Fire on the Horizon (11 page)

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.

Even when instructed to pare down the list to the bare essentials, the quote came in at more than one hundred thousand dollars.

And signs were just the beginning of the safety spending. Lifeboats, each costing the amount of an average American house, topped the list, but in aggregate the costs of preventing minor injuries was much higher. Teams of contractors descended on every newly built vessel to push safety videos, manuals, and contraptions of all types aimed at ensuring a safe work environment. They found a receptive market in Transocean executives, who competed
to champion innovations in shipboard safety before they filled out their end-of-year self-evaluation forms, which had a place to list them. The emphasis on safety had resulted in some excellent ideas, such as positioning automatic defibrillators on the rig floor and in the engine room, but not all the ideas proved so practical. One company scoured public industry incident reports and found minor injuries related to the use of sledgehammers. They devised an alternative tool, a pole that would be centered on a stuck bolt with two handgrips, one to hold the pole steady, and the other to hoist up a sliding weight. The rig hand straddled the device and proceeded to pull up on the weight, a physical task accompanied with a grunt, then let it drop down the pole. Of course the device didn’t loosen bolts very well, but it was nevertheless used because the repeated action—pelvic thrust, grunt, pelvic thrust, grunt—always managed to illicit an adolescent response from coworkers.

Another safety device sold to the rigs was called a “back-scratcher,” a steel cage affixed to vertical ladders to prevent a climber from falling backward off the ladder. But that wasn’t safe enough. Transocean managers ordered containers full of wires, harnesses, carabiners, fall arrestors, and mounting gear, along with technicians who would bolt failsafe devices to any ladder over six feet high. Rig hands were then required to don five-point harnesses and clip into the failsafes. One employee became famous for voicing the prevailing sentiment: “I was never afraid of climbing a ladder until I came to work for Transocean.”

Though there were always some who griped about what sometimes seemed like overkill in safety initiatives, most rig workers—who, after all, had their fingers, toes, limbs, skull, and butts on the line—wholeheartedly supported the safety programs. Occasionally a little too wholeheartedly.

In 2009 Transocean asked each rig to produce its own footage
of work situations that created a hand injury risk, for inclusion in a company-wide safety video. The idea was to get jaded rig crews to pay attention to these usually boring films by featuring real coworkers instead of hiring actors. One rig under BP contract—the Development Driller II—got the message, marked urgent, to send in video ASAP. The medic grabbed a willing crew member and, camcorder in hand, went down to the rig’s machine shop. His instruction to the crew member was to put his hand near the blade of the device to demonstrate the dangers of improper hand placement. They turned on the camcorder, turned on the saw, and proceeded to capture a more gruesome scene than the managers had asked for.

For Transocean execs, even the company’s cornerstone of safety—a mandatory time-out before even the simplest procedures to take a moment to assess potential dangers, called THINK—didn’t guarantee the level of safety awareness they were striving for. So they created another program with yet another acronym whose initials were a mystery to almost everyone. It was called START (See, Think, Act, Reinforce, Track, as it happens) and required all rig workers to become impromptu safety control managers. At least once a day, employees were required to circulate the deck with a pocketful of index cards, each slightly longer than a dollar bill and printed with a checklist of potential hazards. When they saw safety principles being violated, they were supposed to check the corresponding hazard on the START card. Was someone missing a hard hat? Check. Safety glasses? Check. Was heavy material being moved without regard for possible pinch points or crush points? Check. Were there any slippery surfaces in a work area? And so on.

No minimum number of cards was required, but the common
wisdom on the rig was that “a START card a day keeps the rig manager away.”

Every check mark for major or minor violations of safety rules, every missing earplug or tripping hazard, was logged in a giant computer database onshore. The numbers were tracked—the amount of cards submitted by each division, rig, and even each individual employee could be spit out in an instant.

Often the data was used to make new safety policies. One year too many cards came in about missing hard hats, so the managers bought chin straps to keep the hard hats from blowing off in the wind. Of course most of the missing hard hats had nothing to do with wind, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that Transocean was tracking the potential for injury and actively working to correct problems.

The focus on safety expressed itself most immediately in the pre-job meetings—without which no procedure on the rig, however routine, can begin. All work is shut down and relevant personnel are gathered on the rig floor to review the procedure. The senior supervisors each take a turn saying things like, “I know you’ve all done it a million times, but you can’t let your guard down. It’s a big job. This is heavy machinery, heavy equipment, things can turn ugly, so keep your head on a swivel.” Some of the southerners—thoroughly used to the idea that everyone within hearing was male—might try for something a little more colorful, along the lines of “Men, make sure you don’t put your hands anywhere you wouldn’t put your dick…” Then all the other supervisors would pretty much repeat the same message, beginning, “As Jimmy says…”

The men made eye contact and nodded, but most were just waiting to get on with the job. They knew the drill, knew they had to appear as if they were hearing all this for the first time, even
as they were engaged in a raging internal debate over whether the terrorists took over the skyscraper in
Die Hard
or
Die Harder
. It wasn’t that they didn’t care about safety. But they were like frequent flyers who had to listen to the attendant’s spiel about where to find the flotation cushions for the eight millionth time. They knew, they knew.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE FLOOD

May 2008

Gulf of Mexico

One day in the spring of 2008, Dave Young was onshore, dry and comfortable in his Connecticut home, when he decided to check in with the rig. One of the watch crew, a dynamic positioning officer, answered the phone on the bridge. Dave could immediately hear the strain in his voice.