Fire on the Horizon (30 page)

The chopper set them down on BP’s Na Kika production rig, not far from the Horizon. He’d been taken to a room set up for triage, then put on another helicopter and sent to the University of Southern Alabama Hospital, where he discovered they’d also taken Paul Meinhart. Doctors ran tests and treated Doug’s leg injuries, then released him to two Transocean consultants, who drove Doug and Paul to the Crowne Plaza Hotel in New Orleans.

Getting wheeled into the lobby of a luxury hotel hours after escaping a blowout and a burning rig was a jarring experience. Given how exhausted and shaken he was, it seemed more hallucination than reality. Doug was handed some clean clothes and then wheeled into a debriefing on the blowout with Coast Guard officers. Somehow he managed to participate. He kept telling himself it would only be minutes before he could close a hotel room door on the world and fall into bed.

But when the Coast Guard was done with him, he was taken to another room. There were two men in suits who introduced themselves as legal representatives for Transocean. A court reporter sat beside them with an air of alert anticipation and a transcription machine.

They had a few questions for him.

At 7 a.m. on Wednesday April 21, a Houston attorney named Steve Gordon got a call on his 800 number. The woman identified herself as Tracy Kleppinger. She said her husband, Karl, was on the
Deepwater Horizon, an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Steve knew where this was going. He had been blipped awake at 4:30 that morning by an alert on his smartphone to a CNN newsflash about the explosion on the rig.

Steve specialized in maritime law, and he had represented the families of rig workers before in personal injury lawsuits. He’d recently represented the widow and one-year-old child of a man on another Transocean rig. The man had been working a double shift. He was using hand signals to direct a pipe handler, telling him where to drop a one-ton pipe. It was a hot day without any breeze, so the man found a shady spot to stand in. The pipe handler didn’t see the man in the shade. The pipe swung out of control, crushing the man against a steel stanchion. Steve was there to help the widow hold Transocean accountable.

But in this case, Steve’s assumption was off.

“I don’t want you to sue anyone,” Tracy Kleppinger said. “I just want you to find my husband.”

When the phone rang at 5 a.m., Alyssa Young was in the shower getting ready to start her day, always a complicated proposition when you were alone in a house with a six-year-old, a five-year-old, and a four-month-old baby. Getting dressed, she saw the phone blinking one message. For a fraction of an instant, she felt a shock, a sudden vivid glimpse of a nightmare she’d managed to forget, that black cloud on the drive to the airport with Dave. But it instantly faded, just like a bad dream can vanish.

Then the day started and the kids decided to have a bad morning. Last night, Dave had messaged her that he wouldn’t be able to call, he was busy with some cement job or something. He’d probably decided to call early and catch her before the
day started, is all. He’d call back later. She couldn’t think about it now. Between getting everyone a different breakfast and getting them out the door, she didn’t even have time to turn on the news.

Tracy Kleppinger had gotten a call before dawn. Someone with a dull mechanical voice, almost robotic, said, “I’m calling to tell you that there has been an explosion on your husband’s rig. We don’t have details at this time. You’ll be contacted when we know more.” Nobody had called back. She’d found Steve Gordon’s name in an advertisement on gCaptain, a networking website for mariners. and called for help.

Steve got a number for the Transocean human relations chief, who took Steve’s number and Karl’s name and promised to call when he knew something. Steve didn’t wait to hear. He kept calling all morning, but learned nothing.

Steve planned for the worst. He chartered a flight for his investigator to go sit with Tracy Kleppinger in her home in Natchez, Mississippi. He’d arrived at her house at noon.

Around 2 p.m., Steve got the news he’d been dreading: “We have now been able to conclude that there are eleven men missing, and that Karl was one of them.”

Steve hung up, swallowed, then called his investigator’s cell phone to warn him what was about to happen, and admonish him to stay close to Mrs. Kleppinger. Then he called the house.

When he told her that he had bad news, that Karl was one of the missing, he expected her to drop the phone or weep or scream. He didn’t expect what happened.

“He’s not missing,” she said, buoyantly. “They found him!”

She was watching MSNBC. “They’re reporting right now that they found a capsule with the missing eleven.”

