Fire on the Horizon

by Tom Shroder

  Doug Brown and Jason Anderson were both down-to-earth, practical men not inclined toward demonstrative emotions. But like many of their rig mates, they already felt an affection and pride for the new rig, for its power and sophistication, even before they’d spent a night aboard. But their feelings were tempered by the knowledge that for all the no-expense-spared cost of construction and outfitting, the half decade of design and development, the seemingly bottomless trust placed in their hands—none of it had yielded its owners a single dollar. Before Deepwater Horizon and its crew could begin earning their keep, the rig would have to travel fifteen thousand miles around the southern tip of Africa to a well that was waiting to be drilled a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SEA LEGS

  February 2001

  Fort Schuyler, The Bronx

  When the Deepwater Horizon floated off the drydock into the Sea of Japan on February 23, 2001, Dave Young would have found it ludicrous to think his destiny was linked to a new generation of oil rig.

  In just two months he would finally graduate from college with an engineering diploma and a merchant marine officer’s license in his hands after six years spent preparing for a career at sea. Yet if Dave could have glimpsed the Horizon creeping toward him from across the globe at roughly the speed that he would soon march across the graduation platform, chances are he wouldn’t even have recognized it as a ship.

  In that way at least, Dave Young was no different than so many of the men—and an increasing number of women—trained sailors who wound up piloting the self-propelled oil rigs and drillships atop the world’s oceans. The path that would take him to the Deepwater Horizon began on the spit of land where the East River flows into Long Island Sound. The scenic sweep of wide water, anchored by a nineteenth-century stone battlement called Fort Schuyler, is more formally known as the State University of New York Maritime College.

  In a sense, Dave, short and tough, supremely self-confident, perfectly represented the scrappy, resourceful, unruly spirit of his college, little known even in its own southeastern Bronx neighborhood. SUNY Maritime offered a military academy–style program, but unlike the naval or Coast Guard academies, there was no requirement that graduates serve in the military. The student body of seven hundred or so seemed to be made up disproportionately of the sons and daughters of local cops or firemen who knew someone who knew someone who graduated from SUNY Maritime with a mariner’s license, and you wouldn’t believe what this kid is making.

  Despite being the oldest maritime college in the country and being fully incorporated in the state university system, it remains obscure. Most people hardly know what “maritime” in its title means. Founded after the Civil War to shore up the country’s flagging merchant marine ranks, for more than half a century the program had no land-based home—it was conducted entirely aboard a training ship and was in constant danger of closing. In 1934, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his last act as New York governor, put the academy securely on the fifty-five acres of waterfront on the eastern edge of the Bronx at the foot of Fort Schuyler, which would lend the college its name.

  The average starting salary of Schuyler graduates ($62,500 in 2009) is higher than that of Harvard or Princeton graduates, but students tend to harbor a Rodney Dangerfield–style sense of disrespect. They tell, and half believe, the story about legendary New York builder Robert Moses: He so despised FDR that soon after the president’s untimely death Moses moved forward with plans to build a bridge over his legacy just for spite.

  It’s undeniably true that Moses despised FDR, and that he wanted the Fort Schuyler waterfront to become a public park for, as one ally put it, “300,000 to 400,000 to enjoy every weekend,” instead of those “300 to 400 boys.” But the Throgs Neck Bridge, which cuts directly over the campus, would not open until 1961, too late to snub FDR but in time to ensure that generations of cadets would be woken in the middle of the night by the backfire of large trucks and that classrooms would be filled with the whirl of traffic helicopters.

  Dave fit the bill of the scrappy and resilient underdog type. About five foot eight, with an athlete’s balance, he had wary brown eyes that always seemed to be calculating angles. He had the kind of smarts that were rooted in common sense and knowledge of what makes people tick. He was always thinking, always looking to maximize results while minimizing the work it took to achieve them. He constantly carved out time to study, or to work on his boat or his friends’ cars, or, most often, to venture off with his crew on a hunt for beer and girls.

  Rich Robson was the brains of the group. The son of a New York City cop, he could always manage to ace his exams without ever seeming to study. Matt Michalski, the son of a construction contractor, grew up in a row house in a working-class section of Philadelphia. Matt was the most driven in his shipping classes. He’d grown up envying his father’s friend, who had become captain of a containership and managed to retire to a beach house in the Florida Keys at the age of forty. Mark Hanson, also a cop’s son, was the wild one, always pushing the group to walk on the edge.

  But Dave was the one with the flair for taking the lead. One of his brilliant innovations made him famous on campus in just his first year: He figured out that if he sewed the front collar and tie of his uniform into his SUNY Maritime jacket, he could wake up, pull the ensemble over his head, and walk out of the barracks instantly ready for morning formations.

  He got away with it, too. After all, SUNY Maritime wasn’t Annapolis. The white shirts and black pants worn by cadets, the traditional uniform of the country’s merchant marine, looked similar to the untrained eye, but varied in details as fine as the alignment of belts and the skew of the cap. Uniforms routinely went unironed, shoes unpolished. But still, there were rules, and demerits for breaking them. The college commanders, usually retired military officers, delighted in sneaking up behind cadets who were hatless, or had an untied tie, and writing them up on the triplicate forms they always carried. The pink copy went to the defaulter, so demerits inevitably came to be called “pinks.”

