Fire on the Horizon (7 page)

Theoretically.

The Horizon motored on its own power through the China Sea to Singapore, then out into the Indian Ocean, where it rendezvoused with the tow ship for the longest leg of its journey, the six-thousand-mile trek to Cape Town, South Africa. The mariners on the Horizon worked with the tow ship’s crew for a week. They didn’t really know what to expect, as they had never worked with the particular drag coefficients of the pontoons and the thrusters, which projected nineteen feet below. They ran through all possible combinations of thruster direction and throttle, but all they accomplished was to burn more gas. They adjusted the cable connecting the two vessels, trying to find the perfect length, one that would minimize the yo-yoing between slack and taut, and ensure that both ships crested the waves at the same moment. But nothing helped. Every inch, every ounce of the Deepwater Horizon had been built for stability, not speed. That was its deepest nature, and it wasn’t budging. All the tugging and engine revving in the world couldn’t change that, a strength of its industrial character that its crew noted with something akin to pride—even as it condemned them to months at sea. There was nothing to do now but ride it out, cut the tow ship loose, and go the whole route at the Horizon’s natural ambling pace—which meant that the voyage they’d hope to make in under fifty days would take ninety-eight, costing the company millions of unbudgeted dollars.

For the crew, it meant a suspension of life as usual, the only long stretch in its history where the Horizon would be more ship than rig. Used to having helicopters fly them to the nearest airport and connections home every few weeks, the crew would have to
get used to the idea that until they arrived in Cape Town, they’d have no more options than the crews of nineteenth-century sailing vessels—and even less available speed.

Of course, they wouldn’t be drilling, either. But that didn’t mean they weren’t busy. In fact, the sailors on board were more occupied and urgently necessary than at any time in the rig’s life, completing half a circumnavigation of the world, dealing with fine points of navigation, winds, currents, propulsion, and all the unexpected contingencies they’d trained for years to meet. Doug had a blessed stretch in which to bond with his engines and work out all the remaining kinks in the rig’s other machinery, and in his own crew of mechanics. And the toolpushers, the drilling foremen, were like nineteenth-century gunnery captains who, with no enemy within a thousand miles, nonetheless exercised the gun crews night after night, urging them on to faster and more accurate practice, so that when a foreign sail did appear on the horizon, they’d be ready, and deadly.

In the Horizon’s case, of course, they weren’t running cannons out gunports, but conducting performance tests on the cranes and drilling equipment, tuning up the blowout preventer and chasing all the bugs out of the rig’s software. And their “enemy” wouldn’t bear up on a stiff wind, but would be waiting for them at destination’s end—if there was an end—in the form of a BP test well where the Horizon and its crew would have to prove themselves before they could go on to their first working assignment and begin to earn their keep.

As the crew busily attended to their varied pursuits, the divisions between them that had been largely ignored in Korea began to peek through in small ways. The drilling crew, anticipating its deepwater destiny, might pester the mariners, constantly asking, “What’s the water depth here?” The mariners, concerned with
winds, currents, and making their way across the
surface
of the ocean, couldn’t care less once they were far enough from land not to worry about grounding the rig, and didn’t have equipment to calculate such great depths in any case. They’d react to the inquiries as if they were dealing with annoying kids in the backseat constantly piping up with “are we there yet?” Even something as prosaic as the derrick lights might become proxy for a low-grade culture war. The drilling crew would turn them on, and the glare off the sea spray would blind the watch-standers, those constantly on the lookout for obstructions floating in the dark water. When the crew complained that lack of lights was creating a safety hazard on deck, the mariners told them to carry a flashlight, that hitting another ship because they couldn’t see was a far more significant safety concern. Inevitably, it would take one of the mariners who had been around, who knew how to translate in a way Yankees and southerners and even Left Coasters would all understand. The conversation went something like this:

INTERPRETER:
Pretend this is your pickup truck, and your kid, sitting in the backseat, turns on the interior light; makes it kinda hard to see, right?

DRILLER:
Yeah, but these are
outside
lights!

INTERPRETER (PATIENTLY):
Okay, think about fog. Would you turn on the high beams of your four-by-four in fog? Now think of the sea mist as small particles of fog and the derrick lights as giant high beams…see the problem?

