Fire on the Horizon (3 page)

The four massive support columns looked like highway tres
tles, or the limbs of a brontosaurus, supporting what appeared to be a crowded construction site in the early stages of the creation of a small skyscraper. The Eiffel Tower–like steel structure in the middle of the rig was an oil derrick, rising to 260 feet above the deck from a forty-eight-foot-square base. Two built-in cranes to either side of the tower were designed to transfer steel pipe and other heavy equipment used in well drilling from supply boats to what was known as the rig floor—a platform surrounding the derrick one level above the main deck. Clinging beneath the main deck was the “accommodation block,” a two-deck honeycomb of steel that was basically a combination hotel and office building. In addition to crew cabins, conference rooms, and offices, there was a kitchen, a dining hall, a movie theater, a gymnasium, an infirmary, and a lounge—everything needed to house, feed, care for, and entertain the full complement of 126 oil workers, sailors, and managers.

Some of those top managers, beginning with the offshore installation manager (always called the OIM), who was the top on-rig authority, and the captain, who answered to the OIM except when the rig was moving between wells, had already been in Korea for months. They had been monitoring the progress of the rig construction from a temporary field office, the working euphemism for two large shipping containers that had been dropped a hundred yards from the drydock where the Horizon sat.

As the February 2001 launch grew near, more and more managers—
layers
of management, really—arrived to familiarize themselves with the rig’s equipment and systems and to set about preparing step-by-step procedures for everything from maintenance of the air-conditioning system to emergency evacuations. The managers of the drilling operations—men with quaint oil field titles like senior toolpusher, toolpusher, driller—were joined
by mariners with familiar titles like chief mate, second mate, and not so familiar ones like dynamic positioning officer. Doug’s group included technical specialists—the mechanics, electronic technicians, supply supervisors, and subsea engineers who dealt with some of the most important equipment on the rig, the tools that would be lowered beneath the sea to control the well when drilling began. R&B Falcon had given the rig managers a virtual blank check to furnish and appoint their brand-new homes. So many crates of expensive equipment—from new wrenches to reading lamps, flat-screen TVs to office chairs—would eventually accumulate in their cramped work area that movement was nearly impossible.

But they were still a long way from any of that as the bus stopped to drop off Doug and his new colleagues at the crude field office, which they immediately took to sardonically calling “the White House,” where they were destined to spend most of their time for the three tedious months remaining until the rig floated. As they acclimated to the strange surroundings, getting used to kimchi at every meal and the way the Korean workers began each morning with mass calisthenics to the beat of American rock songs blaring from loudspeakers, the resident project manager made it clear that until the rig floated, all that any of them could do when they ventured onto the Horizon was watch how the Koreans handled the equipment and take notes.

For much of their twelve-hour shifts in the White House, they were planted in front of computer screens, writing a kind of owner’s manual for the new rig and all its equipment. In Doug’s case, as chief mechanic, that meant creating procedures for the operation, care, and maintenance of his primary concern—the six huge engines—and all the gritty details: the sewage systems, ventilation blowers, fuel lines, water delivery, and the myriad of other mechanical components required to keep the ship afloat and the rig hands
comfortable. If the rig were a Ferrari, Doug and his staff would be the staff of full-time mechanics who not only maintained and repaired the engine, but saw to the air-conditioning, the brakes, the suspension, the power windows, the wiper fluid—everything that moved or sparked from bumper to bumper.

It was all essential, if not always exciting.

For now, though, tapping away at the keyboard in the White House, it was mostly just boring.

At his first opportunity, Doug pushed away from the table he was calling a desk, the computer he’d barely set up, and went out to the rig. It rose 395 feet from the ground to the top of the derrick, the equivalent of a forty-story skyscraper.

He took the temporary stairs that had been plopped down beside the rig by a crane and climbed to the third deck, which was actually the first deck from the ground. He threaded his way through the uniformed workers, an incongruous white giant passing through the crowded construction site, and headed for the engine room. The engines were lined up at the aft end of the third deck, three on the port side and three on the starboard. Between them, and half a deck up, was the engine control room, or ECR, which would be Doug’s office. But he went straight for the engines.

