Fire on the Horizon

by Tom Shroder

  New hires who survived the two weeks of training sessions were handed a diploma of sorts. It looked like a driver’s license but could be far more important—a “rig pass,” an official passport into the offshore oil industry, which might as well have been a winning lottery ticket in a region where any jobs were scarce, and high-paid jobs otherwise nonexistent.

  Dave’s first posting was as a junior officer, a dynamic positioning trainee, on a drillship. From the beginning it became clear that his friends had been right. Dave’s high-powered personality could be a challenge in many situations, but it meshed beautifully with life on a rig. It’s as if people whose brains are built a certain way engage in dangerous hobbies or take risks not because they want to, but because they need to kick the brain into panic mode just to get enough brain stimulus to feel normal. On offshore rigs, stimulus overload was normal. Deep-sea drilling was inherently high-risk, high-reward, a continuously demanding series of complex operations involving multiple moving parts and quickly shifting objectives, not to mention the imperative to do everything now.

  And just as in firehouses and police precincts, adrenaline junkies may have certain advantages on a rig, especially in emergencies. The flood of brain-stimulating chemicals released during times of danger may overwhelm some, but for those who crave it as a matter of equilibrium, risk may provoke a state of placidity that could make them the most functional people in the room during a disaster.

  In any case, Dave thrived, and after a few months, he was promoted to second mate on a rig with a stellar reputation.

  A blaring alarm tore into Dave Young’s dream and prodded him awake. No hint of light rimmed the curtains. For a full minute, he couldn’t say where he was. Then he remembered—a late flight to New Orleans, and a few hours of sleep at an airport hotel. He looked at the clock—5 a.m.—just enough time to dress and drag himself downstairs to catch the crew bus to the heliport.

  Several dozen others were already there waiting, rig pass in hand, to check their flight order on the dispatcher’s clipboard. There wasn’t much suspense. The crew was listed by position, top down. The first names on the list had a seat on the early bird, and the last names could count on a day of waiting room magazines and Fox News droning in the background. While they sat there, they could wonder if they’d be tapped on the shoulder, handed a test tube, and escorted to the restroom to provide a sample for random drug and alcohol screening.

  Much had changed since the good old days when most rigs had rollicking onboard taverns where off-duty workers could unwind. Rig workers could thank the captain of the Exxon Valdez for the abrupt end to that custom. Captain Joseph Hazelwood admitted to having “two or three” vodka drinks the evening his oil tanker drove onto a reef in a pristine Alaskan bay in March 1989, spilling ten million gallons of crude. Hazelwood was asleep in his cabin at the time of the grounding, and he was cleared of the charge of intoxication at his trial, but ever since the incident, drug and alcohol testing is an industry standard among U.S.-crewed ships, and very few now board a ship or rig under the influence. Almost to a man, the Deepwater Horizon’s crew wouldn’t even dream of trying. Guys had such fear of the consequences that they often arrived for their hitch with foul morning mouth, having avoided toothpaste completely for fear of it reading as alcohol on their Breathalyzer test.

  Some workers still found a way to smuggle something aboard for off-duty consumption, a caper planned and executed with the care and attention to detail of a prison break. More common were those who viewed rig time as enforced detox. When their hitch was over, if they wanted to, they could go on a weeklong bender. But they were damn sure to stop drinking soon enough to pass the test at the heliport.

  Every trip to the rig via helicopter came with another test as well, a test of faith. If you asked rig workers to rank their greatest on-the-job fears, crane accidents, hurricanes, and even blowouts would no doubt rank behind the helicopter commute.

  Every few years, a helicopter ferrying rig workers goes down, and in some years it happens more than once. The worst catastrophe came in 1986, when a Chinook helicopter carrying forty-seven passengers and crew from the shores of Scotland to a North Sea rig went down in a storm. Only two survived.

  Even when the weather conditions are perfect, a small error in navigation can create large problems. In 2007, when Transocean’s Discoverer Deep Seas finished up one well and moved a few miles away to begin another, the communication chain broke down and the incoming helicopter flight headed for the wrong spot. It arrived on location well past its point of no return, the point in the flight plan when there is no longer enough fuel to make it back to shore, and could not find the rig until it was almost too late.

