Fire on the Horizon (2 page)

I blog daily about the ships and rigs whose stories fascinate me, but I am not a professional writer or a journalist. That is why I have partnered with my co-author, Tom Shroder, a writer and editor with thirty-five years experience at some of the nation’s most respected newspapers, most recently
The Washington Post
.

We did not want this book to be a political argument, or even a judgment on ultimate responsibility for the disaster. The investigations and legal cases that will eventually make those determinations are ongoing, and probably will be for years.

This is not the story of a rig, technology, the environment, corporate policy, or government oversight, but it concerns each. This is the story of men and women. Good men and women facing unprecedented technological challenges under unparalleled economic pressures. It is the story of a way of life, and a devastating tragedy that those challenges and that way of life made only too inevitable.

Nonetheless, I have a personal history that might prompt some readers to look for an element of bias in this book. While working for Transocean in 2008, I found myself balancing the needs of my crew with the rapid growth of a company working through a large merger and expanding to meet the needs of the energy bubble. I got into a dispute with company management over safety procedures. As a result of the dispute, I was placed on leave, and then finally administratively discharged without notice of fault. As I have mentioned, I went on to other jobs in the industry with companies including BP and to develop gCaptain. Despite that dispute, there are still many things about Transocean I respect and admire, and many, many people who I worked with there for whom I have deep affection.

I can attest that Tom and I have desired only to reflect the Deepwater Horizon’s reality as truly as we can. To that end we have based our account on interviews with firsthand sources, thousands of pages of sworn testimony, official reports, and public documents. I ask that you read this book, and judge for yourselves if we have succeeded.

—John Konrad

PROLOGUE:
THE END

2315 Hours, April 20, 2010

Doug Brown, chief mechanic of the Deepwater Horizon, had survived the direct impact of two explosions, guided an injured man to the bridge around piles of debris, and made a harrowing exit from a burning oil rig. But only as his lifeboat pulled away did he realize something was wrong with his left leg. It began to ache, and then the pain blossomed into a fiery torment. The too-recent memory of hiking all over the rig, skirting flames, climbing up and down stairs, seemed like an impossibility. He was a sick kind of dizzy and his head throbbed. The hard bench had become a torture device prodding his lower back into a clenching knot that had grown tighter with each indifferent drop and roll of the lifeboat. He’d find out the physical toll soon enough: a fractured fibula, torn knee tendons, nerve damage, loss of feeling in a softball-sized chunk of his calf, lumbar strain, and a concussion. The psychological and emotional cost would be more difficult to calculate.

After he’d been lifted to safety aboard the rescue boat, there was nothing to do but sit on deck, wait for a medevac helicopter, and watch flames shoot through the top of the Horizon’s derrick a half mile away. It seemed a trick of perception, one of those out-of-body experiences he’d read about. In his mind he was still on the rig, still feeling the heat and the fear. But at the same time he was watching it burn across a dark void. His inexpressible sadness for the Horizon and what it meant—a home and way of life—merged with the pain of names left blank on a muster list. He’d known all eleven of the missing, counted himself close friends with five. There wasn’t anything he could do about any of it, except sit and watch the flames consume the Horizon. There was nothing to do now but witness her death, just as he had witnessed her birth.

CHAPTER ONE

THE BEGINNING

December 2000
Ulsan, South Korea

Half dead from lack of sleep, Doug Brown was staring out the bus window at the gates of the Hyundai Heavy Industries shipyard in Ulsan, South Korea, five thousand miles from home, when a raging flood of scooters and mopeds burst through the winter morning’s fierce grip and woke him up for good. As the violent buzz bore into his eardrums, Doug recoiled at what his American colleagues called the “Hyundai 500,” a name that didn’t sound so sinister back in the States. Some of the scooters were doubled up and stacked so high with bundles and packages that the slightest bump would surely have knocked one into the next and sent the whole mass crashing like dominoes. It seemed to Doug that all ten thousand workers at the world’s largest shipyard were arriving at the same instant, moments before the 0900 start time.

