Fire on the Horizon

by Tom Shroder

  But he could crawl, and that’s what he did. Halfway across the room, he saw a dim light.

  In that same dim light, Doug Brown saw a person crawling across the floor. It was Mike Williams. Somehow, the electronics tech had ended up in the engine control room creeping over the debris and wreckage, screaming that he was hurt and had to get out of there. Mike crawled past Doug, heading toward the back of the control room, where the hatch had blown open and light was streaming in. Now Doug could see that Willie Stoner was crawling toward the same hatch ahead of Mike. Doug fell behind Mike, and all three crawled into the light and the air of the stern lifeboat deck. They were gasping for air when the other motorman, Paul Meinhart, called to them.

  “I need some assistance. Brent is injured.”

  They could hear Brent moaning. Doug wanted to go to Brent, but Mike Williams was in bad shape. Blood was streaming down his face from a wound on his forehead. He kept screaming, “I’ve got to get out of here!” Doug decided to take him up to the bridge, their muster station, at the other end of the rig while Willie went in to help Paul with Brent.

  As Willie came back into the ECR he couldn’t see anything at first, but he could hear Paul pulling debris off Brent and tossing it aside. Paul was helping pull off a heavy piece of something—he couldn’t even tell what it had been—when Brent lunged up, stumbled, and fell forward, knocking Willie to the floor. Willie pushed himself back up. He and Paul got a hold of Brent and half carried, half dragged him outside.

  In the light, Brent saw the blood dripping from his face. “What’s this?” he asked, as if he had never seen blood before. Then, as if realizing something, he said, “It hurts.”

  There was a broken water pipe dribbling water above where the door had been. Paul and Willie used some of the water to wash away the blood on Brent’s face as much as they could. Brent looked like he was in shock.

  “Calm down,” Willie said. “We’re going to go ahead and make our way to the bridge.” As they carried him up the stairs to the main deck, where the derrick should have been, they instead were met by a swirling tower of flame.

  On either side of the rig, just aft of the derrick, the port and starboard crane towers rose sixty feet off the main deck. From his perch in a roomy cab atop the port crane, operator Micah Sandell had seen the mud shooting up and instantly understood he was looking at a blowout. He had shouted into his radio, telling his roustabouts to get to the front of the rig, away from the derrick. But the mud eruption stopped abruptly. Just as he took a deep breath of relief and thought, “Oh, they got it under control,” mud spurted out of the degasser, a gooseneck pipe venting out to the deck aft of the derrick. Micah knew then that nothing was under control. The degasser was where mud was routed if it had been saturated by methane down in the well. The toolpusher must have switched the outflow to the degasser when he saw the kick coming, a split-second attempt to handle the kick and avoid polluting the Gulf. Still, it had been the wrong choice. The kick was far too powerful, and the degasser had been instantly overwhelmed. If the incoming hydrocarbons had been diverted through a different pipe that led out over the ocean instead, he would have guaranteed a serious pollution incident, but deadly gassy smoke wouldn’t now be belching out of the gooseneck loud enough to rupture an eardrum and making the deck into a time bomb waiting for a spark to ignite it.

  That didn’t take long. Something beneath Micah exploded, and flames burst out above a shed on the starboard side of the derrick. He jumped up and turned off the air conditioner in his sealed cab, not wanting to suck in any of that gassy smoke, whatever it was. He didn’t know if he should get out and run for it or stay.

  On the far side of the rig, Dale Burkeen faced the same decision. He forced himself to focus. He knew that in an emergency, an unsecured crane was a catastrophe waiting to happen. He also knew it was his responsibility to direct his crew in firefighting, and he had to get down and suit up in his fire gear. Everything in him told him to flee, but he resisted. First he had to move his crane’s 150-foot boom into its cradle in order to lock it down. The seconds ticked by slowly, agonizingly, as smoke and gas billowed higher and higher below him, closing in on his cabin. When the boom was two-thirds of the way down, it became clear the whole process was taking too long. Just like Micah Sandell, crouched in his cab 250 feet away on the other side of the rig, Dale had a decision to make. He couldn’t wait any longer. He was a large man, but he dashed as fast as he could to the spiral staircase that led down to the deck and began to pound down the steps.

