Fire on the Horizon (10 page)

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 center 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.

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, Louisiana, or (east) Texas. They all seemed to have nicknames like Big Country, Chickenhawk, Cornbread, Corn
fed
, 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.