  When a helicopter does arrive, the danger is far from over. Two objects, one heaving up and down, rolling port and starboard, and the other jumping with each unexpected gust of wind, do not greet each other easily. Even after the craft touches down, a gust of wind can blow the long, narrow fuselage across the deck into personnel, steel bulkheads, or over the side into the ocean—a real-life dunk tank. As a result, more often than not, helicopter pilots do not shut down while refueling, but maintain reverse thrust with the rotors to hold the craft in position. The personnel disembark hunched over in fear of the rotors turning above their heads, grab their heavy luggage, and shuffle across the slippery deck. Until they descend stairs into the enclosed helicopter waiting room, they are not completely safe. In 2003, a pilot lifted off the deck of a Transocean rig in India and tripped over a net laid down to prevent her skids from sliding off the deck. As the chopper tilted over its blades dug into steel and shattered, launching steel fragments in every direction with such force that some were found embedded in the steel legs of the derrick more than one hundred feet away.

  Of course, thousands of rig transport flights come off without a hitch, and Dave’s first trip to the Deepwater Horizon was no different.

  Now all he had to do was get acclimated with the motion beneath his feet. Ships, with their single V-shaped hull, tend to rock like a cradle. Rigs roll in circles like a cork, which can be unsettling even to the saltiest sailor. The good news is that waves can pass almost unnoticed above the submerged pontoons and beneath a rig’s main deck. Even ten-foot waves have little effect. Rigs in the Gulf of Mexico can be so stable that some even have pool tables, which are playable more often than not.

  Some coming off merchant ships found it difficult to adjust to the rig’s chief asset, its phenomenal stability—the rig’s ability to just sit there. As a junior officer, Dave’s primary duty was standing a watch, choosing a path around ships, boats, and underwater obstacles, objects that might be invisible to the naked eye but visible on radar, or vice versa. It required both quick thinking in the moment and planning executed with mathematical precision and foresight. But on a rig that doesn’t go anywhere 90 percent of the time, the job of standing watch on the ship’s bridge boils down to long hours staring at computer screens and calling approaching ships, begging them not to hit you. It is boring. It definitely isn’t salty.

  But Dave was a quick study, and all the aspects of rig life soon became second nature to him. As his friends had supposed, his mechanical skills quickly made him a valued addition to the rig crew, and his personal qualities allowed him to float above the cultural divide that had proved so tough for other mariners to hurdle. For one thing, there was the lack of separation between officers and crew members. There were no fancy uniforms or rank insignia. Everyone referred to each other by first name. A mate’s cabin was like a roughneck’s, and there was no officers’ mess—they all ate the same food. The culture shock was compounded for some because of offshore drilling’s roots in the Gulf. It had always been primarily the province of a southern and largely working-class culture. For one thing, the lower-paid workers, who had no company travel allowance, couldn’t afford to fly home every time they came back onshore for their weeks off. By necessity, they tended to live in or near the bordering states of Alabama, Mississippi, Louis
iana, or (east) Texas. They all seemed to have nicknames like Big Country, Chickenhawk, Cornbread, Cornfed, and every rig had a Smokey—the guy who first caught the ship on fire. Off the rig, they tended to return home to houses at the end of country lanes where they could indulge their desire for acreage, even if they had to drive an hour for a bottle of milk. They had cows on the land, or chicken coops, or ATV hunting trails. They dipped snuff and owned shotguns.

  It all could be a little alienating to someone who had grown up in suburban New York or the woods of Maine or on the beaches of California. To many of the mariners, the rigs could appear to be a redneck haven. But Dave took the ribbing often aimed at outsiders in stride, and he pulled his weight. He kept mum about his engineering degree and got his hands black with oil and grease alongside his crew. He discovered that if you were willing to accept the culture and the occasional comments about where you grew up, you could advance—quickly. If you came in with attitude or took offense to the jokes, well…that didn’t get you anywhere. The most important attribute on an oil rig is the ability to work and get along.