What he could see of the yard through the window looked like an industrial version of Disney World: walkways lined with flowers, buildings seemingly wet with fresh coats of paint, impec
cably dressed security guards with helmets and badges buffed to a pristine, reflective shine. Uniformed signalmen positioned on platforms in the center of the road moved robotically as the chaos swarmed below. The whole crazy scene was framed by five-story-high gantry cranes straddling immense drydocks at the water’s edge, and seagoing vessels laid section by section on a blacktop the size of a Walmart parking lot, as if playful giants had abandoned their toys there.

Rising from the drydocks and floating at mooring cables were more finished or nearly completed ships than at any other shipyard in the world. The vessels were of astonishing variety and power—liquefied natural gas carriers crammed with cryogenics and studded with insulated domes, each the size of a small basketball arena; supertankers capable of carrying two million barrels of oil; car carriers with their tall boxlike hulls and internal maze of ramps capable of holding thousands of vehicles; and countless container-ships without a single container on deck.

If the scooter stampede hadn’t so thoroughly woken him, Doug might have believed he was still dreaming. He’d only been working for the offshore oil company R&B Falcon for two years when his managers pulled him aside and offered him a prestige assignment: chief mechanic of their newest, most technologically advanced rig, still being built in Korea. That was barely a month ago, and now he was in this fantastical place halfway around the world, about to see his new rig—his new home—for the first time.

Doug had grown up in a middle-class family in California. He was a round-faced, round-figured man of average height with kind blue eyes and a laid-back temperament in that open, Pacific Coast way. Nothing about him said striver, yet here he was making a rapid climb in one of the fastest-growing and most profitable industries in the world. He didn’t even have a college degree, but
what he did have was a natural ability to work with machines, and experience.

He’d started out working in construction and landscaping. When the lawn tractors broke down, he was the one who got them running again. He had an intuition about engines, a feeling and liking for them. For most people an engine is an unorganized cacophony of sounds, but to Doug the fast beats of compression and ignition formed an intelligible rhythm. He could tell when a piston misfired by the sound of a missed beat. He had a talent, but no formal training, something he thought he could rectify when he decided to join the army in 1989, at the age of twenty-nine. He started out learning to maintain helicopter engines, then migrated to an oxymoronic job: working on army marine engines during the Persian Gulf War—landing craft, tugboats, and barges used to ferry troops and equipment across rivers and between ports. The closest he and his heart rate came to combat were the poison gas alarms that screamed across his base in Kuwait, signaling the launch of Iraqi Scud missiles in his general direction.

He learned a little about working on the edge of danger, but even more about the complex machines that powered seagoing vessels. Engines were engines—gas had to be delivered from a tank to a chamber where it would mix with air, compress, explode, and drive the movement of a shaft—but ship engines were larger, with more moving parts. He also had to learn the mechanics of auxiliary systems needed on a self-contained vessel at sea: water desalination, ventilation and cooling, hydraulics, even the processing of sewage. While managing these systems lacked the glory of combat infantry, the skill set he’d developed paid off when his army career approached an end in 1998 and he posted his résumé online.

The offers all came from offshore oil companies. He accepted the one from R&B Falcon. The company was not the largest or
the most profitable. If Doug had had a background in finance its balance sheet might have caused him to reconsider. But R&B was pushing into the new frontier of deepwater drilling with an aggressive program of building new rigs, each among the most advanced in the world, and, most importantly to Doug, they offered the highest pay. He wasn’t married, so the schedule of twenty-one days on and twenty-one days off didn’t present any family problems, and the rig’s atmosphere—the smell of burning diesel and the constant grind of heavy equipment, the hierarchical command structure—all reminded him of the military.

He signed on as a mechanic on a rig in the Gulf of Mexico, was promoted quickly to chief mechanic, and had barely settled in to his new supervisory responsibilities when he was swept up in this Korean vortex.