  Dave had racked up a thick stack of pinks: a nice fistful for not saluting officers or, until his jacket breakthrough, being out of uniform. But most were for being late to morning formation, which was at 0730 five days a week—a tough wake-up call when you’d been alternating nights between calculus books and drinking in Manhattan clubs, not getting to sleep until four or five in the morning as Dave did regularly.

  In one period of particularly heavy celebration, Dave and his team of buddies weren’t just late for formation. It was spring, the weather was nice, the bars were packed—and so they decided not to show up at all.

  Since they all lived on the same floor of the same dorm, and formation was organized by residence, it made a very loud statement when the entire first row simply went missing, a fact that even the numerous upper-class cadet officers Dave had befriended couldn’t overlook. This offense was beyond a stack of pinks. It earned them all a summons to appear before the company commander. On the night before they were due on the carpet, Dave and his crew stayed up past curfew, then stealthily sprinted about the campus, flipping the circuit breakers in all four dormitories. In the hours that remained before dawn, they spit-polished their shoes and ironed their uniforms. When the commander came on the nearly empty parade ground, he was met by the front row of formation intact and gleaming in military splendor, standing precisely at attention. A forlorn handful of others who had managed to wake up without the aid of electric alarm clocks blinked in confusion.

  It had been a risk for Dave to take such bold action; getting caught in such a stunt would have surely led to his expulsion. But he was always willing to “put his boots on” to run to the aid of a friend. Had he been alone in being summoned to the carpet, Dave probably would have accepted his demerits with his usual cavalier attitude and taken his punishment in stride, but to get his boys out of trouble, this bold move seemed worth the price of failure.

  The contrast between the ma
ss of absentees, and the spit and polish of Dave and his crew, worked its magic. The commander was impressed with their obvious contrition and renewed dedication, and condemnation turned to praise. The rest of the class, he intoned, could learn something from these cadets.

  Dave had grown up in a split household, spending weekdays with his mom in a leafy, stone-walled section of semirural Connecticut and weekends with his dad on the North Fork of eastern Long Island. The two homes were a three- to four-hour drive away, but only twenty to thirty minutes if you could find a speedboat and roar across Long Island Sound. It wasn’t a coincidence that Dave was always oriented toward the water and boating. His dad ran a marina and in his off time raced tiny wooden and fiberglass boats he built himself. Despite their small, 25-horsepower outboards, the hydrofoil racers reached speeds of close to eighty miles per hour and were in constant danger of flipping. The excitement and danger of it was the elder Young’s passion—one he shared with his son.

  North Fork was a place of contrasts, the wealthy summer homes of Manhattan’s elite on one side and the humble ramblers of year-round residents on the other. Dave’s dad was in the middle of it all, in every sense. He earned a good living at the marina, but he was far from wealthy. Still, he did have time to spend on his exotic hobby, which was building racing boats to replace the ones that had gotten smashed, or in working on his house. There was always a project going on, and Dave was a gifted and enthusiastic apprentice. Soon he was building the small racing boats on his own. He also built a custom truck painted bright yellow and jacked up on huge tread-heavy tires. He delighted in driving into Manhattan and parking it ostentatiously in front of the bars. He’d jump out of the bright yellow monster truck in one of his shiny polyester shirts and a sunburst smile. Maybe Dave wasn’t conventionally handsome, but considering the theatrics, it hardly mattered: In no time the ladies would be orbiting him like planets.

  Dave excelled in handiwork and extroversion but was just an average student. His father saw a lot of himself in Dave. And he saw a chance for Dave to achieve a goal that had been denied to him.

  Thirty years earlier, Dave’s father had attended the Maritime Academy for a year, but had to quit after coming down with mononucleosis, a lingering illness that had made it nearly impossible to keep up with the academy’s curriculum. He ended up in the Air National Guard but maintained many of his Maritime connections. And now he realized the school might be a good fit for his son: the rigorous maritime training, the summers spent sailing to ports around the world, the in-state tuition, and the lack of military commitment.

  Dave agreed, but he quickly learned that the academy’s relatively low entrance requirements didn’t translate to an easy ride once inside, especially for those like Dave who enrolled in the school’s most rigorous academic program, naval architecture. Dave never envisioned a nine-to-five life behind a drafting table, but he was infatuated with the construction of ships. The physics and mathematics of vessel buoyancy and propulsion satisfied his intense desire to learn not only how to operate ships, but also how ships operate.

  An engineering degree can be demanding in itself, but at SUNY Maritime the requirements for earning a United States Coast Guard–issued officer’s license more or less doubled the workload. There were also the daily rigors of cadet life to contend with. Underclassmen spent early mornings at cleaning stations in the dorms waxing floors and washing windows, midday in classrooms and labs, and afternoons and weekends behind paintbrushes and chipping hammers on the school’s 565-foot, 17,000-ton training ship, the TS Empire State VI.