There were six diesels, all muscular curves and cast steel sinew, the length of a semitrailer and three times his height. The nearly 10,000 horses they generated served a single purpose—to rotate a generator shaft 720 times per minute, sweeping it through a magnetic field to create 11,000 volts of pure electrical energy. The electricity would surge through the ship’s veins, arteries, and capillaries to power everything from the smallest light socket to the big thrusters mounted 125 feet below his feet. The engines were
what you’d build if money were no object, gleaming with as-yet untapped power.

The Korean technicians fussed around them, looking like laboratory assistants with clipboards, timers, and measurement devices recording every vibration—every movement—each engine made. As Doug drew near, he could feel the Koreans watching him skeptically, this large, lumbering American with sloping shoulders and thick legs, drawn to the engines as if against his will.

For the first time he felt the urge he would feel a thousand times more, to reach out and run his hand along the diesel’s flank, to whisper his admiration. But the next thing he knew, the Koreans coalesced around him in a protective knot and admonished him shrilly. The translation was clear: look but don’t touch. Until all the papers were signed and sealed, this rig still belonged to them, and they weren’t going to let Doug lay a finger on those engines.

Coming back down the stairs, Doug felt the bitterness of the Korean winter wind. It was so cold. Growing up in California and spending his working years between the waterways of Iraq and the balmy Gulf of Mexico, Doug had never known a high-latitude winter. If he had, maybe he wouldn’t have left his cup of coffee in the cold while he sought out his engines—he returned just then to a mug of caffeinated slush. And maybe he’d have packed more than a sweatshirt to stay warm.

Doug had a streak of stubbornness in him, too. He sat there every day typing up his procedures, his body tensed against the cold, shivering and turning a bluish tint. When he had to go outside, he ran from one door to the next, his shoulders to his ears.

A big, strong, moon-faced man had been watching this dance with equal parts amusement and sympathy. He approached with a duffel bag and pulled a pair of thermal coveralls from it with a
mangled, four-fingered hand. “Looks like you might need these more than I do.”

His name was Jason Anderson. He’d worked oil rigs since his first (and only) summer at community college, when his dad pulled strings to get him a job chipping paint and lugging garbage. It was scut work, the bottom of the ladder, but something about the life aboard a rig grabbed him. Jason got through another year of school, but as fast as he could manage he was back on a rig full-time, moving quickly to the center of the action as a drill floor roughneck. Roughnecks were pushed hard twelve hours a day by the drillers, who weren’t always picky about their motivational techniques. With the sun beating down hard and no protection from the wind and rain—coupled with the scuffs and bruises of constant manual labor—most roughnecks had the physical proof of their position after a couple of years. Some remained in that job much longer than it took for the skin of their necks to coarsen, but Jason was smart and motivated. He worked his way up the stations of the rig, the jobs as blunt as their names–shaker hand, pit hand, derrickman. Everyone knew he’d eventually make toolpusher, the drilling foreman. He had a gift for getting people to want to work for him. He was the kind of man who would give up a pair of warm coveralls to a cold stranger in a strange place. It was a gesture that sparked a friendship that would last as long as the Deepwater Horizon.

CHAPTER TWO

OIL AND WATER

1896
Summerland, California

Since a time beyond memory, black streaks of oil and thick veins of tar have seeped from the rocks and sand of the California coast. Native people used it as caulk for their canoes and glue for their tools. Early European settlers dug pits to mine it for building material and fuel. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, oil wild-catters working on the California coast south of Santa Barbara in a place called Summerland realized that the seeping indicated a large reserve of crude oil beneath the surface. As they sunk wells into the ground, they followed the oil field toward the ocean. The closer they got to the shoreline, the more oil they found. When they drilled on the beach itself, the returns were greater yet.

What would you have done?

In 1896, the first offshore oil derrick rose at the end of a pier stretching into the surf. When the well sucked the oil dry, the pier was extended and another derrick built, until finally the water was simply too deep to go any farther.