  While Dale ran, Micah remained frozen in indecision in the cab of his crane. A second, bigger burst knocked Micah to the back of the cab. A fireball swirled around him. He fell to the floor, waiting to die. He put his hands over his head and said the simplest and most urgent prayer a man can say: “No, God. No.”

  Like a miracle, the flames died back from where he was and began shooting straight up the derrick. His paralysis transformed into certainty. He took off out the door of the crane and started down the stairs. When he was nearing the deck, another blast knocked him to the floor. He was almost surprised when he found he could stand, but the surprise turned to a determination to escape. He ran for the lifeboats.

  Dale had been about halfway down when the entire back deck seemed to rise up and rush at him. A tremendous shock wave ripped Dale from the staircase and dropped him into the looming cloud of smoke.

  Anthony Gervasio, engineer on the Bankston, saw the flood lights blink out on the rig. Two or three seconds later, a small explosion lit up aft of the derrick. He frantically reached for an explanation that would lead to some ordinary conclusion. Some welding work? A backfire? Nothing fit. He had no idea what to do. He broke for the engine room door and saw, or felt, another bigger explosion and only then did he know there was no ordinary explanation. “The rig just blew up,” he shouted. And then he remembered they still had the mud hose on board. He called for help and ran out to disconnect the hose. Together they hit the quick-release coupling, untied it, and dropped it overboard.

  After the panicked call from the drill floor, Randy Ezell hung up the phone and lunged for the coveralls hanging on the hook by his door, hopping on one leg and then the other to get them on. He pulled socks on his feet and jammed them in his boots. Then he remembered his hard hat was across the hall in the toolpusher’s office. When he stepped out into the hallway, he was dimly aware there were people there, but he barely noticed them. He had only one thought, one purpose: Get to the drill floor fast.

  He was reaching for his hard hat in the toolpusher’s office when the explosion picked him up and threw him against a bulkhead twenty feet away. The lights went out. The hum of the air handler stopped. Nothing moved. It was silent, deathly calm. He noticed he was covered with debris. He tried to get up but he couldn’t move. He tried again, but he was pinned. Whatever was on top of him weighed a ton. He felt a surge of fear and frustration. He thought, “Either you get up or you’re going to lay here and die.”

  Randy tried again, but his leg was stuck. He pulled it with every ounce of strength and desperation he owned and it came free. He stood up and instantly realized standing had been a mistake. A cloud of smoke seared his eyes and choked him. He knew from his safety training to get down low. There is always cool oxygen on the deck and he was determined to find it even if he had to suck air from the cracks in the floor. He dropped to his hands and knees, but he had lost any sense of direction. He just froze and tried to think, Which way is it?

  Just then, he felt the faintest puff of air, and decided it had to be coming from the hallway. He crawled toward the air, but the living quarters had been demolished, so he had to move carefully over unidentifiable debris. When he made it to the doorway, he realized that the air he had felt was actually methane. Randy could feel it condensing in drops on the side of his face. Knowing a single spark could ignite the gas at any moment didn’t make his painful progress any easier, nor did the dizziness and blurred vision that overtook him as the gas was absorbe
d by his skin. As he crawled forward, carefully feeling ahead for anything sharp or jagged, his hand hit something solid and yielding. It was a body. He couldn’t see who it was in the absolute darkness. Then he saw a light flickering in the hall ahead of him. It bounced and faltered as it grew stronger. It occurred to him it was a flashlight held by someone stumbling down the hall through the debris.

  Suddenly the flashlight was in his eyes. Randy saw that the man holding it was the electrical supervisor, Stan Carden. They shined the light on the man down on the floor and saw it was the toolpusher Wyman Wheeler. Wyman had been the one who’d had a bad feeling about the negative test, and now here he was, seriously injured in the wreckage. As they were tending to Wyman, Jimmy Harrell emerged from his room in nothing but coveralls. He looked stunned.

  “I was in the shower,” Jimmy said. “I bent over, and when I stood up, the walls of my room were gone.” He rubbed his eyes, gritting them furiously. “I think I’ve got something in my eyes.”