“Oh my God,” Steve said. He patched in the Transocean HR chief, and repeated what Tracy had seen on TV: “They have found Karl and the others.”

“No,” the HR chief said.

“Yes, they have!” Tracy said. “Go to MSNBC.com, you’ll see.”

“No,” he said. “I’m sorry, but we have followed that story, and that is not correct.”

Tracy Kleppinger, whose voice had been so alive, so full of hope and relief, just disappeared.

Steve’s law partner flew into Natchez and spent the next three days with her. There was still a nominal search operation going on, but nobody really believed anyone would be found.

Within hours of the official cancellation of the search and rescue, on Thursday, April 22, Steve Gordon filed a wrongful death suit in federal court on behalf of Tracy and Aaron Kleppinger.

The funeral was on Sunday, May 2, the day before what would have been Tracy and Karl’s eighteenth wedding anniversary.

Shortly after the funeral, Transocean CEO Steve Newman asked to meet with all of the decedents’ families. Steve arranged a meeting between Newman and Tracy and her parents in Natchez. Newman apologized to them for what had happened, then he cried, and they all cried together.

When they formally canceled the search and rescue mission at 5 p.m. on April 22, Dale Burkeen’s family still couldn’t accept that he was gone. His sister, Janet, couldn’t stop thinking that Dale would have found some way out. His favorite song was “A Country Boy Can Survive,” by Hank Williams, Jr., and his favorite TV show was
Man vs. Wild
, featuring a former British special forces operative demonstrating survival techniques
in some of the world’s most forbidding locales. Dale was always watching that show.

Janet remembered when she’d tease him about it, and say, “Bubba, when ever can you put that into action?” He’d say, “Sis, you never know what’s going to happen to me on the rig. Don’t ever give up on me. I’m a survivor. I’ll find me something to hold on to and paddle to an island and survive.”

So Janet kept thinking the searchers had to have missed him somehow. She just knew he was going to turn up on some little island in the Gulf, sitting under a palm-thatched hut eating bugs and coconuts to survive.

On the grounds of the small-town elementary school Dale attended, there is a small monument to a first-grader who died in an accident on the school playground. A child fell off the sliding board and hit his head. Six-year-old Dale Burkeen was coming up right behind that boy. One of the teachers got rattled and in the confusion of the moment thought it was Dale who’d hit his head. The school called Dale’s mother, Mary, and told her that Dale had fallen and “was unresponsive.” She rushed up to the school to discover that it was not her son headed for the morgue after all. But the incident sent a chill through the family. It somehow marked Dale as vulnerable, at risk of premature death.

“It just wasn’t Dale’s time,” was how they always told the story in the years to come, as Dale grew into a big, strong country boy who knew how to survive. “It wasn’t Dale’s time.”

Somehow, and God only knew how, they were going to have to learn to accept that April 20, 2010, was.

Alyssa Young was dropping her second child off at school at 9 a.m. when her phone rang.

It was Dave’s mother.

“Have you talked to Dave?” she asked. “His rig blew up.”

“Are you sure it was his rig?” Alyssa asked, trying to hold down her panic. It had to be a mistake. It had to be.

Alyssa drove to the oral surgery office where her mother-in-law worked. In streaming video on her computer screen, the Deepwater Horizon burned and burned and burned. Dave’s mother was pacing and listening to Alyssa make one phone call after another. In spite of everything, she called the rig. It rang busy. She called the Transocean number flashing on the screen. They told her they were still waiting for an update from the Coast Guard.

She looked back up at the computer screen and that unquenchable torch that had been Dave’s rig. How could Dave have survived that?

She got a ride home—there was no chance she could drive—and got online. She made serial calls to hospitals in three states, cried on and off, then called more hospitals. By 11:30 she had lost all patience with Transocean and began calling the hotline every ten minutes. How could the news stories be saying there were eleven missing, and Transocean not know which eleven? And if they knew, how could they not tell her? Family and friends filled her house and took the kids outside to play. Alyssa kept searching the Internet for…anything. Dave’s brother had to finally tell her to just turn off the computer.

At 1 p.m., the ordeal ended. Transocean called to say they had good news: Dave was coming in to Port Fourchon.