  Work is the stuff and substance of rig life. Everything is designed to keep the rig working every minute of every day. There are two shifts, each twelve hours a day, seven days a week, with very few breaks. If there’s an ongoing operation on the rig floor, lunch waits. Food is wrapped in tinfoil and put away, devoured when there’s time—even if it’s only five minutes. There are no unions offshore. Only company policy and a supervisor’s goodwill stand between men and exhaustion. If the company wants drillers to work sixteen hours straight, they can make them.

  The normal compensation for the grueling schedule is the promise of three weeks off at the end of every three-week hitch for supervisors and technicians (or two weeks on, two weeks off for lower positions). And the money: Drilling hands, kids right out of high school, can make $40,000 to $50,000 a year. As third mate, Dave was bringing home close to $100,000 a year. The captain earned up to $200,000 and the OIM even more.

  The money was good enough to make rig life bearable to most, and even enjoyable to many. Weeks on the rig were a time to be away from the complications of shore life. They were with friends, doing challenging work that brought tangible results. They worked hard, and when the long shifts were over, they ate dinner, read a book, watched a movie, or went to bed. Every evening, you could find a handful of romantics at the deck rail, watching the sun set. For every nature lover, however, there were half a dozen others glued to video consoles, playing Street Fighter. Some of the younger hands had the energy to work out in the small “gym,” which was just a room with a weight set, two treadmills, and a StairMaster. Others played poker, friendly games mostly, though some might leave the table a few hundred bucks poorer or richer.

  Others, like Dave, spent most of their nonworking, still-conscious time on laptops, chatting with wives or girlfriends, working toward online degrees, starting personal websites.

  Or watching television. The rigs had satellite TV capable of receiving twenty channels at a time—making inevitable the ongoing battles over which twenty. The perennial winners: Fox News (always), the Weather Channel, Country Music Television, the Rodeo Channel, Outdoor Life, and anything involving antlers and largemouth bass. When the big bosses came in from town, CNBC was switched on. Most rigs used to have adult channels, but as more women began to arrive, the racier TV fare was purged. Instead, contraband porn DVDs were traded around the rig like baseball cards.

  The ten-by-twelve-foot crew cabins, most of which had a DVD player and a seventeen-inch TV, were identical. Most were shared by two crew members who worked opposite hours—meaning they were almost never in the room at the same time. Some low-level crew were bunked four to a room. Only the captain and the OIM had a room to themselves.

  Legend has it that the captain of Transocean’s rig Discoverer Deep Seas, to better demonstrate his elevated status, requisitioned a monster forty-two-inch flat-screen TV that barely fit in his tiny room. Word of the purchase order, approved by the rig manager onshore, leaked out. As soon as the hitch was up, some crew members visited a local florist to order the biggest, gaudiest flower display in the shop, complete with a teddy bear centerpiece and balloons. They sent it to the rig manager with a note that said, “Thank you for the flat-screen TV!”

  The TV order was promptly canceled.

  Ribbing and one-upmanship were common elements of rig life, but outright fights were rare. The lack of booze and drugs, and the fear of doing anything to jeopardize the almighty rig pass, tended to keep things civil.

  Rig populations are still overwhelmingly white and male. Transocean and other companies have made some advance in diversity in recent years, but the largest incidence of women and minorities still occur in the catering staff. Given the relatively low salaries and long hours, many of the catering positions are filled by people who come from impoverished backgrounds and have few other options. On some rigs, the caterers, hired and managed by a subcontractor, remain permanently on the edges of rig life, never really thought of as part of the crew. But some crews make a point to include the cooks and waiters and janitors, inviting them to weekly safety meetings and drills and other communal events. You can always tell when you’re on one of those rigs by the superior quality of the food and service.