  Randy looked down and noticed Jimmy didn’t have any shoes.

  “Jimmy,” he said, “I’ve got Wyman down right here.”

  Jimmy said he had to find some shoes and get to the bridge. He went off down the hall, picking his way through the tangled ruins of the accommodations. Randy and Stan were pulling debris off Wyman when another flashlight appeared. It was Chad Murray, the chief electrician. They sent Chad off to find a stretcher, and kept digging. After a while, Randy thought they might be able to help Wyman to his feet and carry him out. He hadn’t forgotten the methane, and he didn’t want to stay in there a second longer than he had to. They lifted Wyman up and put his arms around their shoulders. He took a couple of steps and grunted in pain.

  “Set me down. Set me down,” he said.

  They did what he asked. Wyman put his head back and closed his eyes.

  “Y’all go on,” he said. “Save yourselves.”

  Randy leaned over Wyman and waited for his eyes to open. When they did, he looked into them. “No, we’re not going to leave you. We’re not going to leave you in here.”

  From down the hall they heard a weak, strangled call. “God help me. Somebody please help me.” The sound seemed to be coming from the entrance to what had been the maintenance office. All Randy could see was a pair of feet sticking out from a pile of wreckage.

  They told Wyman they’d be right back and began to pull debris off the pile above the feet. Almost immediately, they hit something solid and heavy. It was a steel door, and it was lying on top of whoever belonged to the feet. As they bent together and pulled it off, they recognized the man beneath the door as Buddy Trahan, the Transocean VIP. Buddy had left the tour at the bridge early and went down to the accommodations. When he passed by the subsea supervisor’s office he saw Chris Pleasant desperately calling the rig floor and getting no response.

  “What’s going on?” Buddy asked.

  “Buddy, we got to go,” Chris said, jumping up. They took off running, but got separated. Buddy ended up here, underneath this steel door. The door was sticky with blood and as they heaved to push it aside, they saw why. One of the steel hinges had pierced Buddy’s neck, leaving a hole the size of a golf ball in the flesh a half inch from the carotid artery. As Randy bent to comfort him he saw that what at first looked like a black shirt was the bare, blackened skin of his back where his clothes had burned from his belt to his head. A long, deep gash on his left thigh pulsed blood onto the floor. Between pulses, Randy thought he could see bone through the torn cloth and flesh. It was hard to understand why Buddy was conscious.

  Clearly, he was their most critical casualty. So when Chad came back with the stretcher, they loaded Buddy first. It took all three of them to get the stretcher out into the open because one of them had to go ahead and clear the debris hanging from the ceiling and jutting up from the floor. The space they had lived in for years was unrecognizable to them. When they emerged on deck, Stan and Chad took the stretcher and headed to the forward lifeboats. Randy stayed with Wyman. He’d said he would not leave him, and he couldn’t do much, but he intended to at least honor that promise.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  MAYDAY

  2149 Hours, April 20, 2010

  Block 252, Mississippi Canyon, Gulf of Mexico

  Andrea Fleytas had been monitoring the dynamic positioning system on the bridge of the Horizon when she felt a jolt. Before she could make sense of it—a rig-shaking shock that came out of nowhere—magenta warnings began flashing on her screen. Magenta meant the most dangerous level of combustible gas intrusion.

  Andrea was a triple minority on Deepwater Horizon. She was a woman, a Latina, and she was a Left Coaster. It was hard to say which one made her stand out the most. She grew up in an East Los Angeles barrio, excelled in high school, and graduated from the California Maritime Academy. When she earned her four-year degree at the top of her class, she got this job with Transocean. Not many years ago, the offshore business was an insider’s game—you had to know someone in Transocean to have a prayer of getting hired. And that’s if you were a man. The oil business was an old boys’ club, and everyone knew it. A woman taking that on had to have special self-confidence, and even at the young age of twenty-three, Andrea had it.

  But when faced with the multiple magenta alarms, she froze. Her training had taught her that when more than one warning light flashed, she needed to hit the general alarm immediately. Now there were so many lights flashing, she didn’t know how to respond.