She didn’t quite believe it until he called at nine that night. He could barely speak; he just kept repeating, “The fucking rig blew up!”

The following night, when he walked through the airport gate in a greasy jumpsuit, hard hat in hand, he had nothing at all except the hundred-dollar bill Transocean had handed him.

“You look like an escaped convict,” she told him.

But she knew that it was both of them who had escaped.

After he got home, Alyssa began to follow all the hearings into the cause of the blowout. She had to know what had happened, and she had to believe that it could be prevented in the future if she was ever going to let him return to the Gulf.

Dave was on full-pay leave. He played with the kids and worked on his speedboats to get them in racing prime. When he healed, he raced.

A few minutes after Dave had left for one of his races, Alyssa felt that same sick feeling she’d felt before he left for the Deepwater Horizon on April 14. She called his cell.

He was fine, he said. The race was just about to start.

Twenty minutes later, her phone rang.

“I’m in the ambulance,” he said, laughing.

His little boat had flown out of the water at high speed, then flipped. The propeller on the 25-horsepower engine had cut through the Kevlar wet suit and sliced his leg. If it hadn’t been for the Kevlar, the leg would have been at the bottom of the Sound.

She called him every name she could think of. She was so angry, she immediately got online and listed all his boats for sale.

He laughed at that, too. But Alyssa was deadly serious. She didn’t want him to race anymore. Time passed and using all his charm, he persuaded her to come watch the next one. Dave professed a reformation: he’d drive safely.

“He held back a little,” Alyssa said. “But it’s just like with the rig. I think it’s going to happen again in ten years. That’s what humans do, right? They get cautious for a while, and then they forget.”

EPILOGUE

A Hole at the Bottom of the World

On April 22, the Deepwater Horizon sank, rupturing its riser, which began a massive oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. Coast Guard and BP estimated the volume of the leak at 42,000 gallons of crude oil a day—roughly enough to fill an Olympic size swimming pool. That accounting turned out to be absurdly optimistic. In the days following the disaster, after multiple failed attempts to trigger the ram shears on the blowout preventer, it began to dawn on an anxious Gulf Coast that an uncontrolled flow of oil might continue for weeks, if not months. Before the end of the next week, with people all over the world watching a live feed, via the Internet, of the billowing leak, estimates of the disaster’s size increased fivefold, to as much as 210,000 gallons per day.

President Obama promised to assign “every single available resource” to contain the spreading oil, and vowed to hold BP accountable for the cleanup. For his part, BP chief executive Tony
Hayward launched an aggressive PR campaign with an initial TV ad buy estimated to cost at least $50 million.

“The Gulf spill is a tragedy that never should have happened,” Hayward said in his upper-crust British accent as the spot began. The camera moved in for a tight close-up of his sober face and worried brow. BP would take “full responsibility for cleaning up the spill. We will honor all legitimate claims, and our cleanup efforts will not come at any cost to taxpayers. To those affected and your families, I am deeply sorry.”

The ad closed with images of the Gulf Coast as Hayward intoned, “We will get this done. We will make this right.”

It wasn’t going to be easy.

BP pursued multiple strategies for stopping the unchecked flow into the Gulf. The best hope for a quick fix was a 98-ton steel containment dome designed to cover the ruptured wellhead and siphon the oil into a waiting drill ship. The dome was lowered over Macondo on May 7, but soon clogged with slushy a mix of frozen gas hydrates after an ROV collided with the cap and accidentally shut off a deicing system.

Meanwhile, the BP-leased Transocean rigs Development Driller II and Development Driller III began to sink relief wells parallel to the existing Macondo shaft. Once they penetrated beyond 15,000 feet, into the pay zone, the rigs would then drill horizontally and tap into the well at the source of the blowout, where they could pump in enough heavy mud and cement to bury it for good.

But the drilling would take several months, at least, and the unnerving possibility that the gusher would continue unchecked for that long ratcheted up the tension just as executives from BP, Transocean, and Halliburton appeared before congressional hearings in Washington. By that point, estimates for how much oil was spewing each day had climbed still higher, to 800,000 gallons.