That did it. The drill crew not only complied but in the weeks ahead would eagerly search the decks after each sunset looking for rogue lights on the derrick to switch off, a recognition that they were, in the final analysis, all in the same boat.

Six hundred miles off the southern tip of India, the Horizon crossed the equator. Jason Anderson had been here just the year before as one of the crew sea-testing an unfinished rig, Transocean’s Cajun Express, which was being towed from Singapore to Grand Isle, Louisiana, where it would be completed. Shortly after the journey, Jason left Transocean for a job with R&B Falcon and ended up here, about to cross the equator for a second time. So he knew what was coming—an ancient and abundantly bizarre initiation called the shellback ceremony.

Shellbacks like Jason, those who had been initiated on a previous voyage, took control of the deck as the crossing neared. The highest-ranking shellback became King Neptune, in this case a wild-man electronics technician named Gene Frevele, whose coils of brown hair streamed from under a tinfoil crown embossed with some kind of crustacean. He ruled over the proceedings with a trident of welded metal rods. Jason, an irrepressible extrovert, enthusiastically played the second lead in this production, as the “Sea Baby.” He wore the headband of a welder’s face mask trimmed with colored rags that hung down like hair. His shorts had been ripped into rags and his work shirt cut off below his chest, leaving exposed in all its glory his hairy melon of a belly—which he had smeared with grease. He loved his opportunity to ham it up for the new kids, the “pollywogs,” who, as the tradition demanded, would be subjected to all kinds of imaginative humiliation and abuse before they could emerge from their embryonic state and join the society of shellbacks.

In the navies of previous centuries, the initiation ceremonies could be brutal. Pollywogs were covered with filth, forced to eat noxious substances, beaten with boards and salt-stiffened ropes,
sometimes even tossed overboard and dragged in the surf. Injuries were common and deaths not unheard of. As late as 1995, in a shellback ceremony captured on video aboard an Australian submarine, a pollywog was sexually assaulted with a stick.

Naval regulations have been instituted to curb abuses, but on commercial vessels, individual traditions still determine the nature of shellback initiations.

The guiding ethos on the Deepwater Horizon could be summarized as “good-natured gross-out.” The conspiring shellbacks had been saving the food waste from the compost barrel in the mess hall for two days, which they ladled out of noxious-smelling pots and poured into an improvised wading pool. The blindfolded pollywogs had to “drink” the brew (they spit it out) and crawl through the slops, then rinse off in a tub of yellowed oily water the shellbacks called “whale piss.”

For their final act of obeisance, the ’wogs were led, still blindfolded, to Baby King Neptune. They were ordered to kneel, whereupon Jason magnanimously accepted the initiates into his kingdom by rubbing their faces in his Vaseline- and food slop-encrusted belly.

When it was over, the slime washed off in the shower, but the bond—of the ceremony and of the shared, interminable crawl across a vast and empty ocean—remained.

The jovial mood wouldn’t last long. Just three days later, one of Doug’s motormen, a good-natured man named Jack Parento who had robustly played a pirate in the shellback festivities, with a red bandanna and black eye patch, was on shift when he began complaining about a bad case of heartburn. He asked if he could go see a medic, and of course Doug let him go. An hour or so later, the shift electrician found Doug and said, “Did you hear about Jack?”

“What do you mean?”

“I just passed by the medics’ office. They had Jack on a bed with wires all over his chest. They said he’d had a heart attack. The medics gave him CPR and brought him back. He’s stable, but in bad shape.”

They were still too far from anywhere for a helicopter to evacuate Jack. In what they all knew was probably a futile gesture, the captain ordered all thrusters to go full out.

That night, Jack suffered a second heart attack, and could not be revived.

It hit the crew hard. Conversation all but ceased as everyone went through the motions of rig life that night. Doug’s shop was especially devastated. Jack had been the joker, always the guy to get everyone loose when things got tense. The coffee cup he’d used every day—featuring a girl in a bikini with cleavage that commanded attention, beneath which was written, “Watch my back”—just sat on a desk in the engine control room, reminding them all how one moment you could be alive, laughing and cutting up in a pirate outfit, and the next, gone.