Eleven years later: a surveyor in east Texas for the Gulf Refining Company, intrigued by the eye-stinging mists that lingered above the dark waters of Lake Caddo, held a struck match over the side of his small, trolling boat and caused a burst of blue methane to flare into the night. Three years later, Gulf Oil floated an armada of barges bearing pile drivers and derricks up the Red River into the lake. Using local cypress trees, they drove pilings into the lake bottom, then built freestanding platforms far from shore and commenced drilling.

Not far away, in the Louisiana swamps, the Texas Company was also having success with pilings and platforms. But building platforms from scratch was expensive, and they weren’t easily recycled one well to the next. That meant the company was paying construction crews for lost time when oil wasn’t flowing. The financial imperative was obvious. They conceived of an odd plan: they sunk two large barges in the shallow swamp as a base, then welded a platform to support a derrick on top. When the well was depleted, the barges could be refloated and towed off to the next site, where the process would be repeated. The lost time was reduced from more than two weeks to just two days.

Eventually, the entire arrangement was constructed in advance—a drilling platform perched on tall columns attached to two immense pontoons. The platform was towed, floating on the pontoons, to the drill site. Then the pontoons were flooded, and the whole arrangement sank to the bottom, supporting the platform above the surface. When it was time to move to another location, the pontoons were refilled with air and rose to the surface. They were called submersible rigs, and with elongated columns, they could operate in as much as a hundred feet of water.

In 1961, one of these submersible rigs, owned by Shell Oil Company, was being towed in heavy weather. The platform, rocking like the hand of a metronome high above the waves, threatened to capsize the rig. The operator, desperate to lower the center of gravity, allowed water to partially fill the pontoons, which sank below the surface, but not to the bottom. Instantly, the stability of the rig improved dramatically.

A Shell engineer named Bruce Collipp happened to be on board. Collipp had a background in naval engineering—unusual in the oil business, but ideal for the situation at hand. He immediately saw the possibilities suggested by the performance of the partially submerged rig. He came up with a design for a drilling vessel intended to operate at varying levels of submersion, controlled by ballast tanks in the pontoons. The design proved to be so stable when the rig was partially submerged that it prompted an outrageous idea: drilling could commence while the rig was still afloat. This was no longer a clever way to elevate a platform above the waves. It was a kind of ship.

But Shell didn’t want to call it that, for fear of placing operations under the thumb of the famously tough maritime unions. So when Collipp was explaining his design to the New Orleans Coast Guard officer, he stressed the idea of a submersible that, nevertheless, operated while only partially submerged. The officer, apparently convinced, merely took up the license application and, under “vessel type,” wrote “semi-submersible.”

That same year, the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences launched the first attempt to explore the earth’s deep geology beneath the planet’s outer crust. It was known as the Mohole Project. Drilling into the earth’s inner mantle would
have been virtually impossible from the solid surface, where the crust can be twenty-two miles thick. Project designers came up with an audacious strategy: take advantage of some of the deepest waters in the world to get thousands of feet closer to their target.

They hired the experimental offshore rig CUSS I (named with the initials of the consortium of oil companies that owned it) to test the theory that a rig could operate in deep water. Project engineers developed an entirely new system for drilling that used radar and underwater sonar sensors to provide continuous information about the ship’s exact position—“dynamic positioning,” they called it.

Some garbage scow.

While on board the CUSS I for
Life
magazine, Steinbeck wrote:

Success or failure of the daring enterprise hinged upon the ability of the pilot to hold the CUSS at a precise position, as unmoving as if planted in concrete instead of being adrift on a turbulent ocean. To achieve this the pilot used a complex control console designed by Marine Engineer Robert Taggart to regulate four outboard motors, two on each side of the CUSS, which could nudge the vessel in any desired direction. The crucial task was to keep the drilling derrick directly over the hole in the ocean bottom, 2.3 miles below, where the drill turned in the earth’s crust. The long string of pipe would bend only so much. If the barge moved more than 1,000 feet from center, the pipe would snap, the drilling operation would be over—and the resulting recoil would jolt the craft and seriously endanger the crew. To avert such a disaster, the pilot watched blips on his radar and sonar screens…their pattern told him at any given moment whether and where he was drifting so he could compensate by manipulating motors.