  Moored at the dock in the school’s backyard, the ship is one of the country’s last five-hatch steam freighters—the hatches being steel covers in the deck that open on cavernous storage spaces in the interior of the vessel, from which crates and barrels and pallets of miscellaneous cargo would be offloaded by burly longshoremen, as in the classic Marlon Brando film On the Waterfront.

  While most steam freighters have long since been rendered into razor blades and rebar, those that remain are crusted with rust and abandoned in ship graveyards around the world. Not the Empire State. The grand vessel was built half a century ago but remains in better condition than most ships built in the last half decade. This is thanks to the work of the cadets, who each year beat the steel bulkheads with a million hammer strokes, scale rust with hand chisels, and layer thousands of gallons of paint onto her hull. While Dave was trained by his father in the equipment and technique of modern rust removal—sandblasters, bead blasters, and water guns of such high pressure they can bring the metal down to its purest, whitest steel—at Schuyler, he and his classmates were chained to a tradition of manual labor, of earning their keep. When Dave went without a hammer, he was usually carrying garbage, mucking slop out of bilges, or scrubbing the decks.

  It was a demanding program, and not to everyone’s tastes and capabilities. Of the enrolling freshman class, less than half would ever make it to graduation. Suitcases and boxes seemed to flow out of the dorms in an unceasing stream. Cadets left who couldn’t take the labor, or make the grades, or could not keep the pace of twenty-two-credit semesters; cadets who found the 7–1 male to female enrollment more irksome than they had imagined, or discovered, the first time they set foot on the training ship, that they were desperately susceptible to seasickness.

  And then there were those who just couldn’t hack the military-style discipline, even the relaxed SUNY Maritime version.

  Dave could hack it just fine. For most cadets, working off all those pinks by—what else?—even more chipping of rust and painting was almost unendurable. But Dave would quickly talk his way out of chisel duty into something more skilled and consequential, like repairing damaged fiberglass, a job he performed more expertly than the professional sailors aboard. As his ability made itself known, Dave came more into demand. If, say, the captain wanted wood flooring in his cabin, the ship’s carpenter would come find Dave. He’d complete his task hours before his fellow pink-slippers finished chipping their rust, and spend the rest of his sentence joking around with the ship’s crew. Soon Dave didn’t need a pink slip invitation. He actually found comfort at the end of the day in trading slacks for a boiler suit, dark blue coveralls of the type worn by auto mechanics, and walking down to the ship to assist in repairs and maintenance.

  Dave also discovered he had a taste for the school’s traditions. In his freshman year he joined the Pershing Rifle fraternity, a military drill society founded in 1891 at the University of Nebraska by an obscure second lieutenant named John J. Pershing, later to become General “Black Jack” Pershing, who led American forces in World War I. At SUNY Maritime it was a work-hard, play-hard club with its own hideaway in the neglected basement of a campus building. Dave liked the exacting standards to which the fraternity members held themselves, their pressed uniforms, the synchrony of their parade march, and their sense of self-discipline. He also liked doing Jell-O shots in the rank basement with his frat buddies. It was the latter—strictly against the rules—that eventually prompted the administration to shut the frat down in Dave’s senior year.

  But despite his unruly streak, and the fact that his bright yellow monster truck took up three spots in the dorm parking lot, the campus brass embraced Dave (to the point of letting him stash the truck on the football field access road, conveniently opposite his dorm) and Dave embraced the school—especially its tradition of sending all students for summer-long training cruises on the Empire State VI.

  In May, the whole college would steam across the Atlantic. The cadets did everything: loaded the supplies, mopped the decks, stood the watches, steered the ship. Every day at sunrise and sunset they were required to use their school-issued sextants, instruments from the epoch of sailing ships in the era of Global Positioning System satellites, to read the ship’s exact position from the alignment of the stars. For a grade.

  Dave’s crew figured there was a better way, a way that didn’t involve waking up before dawn. They knew that at any point in
the day, if they could sneak up to the bridge, they could find where the ship had been at sunrise from the history in the GPS. But that wouldn’t do them any good—it was like having the answers to a long-form math exam, one in which you were required to show your work. They needed to show the astronomical alignment that, in theory, had led them to the ship’s position.

  In the quest for more sleep, they pulled consecutive all-nighters, trigonometry books spread out around their cabin, poring over the formulas until they got it: a way to reverse-engineer the results from the pilfered sunrise position. From then on, they slept through the morning observation. When they got up, feeling refreshed and pleased with themselves, they found a reason to be on the bridge, created a diversion, got the sunrise navigational fix. Then they’d work their mathematical magic and voilà, the exact astronomical alignment above the ship at the moment the sun peaked above the horizon. They charged their shipmates five dollars apiece to replicate their work.

  When they made port, in Bermuda, Barbados, Athens, Tenerife, Lisbon, Malaga, Hamburg, Portsmouth, Naples, they got a different kind of education. The school catalog called it “exposure to international cultures.” They quickly learned that it could soon become overexposure. The locals were happy to see them when they arrived—young men would offer to show them the town, young women wanted to practice their English on them—but by the end of the week, as often as not, they’d board the ship running.