Fire on the Horizon Read online

  Fire on the Horizon

  The Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster

  John Konrad and Tom Shroder

  To the eleven, and their loved ones

  Contents

  Author’s Note: A Perilous Crossing

  Prologue: The End

  Chapter One The Beginning

  Chapter Two Oil and Water

  Chapter Three Cold Comfort

  Chapter Four Sea Legs

  Chapter Five King Neptune

  Chapter Six Macondo

  Chapter Seven X Marks the Spot

  Chapter Eight The Flood

  Chapter Nine A Captain’s Colors

  Chapter Ten Latching Up

  Photographic Insert

  Chapter Eleven Kicks

  Chapter Twelve A Long String

  Chapter Thirteen Uneasy Partings

  Chapter Fourteen Positive Test

  Chapter Fifteen Negative Test

  Chapter Sixteen Sailor Take Warning

  Chapter Seventeen “Something Ain’t Right”

  Chapter Eighteen Mayday

  Chapter Nineteen Abandon Ship

  Chapter Twenty Mustering

  Chapter Twenty-One Going Home

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: A PERILOUS CROSSING

  In the vast southern ocean, below the continental tips of South America and Africa and above the ice of Antarctica, storms take complete loops around the earth with no land to obstruct or diminish their force. Occasionally one of those storms veers north to sandwich ships between high winds and land as they round the Cape of Good Hope. On April 19, 2010, my ship broke through just such a veering storm that had brought with it sheets of rain and gusts of hurricane-force wind. Fortunately, I was sailing on the drillship Deep Ocean Ascension, the latest, most expensive and technologically advanced of BP’s fleet of exploratory drillships, built in a post-Katrina world to handle the extremes of nature—up to fifty-foot waves and winds of 115 miles per hour—with 54,000 horses of available power to propel 105,000 tons of equipment and steel.

  I had been with the ship since she was a collection of scattered parts in a Korean shipyard; I was serving as acting captain to a vessel that had yet to float. The only navigating I was responsible for at that point was maneuvering around construction delays and bottlenecks to ensure that she, and particularly her safety systems, were built to specification. Any foreseeable emergency that would visit the ship had been considered before construction had even begun; a new drilling rig is, if anything, a rig made wiser by the disasters of its predecessors. The prospect of fire is anticipated everywhere: the foam dispensers mounted above the accommodations, the deluge sprinklers, lockers filled with firefighting gear, and the rows upon rows of tall, thick canisters above the engine room that, through countless pipes within the rig, could blanket machinery spaces with more than ten thousand pounds of fire-snuffing CO2. No expense was spared for the safety of this $750 million vessel.

  Yet danger remained. I had continued my training since graduating from SUNY Maritime College in 2000 and had spent nearly ten years advancing my licenses to the highest level–master unlimited—but, as the son of a fireman whose company, Rescue 3 of the Bronx, lost its crew on 9/11, I was aware that it’s not the dangers you anticipate but rather the unforeseen failures that most often give birth to a catastrophe. And at sea and in the Gulf, when disaster strikes, there are no 911 services to call.

  This fact wasn’t lost on my wife, Cindy. A mariner herself, she had navigated a large containership stocked with ammunition and supplies through the combat zones of the Persian Gulf. She realized that the danger of rounding the Cape of Good Hope was small compared with navigating waters mined with explosives, but life had changed with the birth of our children, Jack and Eleanor. I’d been spending longer stretches at our California home, and I’d launched a blog and networking website for mariners that had diminished the financial imperative for me to spend long stretches at sea.

  And yet here I was, again.

  If anyone had told me ten years earlier that I would come to love life offshore, I’d have laughed. But I had discovered a reality that few understand or appreciate: the offshore oil field is a magic place where people pit technology against nature to accomplish impossible tasks. It’s a place that more often than not rewards hard work, intelligence, and determination; where degrees and résumés don’t matter; where even a high school diploma is not necessary to lead divisions of men and women.

  So in 2009 I accepted an assignment with Pride International on the as yet unfinished Deep Ocean Ascension. Now, months later, in mid–April 2010, we were sailing through this storm near the Cape of Good Hope.

  The weather cleared as the storm passed, and the next day, April 20, we awoke to clear skies and smooth seas. It was 5:30 in the morning when we had our first meeting, but back in our Houston headquarters the time was 9:30 p.m. An hour passed and I was in my office working on paperwork when Cameron Whitten, the ship’s second officer, scrambled up the stairs with a confused look on his face. He had just been to the crew meeting where one of the guys, calling home after a late shift, got word of a blowout on a rig, owned by the world’s largest offshore drilling company, Transocean Ltd., named the Deepwater Horizon.