It made them all feel even worse that they were still weeks away from any place where Jack’s body could receive proper attention. There was no choice but to clear out the food from one of the cold storage lockers and store the corpse there until they reached port—still thousands of miles distant. The weight of sadness and the unsettled presence of their rig mate’s inanimate body always in the back of their minds, the incremental creep of progress, not to mention the imminent depletion of their tobacco reserves, began to threaten sanity. Every day, for weeks it seemed, the question “how many days left” would bring precisely the same answer.

But even the longest journey ends. For Jack Parento, it ended on the island of Mauritius, off the eastern coast of Africa. The crew
was not permitted to depart the rig (save for one crewman with an impacted tooth), but the company had flown Parento’s widow in to the island, then landed her on the rig by helicopter. The entire crew participated in the somber memorial service on the rig deck, after which the body was shipped home, while the Deepwater Horizon rounded the Cape and continued to crawl across the Atlantic.

It was late spring when they arrived in the Gulf. The rig latched up to the BP test well and the crew took it through its paces. Some rigs had required months of constant adjustment to pass. The Horizon, having worked all the kinks and bugs out of its drilling systems in the long passage, proved itself in a matter of weeks. Nearly three years after its construction had been commissioned, the Horizon was finally ready to do what it was made to do—but it would not be doing it for R&B Falcon.

The Deepwater Horizon had been a bold addition to what was already the largest fleet of deepwater offshore rigs in the world. Those physical assets, and the great debt that R&B Falcon had incurred in manufacturing them, had driven the company deep into debt, making it a tempting acquisition target for the slightly larger, fiscally sound offshore drilling company Transocean Sedco Forex. As its lengthy name suggests, the company was itself the product of promiscuous mergers that began in 1953 when it acquired the Offshore Company out of Birmingham, Alabama.

Transocean, as the new merged entity would come to be called, had announced its intentions to buy R&B Falcon in a complex $8.8 billion deal months earlier. But the formal document of transfer was not signed until mid-August.

When the crew got the official announcement, Jason, whose first jobs had been on Transocean rigs, told a buddy, “I left them
sum-bitches to come to R&B Falcon and now here I am working for them again!”

The truth was, though the two companies had very different policies and styles—from the way hitches were timed to the role mariners played in day-to-day operations, and a hundred other things—the Horizon would be considered a legacy rig and continue to operate with the strong influence of its original R&B Falcon policies. Change would come so slowly that even years later, offshore veterans would be able to walk onto the Horizon and know which company had built it.

But Transocean’s culture was powerful, and it would soon stamp itself indelibly on the Horizon. Formally based in Switzerland (for tax purposes), Transocean ran its Gulf of Mexico operations out of offices in Houston, and it cultivated a can-do cowboy swagger as a company that could accomplish the near impossible in the new frontier of ultra-deepwater drilling.

“We’re never out of our depth,” was the corporate motto.

CHAPTER SIX

MACONDO

Miocene Epoch, 20 Million B.C.
The Mississippi Canyon

Life, no matter how abundant, ends in death. Every death, no matter how small, is significant. That’s the larger lesson in the deposits of oil and natural gas that lie buried within the earth. Deposits like the one we now know as the Macondo Prospect.

It formed during the Miocene geologic epoch, somewhere between twenty million and ten million years ago, in the depths of an ancient sea, fed by giant rivers—now called the Mississippi and the Red—that drained the nascent North American continent as it drifted away from Europe and Africa. With the Atlantic Ocean slowly growing larger, the nearly enclosed sea that would become the Gulf of Mexico remained remarkably unchanged. The giant rivers that fed nutrients from the eroding land into its warm confines created an explosion of life, most of it microscopic. Contrary to popular myth (and oil company logos), dinosaurs only ruled certain terrestrial neighborhoods of earth—and their corpses didn’t turn into oil. In many ways the most significant impact on
the planet has always been from the smallest life-forms, not the largest. Microorganisms produced the oxygen that transformed the earth’s atmosphere. And microorganisms are largely responsible for the formation of oil and natural gas deposits, the burning of which is altering the atmosphere once again.