As quickly as the storm of scooters appeared, it passed. The flow slowed to a trickle, and the bus lurched forward, carrying Doug and his future rig mates on a clear path to the docks. As they approached their destination, Doug cocked his head flat against the cold window to get a glimpse of the derrick towering above the Deepwater Horizon.

The Horizon had begun life as simple sheets of thick steel, lifted from trucks by powerful magnets and placed on a gigantic conveyor belt. First stop was an industrial-strength version of Goldfinger’s powerful laser cutter, which sliced the metal into the proper shape. From there the cut steel rolled into the bending room. No machine had yet been invented for the task of shaping such thick steel, so the yard relied on an age-old manipulation by fire and water. The steel was laid down on prefabricated plywood molds, then, with a fire torch in one hand and a garden hose in the other, the master
bender, sitting directly on the steel on a wooden stool, heated the metal till it began to wilt over the plywood frame. Once it fit the form, he’d douse it with water, cooling and immediately hardening the steel. Now cut and shaped, the steel sheets were welded to form tanks, rooms, bulwarks, derrick sections, or any one of the hundred other modules of a rig; then every inch was painted. The finished sections were carted outside to the asphalt assembly lot. There they were outfitted with pipes, electrical cables, gauges, hoses, and the myriad other small components, then stacked and welded together to form massive megablocks, the biggest ones twelve stories high and one to two hundred feet square.

The job of moving these behemoths around the yard fell to oddly small devices called transporters. Just a few feet tall, the transporters had a flat deck, beneath which were 144 small wheels connected to powerful hydraulic jacks. The short profile of the transporters allowed them to crawl underneath the megablocks, where they were linked by a wireless signal from a computer. They moved in unison into position, then the hydraulics engaged, elevating the transporters and lifting the entire megablock off the jacks. Traffic stopped, the roads cleared, and the entire immense assemblage rolled down to the dock. In a short few weeks, huge cranes on barges lifted each megablock into its precise position. Now the growing skeleton was swarmed by workers donning masks, starting generators, lifting spray guns, each performing a single task that inched the rig closer to completion. At first the welders dominated. Men and women wearing leather smocks and face masks covered every corner of the structure, maneuvering across scaffolding and through holes in the bulkhead, which they would eventually weld shut. Painters followed behind the welders, laying coats of protection over the steel. As the rig got closer to completion the ratio of welders to painters tipped and the metallic
smell of burnt steel was replaced with the noxious fumes of drying paint. Then came electricians, pipefitters, electronics techs, quality control engineers, and a myriad of other specialized workers who added layers of complexity until the rig was ready for its final assembly.

This was where Doug came in, about three months before the rig was scheduled to be launched. He and his busload of future rig mates, each of them handpicked from other company assets, arrived as the multi-tiered deck was hoisted one hundred feet in the air by some of the world’s largest cranes, then settled carefully atop the four columns rising from the pontoons.

To the uninitiated, the Deepwater Horizon was far from beautiful. None other than John Steinbeck once described one of the Horizon’s early ancestors as having “the sleek race lines of an outhouse standing on a garbage scow,” and nearly a half century of technological advances hadn’t changed that.

In place of a single hydrodynamic hull, the rig would float on its two long, narrow pontoons, each twice the size of a 727’s fuselage. The pontoons were lined with computer-controlled ballast tanks that could be flooded or emptied in precise increments that finely adjusted the rig’s trim, and the main deck’s elevation above the ocean surface.

When the rig moved from one spot to another on its own, powered by eight 7,000-horsepower electric thrusters mounted beneath the pontoons, the ballast would be adjusted so the pontoons rode thirty feet below the surface, submarine-like, and the deck towered more than a hundred feet above the water. When the rig moved over a well and prepared to drill, the pontoons would take on more water and sink to a depth of seventy-six feet, creating a more stable base and lowering the deck to just sixty feet above the sea.