  I turned on my computer in disbelief. It had to be wrong. Google, CNN, and the rest of the online world made no mention of the event. Then I turned to my blog, gCaptain, and I saw it. A longtime reader, Captain Thad Fendley, was laying anchors for another Transocean rig just ten miles away from the Horizon, snapping pictures and posting the first public images of the rig in flames. I stared at the three-hundred-foot-high fireball that seemed to be consuming the entire Horizon. My heart plunged in my chest; my eyes started to well. My anguish was reflected all around me. A half-dozen among the Deepwater Ascension crew had previously worked on the Horizon. Countless others had friends, neighbors or family aboard. One’s brother had been a member of the crew working around the derrick, where the explosion had ignited that night.

  The Horizon wasn’t just any rig to me. I had worked for Transocean for seven years, and I had spent nearly ten years (on and off) on ships contracted to BP, the company for which the Horizon was drilling.

  Faces of those I knew on the Horizon flashed painfully in my mind. Mark Hay, the subsea engineer on my first rig, the Discoverer 534, had been generous sharing his knowledge with a green hand. Mike Mayfield had reported directly to me on the rig Discoverer Spirit, and had been a willing teacher to a boss two decades younger than himself. Curt Kuchta, a friend with whom I had risen through the Transocean ranks, was the Horizon’s captain.

  And Dave Young. Dave Young, the Horizon’s chief mate, was one of my closest friends. We’d met in 1996 as second-year students at SUNY Maritime. We’d sailed the world together in the academy’s training ship. We’d stayed close through the years as we both married and started families. In fact, I was the reason Dave was on the Horizon—for years I’d invited him to come to work in the oil field. I was still with Transocean in 2007 when he finally agreed to apply, and I’d pulled whatever strings I had to help get him in the door.

  I kept looking at the picture of the all-consuming fire, still raging, I knew, five thousand miles away to the west and north.

  It was late at night back home. Did I call Dave’s wife, Alyssa? My God! They’d just had their third child a few weeks before. I began waking friends with Transocean in Houston, and I followed the updates flowing in from Thad Fendley and the other boat captains who were participating in the rescue efforts and updating everyone via gCaptain, which by now had gotten the a
ttention of many of the Horizon crew’s families, who were posting frantic pleas for information.

  But for long hours, nobody knew the fate of the crew. No one had heard from those who were aboard the Horizon. No one knew if Dave was still alive.

  I watched a crewmate dial the numbers for the onboard phones on the Horizon. They just rang and rang and rang.

  That night, twelve hours after we first heard the news, the captain passed word that all crew had been rescued. Excitement and relief spread across the ship as we approached Cape Town, South Africa. But soon our elation turned back to grief with the word that eleven men were missing; before long, that turned to “hadn’t made it.”

  I was relieved so many had been rescued, but I couldn’t get those who would never come home to waiting friends and family out of my mind.

  As the ongoing ecological catastrophe caused by the burning and then the sinking of the Horizon came to dominate the news, the focus of the public quickly shifted to the marshes, beaches, and waterways threatened by the spreading black cloud of oil, and to the impotence and frustration of multiple failures to stop the flow from the ruptured well a mile beneath the ocean’s surface.

  Classmates of Dave’s and mine from SUNY Maritime were intimately involved in the work to stem the blowout. Richard Robson and his crew on the Development Driller III worked around the clock—swarmed by media, BP officials, engineers, and government officials—to drill the relief well that would stop the flow of oil. Simultaneously, another close friend and classmate, Matt Michalski, captain of the Development Driller II, positioned his rig next to Rich and began drilling the second relief well. The Horizon blowout had riveted a nation, but in a far more personal way it had fully consumed our close-knit group and the wider industry of deepwater drilling to which we belonged.

  In the massive coverage that followed, in the finger-pointing and eye-crossing dissection of technical blame, I saw only jagged fragments of the full reality of the tragedy. I came to believe that what happened on the Deepwater Horizon, over block 252 of the subsea geological formation known as the Mississippi Canyon of the Gulf of Mexico, could never be completely understood without placing it in the full context of the powerful, in many ways inspiring, but also intrinsically flawed and little-understood culture of offshore drilling.

  For all my years in the industry, up until April 20, 2010, the world of deepwater drilling had been an obscurity, one I would have difficulty explaining even to family and friends. Now I knew that was no longer acceptable. With my personal experience, my connections to the Horizon, and the many links I’d forged within the industry through my work with gCaptain, I felt uniquely placed to attempt to tell the story, the as yet untold story, of the Deepwater Horizon from the perspective of the people who lived and died at the leading edge of the struggle to decrease America’s dependence on foreign oil. Whatever your politics, or your feelings about the use of fossil fuels, the fact remains that the world continues to need and demand immense quantities of oil, and in the end, we all rely on these crews of strong, skilled, and determined men and women to bring it home. It’s our obligation to also understand the risks and the pitfalls they face in doing so.

  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, impeccably dressed security guards with helmets and badges bu
ffed 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.