  A lot of people knew the story about the rig with an openly gay baker—an out homosexual is the rarest of rig rarities. This baker was a talent, and his specialty was elaborate birthday cakes, which he delivered in person dressed as Marilyn Monroe to sing “Happy Birthday” to the embarrassed recipient. The crew all but marched on the rig manager with electric torches and dinner forks demanding that the baker get bounced back to shore. But the baker stayed on. A couple of years later, word got around that the catering company was finally getting ready to let the baker go. By then, the quality of his cakes had trumped the crew’s homophobia. Or maybe they had learned to enjoy his singing voice. Some of the men who had screamed loudest for his head successfully petitioned management to keep him on.

  The meals on the rig are all-you-can-eat, and almost every meal features something fried in fat or butter with high rations of salt and sugar. Any attempt to provide healthier fare is met with fierce resistance. The rare healthy eaters among the crew tend to load up their suitcases with cans of tuna and good coffee, and wind up eating a lot of cereal. Fresh food like milk, eggs, vegetables, or fruit is always welcomed by those wishing to avoid the lethargic aftermath of fried okra, but if there is bad weather or a logistical problem and a new grocery box doesn’t come out on the supply boat for a week, these items quickly disappear.

  The rest of the food never does. On the Horizon, the break room cabinets contained a bottomless supply of cans of Beenee Weenee and Vienna sausages, bread, peanut butter and jelly. Every four hours, a more ambitious spread appeared there—sandwiches, pizza, cookies—free for the taking. On Sundays, the crew could look forward to the rig barbecue. The deck would sprout folding tables and chairs and half barrels loaded with ice and stuffed with cans of soda and, if BP was feeling generous, bottles of nonalcoholic beer. The barbecue grill itself was the pride of the rig, where it was kept in a place of honor on the deck. The Horizon had its Korean trophy grill, but some rigs were known to spend as much as forty thousand dollars on machines so complex they looked like they might be able to circumnavigate the moon with smoking attachments you’d need an air winch just to lift onto the deck. But they admirably fulfilled a grill’s basic function, turning out well-charred steaks, lobsters, and twice a year, big buckets of boiled crawfish shipped in for the occasion.

  The whole affair looked like something you’d find at the end of a dirt road in the Mississippi outback, except no one is smoking. Most tobacco on the rig is chewed or dipped. Spitting on the decks is strictly prohibited, but anywhere off the leeward side of the rig and trash cans are fair game. On an oil rig, you don’t ever want to have to go digging through the garbage can. Those who dip place a paper cup lined with a crumpled
paper towel in their shirt pocket, allowing them to spit with just a tilt of the head. By the time those cups are tossed away, they are pretty full.

  Smoking is limited to two areas outside on the perimeter of the lower deck, each equipped with a couple of benches, a butt can and an electric lighter mounted on the wall. There’s also a red light—a signal from the computer system mandating that all smokes be extinguished, immediately. When it flashes, crew members tend to pay attention: The light is prompted by the flammable-gas detectors, and is a reminder that beneath them is enough explosive gas to blow the rig out of the water.

  Danger is a constant presence on an oil rig and something that few can erase from their minds.

  But blowouts and mass explosions rarely top the list of worries. Most companies, including BP and Transocean, spend immense time and effort attempting to prevent the most common hazards: loss of fingers, back injuries, minor chemical burns, slips, trips, and falls. Transocean had an official “vision” for safety, and it was repeated with near religious fervor: “Our operations will be conducted in an incident-free workplace—all the time, everywhere.”

  To walk into a Transocean workspace is to be accosted with warnings. Every bump in the floor over which you might trip is painted a bumblebee pattern of alternating diagonal yellow and black stripes brushed on the steel deck. Affixed to the walls, marking every conceivable hazard, are color-coded signs—green for safety, red for fire or explosion, yellow for danger—embossed with silhouettes of figures acting out whatever it is you should not, under any circumstances, be doing. A decade ago, Transocean, prompted by BP, hired a company called Seward Signs to survey an aging Transocean rig. Seward representatives, wearing logo-embroidered, bright white coveralls that appeared to cost as much as any designer apparel, were flown from the United Kingdom to spend a week crawling through every compartment of the rig looking for potential hazards they could mitigate by installing a sign. Weeks later a box arrived via FedEx containing bound books, each over two hundred pages in length, listing their recommendations.