic positioning on the cable ship—and put it in front of their Houston-based rig manager. The rig manager got on the elevator in Transocean’s high-rise office building in West Houston and hand-carried the application to the HR office.

  A few weeks later, Dave was in Houston for a daylong physical and drug testing. A few weeks after that, he was headed to the Transocean finishing school.

  Like all rig employees, before Dave began work he had to attend the company training cente
r in Houma, Louisiana. There he and his fellow trainees spent two weeks sleeping in bunk beds in a prefab dormitory and sitting in classrooms learning how to administer CPR and recognize sexual harassment. When they got out of the classroom, the real fun began. In a workshop on personal survival, trainees donned their Gumby suits, the thick neoprene wet suits with hoods, booties, and mittens that made whoever wore one look like Eddie Murphy circa 1981, and more to the point, able to float and survive for hours even in frigid water. The most popular session, and arguably the most important, was basic firefighting. Instructors, typically retired firefighters, would ignite engines, pans of oil, and entire steel-entombed rooms, having the students work together to put the fires out. It was a class that all mariners, like Dave, had been through before, but training that bears repeating.

  Then it was time for the final. Though officially called Helicopter Underwater Egress Training, its informal nickname, the Dunk Tank, better described the experience. Trainees climbed into a steel cage, strapped on seat belts, then slid down a ramp to the bottom of a pool. The objective: survive impact, calmly remove your seat belt, hold your breath while politely waiting for the person in front of you, then squeeze through one of the steel cage’s window openings. Failure is painful. Scuba divers are prepositioned to assist those who get trapped. Occasionally someone panics, ingesting water with an unforgettable taste of death.