  Andrea’s supervisor, Yancy Keplinger, felt the jolt, too. He abruptly left Captain Curt and the puzzled BP VIPs he’d been tutoring on the dynamic positioning simulator in the middle of the bridge and strode to where Andrea sat at the main control console a few steps away. He punched a few buttons to point a closed-circuit television camera to the starboard side of the rig. On the monitor, he saw mud streaming out of a diverter pipe.

  The phone rang and Andrea answered it.

  It was the rig floor. A voice said they were fighting a kick from the well, then hung up. The magenta alarms kept flashing, indicating one part of the rig after another.

  Then all the screens blipped off. The room went dark. For a moment, there was an almost complete silence.

  A backup battery kicked on and the screens came back to life. Andrea and Yancy checked the monitors. No engines, no thrusters, and except for the emergency battery on the bridge, no power whatsoever. A flash of light lit the walls followed instantly by a bang so loud it was impossible to tell if it was heard or felt. Yancy called the rig floor. Nobody answered. Now Andrea jumped up and hit the general alarm. She grabbed the radio and began calling over an open channel, yelling, “Mayday, mayday. This is Deepwater Horizon.”

  Curt heard Andrea repeating the mayday. It was a direct violation of chain of command. Regulations permitted only the captain to give the order to call mayday.

  He came up behind her: “I didn’t give you authority to do that.”

  The first blast shook chief engineer Steve Bertone out of bed. Bertone was thirty-nine. His black hair was shaved close on the sides and flat on top, and he had the shadow of a goatee on his chin. He’d been on the Horizon since 2003, and he’d been chief engineer for seventeen months. He was a direct and earnest man with an intelligent intensity about him. He wasn’t excitable, a “sky-is-falling” type. But that huge thump that kicked him awake must mean that something was falling. He thought that the wire holding the fifty-ton top drive block must have parted, and the shattering crash was the block coming down the derrick. His first thought was that he needed to get to the bridge. He pulled on clothes, work boots, grabbed his hard hat and life vest, then ran out into the hallway. Four or five people were clustered at the bottom of the central stairwell, frozen, looking up as if they couldn’t understand what they were seeing. Steve followed their gaze. There was so much debris, he couldn’t tell if the stairs were there or not. Either way, it was completely impassable.

  Steve had to break the spell. “Take the port for
ward or starboard forward spiral staircases!” he hollered. “Go to your emergency stations!”

  Steve took the port staircase up to the bridge and went to his station, the rear port-side computer. He saw immediately what they were dealing with. No power and no thrusters. He picked up the phone and punched 2268, the engine control room, before he realized there wasn’t a dial tone. He put the receiver down, then picked it up. Still no dial tone. He did it again. There were no phones.

  “We have no coms!” he shouted. He ran over to the starboard window and looked back at the derrick. In shock and denial, he hadn’t even registered the second explosion. He was still expecting to see a jumble of steel and pipe that had crashed down on the rig floor. Instead, where the derrick had been, he saw a great wall of fire.

  Doug Brown and Mike Williams stumbled from the collapsed engine control room onto the rear of the rig. When they got their eyes cleaned out enough to see, they noticed several things. Where there had been a lifeboat deck, there was no lifeboat deck. Where there had been two lifeboats, there were no lifeboats. Where there had been a walkway and handrails, there was only a ragged ledge dropping off into darkness. If they had stumbled one more step, they would have been in the ocean. Mike was still horribly confused, but he knew this: Something really, really bad had happened, and it wasn’t going to get any better any time soon.

  Now Doug was sure Mike was in shock. Blood was still pouring from the wound in his forehead. Doug decided that whatever else he had to do, he first had to get Mike to a medic. Now that the rear of the rig had blown off, they had no choice but to make their way clear across the rig to the bow.

  They took the back steps to the main pipe deck. As they cleared the last step, they were almost knocked over by a blast of heat followed by an unbearable hissing sound, like something emitted from the lungs of a gigantic and predatory creature on the verge of roaring. Flames shot more than 200 feet into the sky, consuming the derrick from legs to peak. They understood now for the first time what had happened. Doug felt sick as he looked at the place where the drill floor should have been and saw only fire. He wanted desperately to imagine a way the drill crew could have gotten out in time, but he couldn’t do it.