by Tom Shroder
The jovial mood wouldn’t last long. Just three days later, one of Doug’s motormen, a good-natured man named Jack Parento who had robustly played a pirate in the shellback festivities, with a red bandanna and black eye patch, was on shift when he began complaining about a bad case of heartburn. He asked if he could go see a medic, and of course Doug let him go. An hour or so later, the shift electrician found Doug and said, “Did you hear about Jack?”
“What do you mean?”
“I just passed by the medics’ office. They had Jack on a bed with wires all over his chest. They said he’d had a heart attack. The medics gave him CPR and brought him back. He’s stable, but in bad shape.”
They were still too far from anywhere for a helicopter to evacuate Jack. In what they all knew was probably a futile gesture, the captain ordered all thrusters to go full out.
That night, Jack suffered a second heart attack, and could not be revived.
It hit the crew hard. Conversation all but ceased as everyone went through the motions of rig life that night. Doug’s shop was especially devastated. Jack had been the joker, always the guy to get everyone loose when things got tense. The coffee cup he’d used every day—featuring a girl in a bikini with cleavage that commanded attention, beneath which was written, “Watch my back”—just sat on a desk in the engine control room, reminding them all how one moment you could be alive, laughing and cutting up in a pirate outfit, and the next, gone.
It made them all feel even worse that they were still weeks away from any place where Jack’s body could receive proper attention. There was no choice but to clear out the food from one of the cold storage lockers and store the corpse there until they reached port—still thousands of miles distant. The weight of sadness and the unsettled presence of their rig mate’s inanimate body always in the back of their minds, the incremental creep of progress, not to mention the imminent depletion of their tobacco reserves, began to threaten sanity. Every day, for weeks it seemed, the question “how many days left” would bring precisely the same answer.
But even the longest journey ends. For Jack Parento, it ended on the island of Mauritius, off the eastern coast of Africa. The crew was not permitted to depart the rig (save for one crewman with an impacted tooth), but the company had flown Parento’s widow in to the island, then landed her on the rig by helicopter. The entire crew participated in the somber memorial service on the rig deck, after which the body was shipped home, while the Deepwater Horizon rounded the Cape and continued to crawl across the Atlantic.
It was late spring when they arrived in the Gulf. The rig latched up to the BP test well and the crew took it through its paces. Some rigs had required months of constant adjustment to pass. The Horizon, having worked all the kinks and bugs out of its drilling systems in the long passage, proved itself in a matter of weeks. Nearly three years after its construction had been commissioned, the Horizon was finally ready to do what it was made to do—but it would not be doing it for R&B Falcon.
The Deepwater Horizon had been a bold addition to what was already the largest fleet of deepwater offshore rigs in the world. Those physical assets, and the great debt that R&B Falcon had incurred in manufacturing them, had driven the company deep into debt, making it a tempting acquisition target for the slightly larger, fiscally sound offshore drilling company Transocean Sedco Forex. As its lengthy name suggests, the company was itself the product of promiscuous mergers that began in 1953 when it acquired the Offshore Company out of Birmingham, Alabama.
Transocean, as the new merged entity would come to be called, had announced its intentions to buy R&B Falcon in a complex $8.8 billion deal months earlier. But the formal document of transfer was not signed until mid-August.
When the crew got the official announcement, Jason, whose first jobs had been on Transocean rigs, told a buddy, “I left them sum-bitches to come to R&B Falcon and now here I am working for them again!”
The truth was, though the two companies had very different policies and styles—from the way hitches were timed to the role mariners played in day-to-day operations, and a hundred other things—the Horizon would be considered a legacy rig and continue to operate with the strong influence of its original R&B Falcon policies. Change would come so slowly that even years later, offshore veterans would be able to walk onto the Horizon and know which company had built it.
But Transocean’s culture was powerful, and it would soon stamp itself indelibly on the Horizon. Formally based in Switzerland (for tax purposes), Transocean ran its Gulf of Mexico operations out of offices in Houston, and it cultivated a can-do cowboy swagger as a company that could accomplish the near impossible in the new frontier of ultra-deepwater drilling.
“We’re never out of our depth,” was the corporate motto.
CHAPTER SIX
MACONDO
Miocene Epoch, 20 Million B.C.
The Mississippi Canyon
Life, no matter how abundant, ends in death. Every death, no matter how small, is significant. That’s the larger lesson in the deposits of oil and natural gas that lie buried within the earth. Deposits like the one we now know as the Macondo Prospect.
It formed during the Miocene geologic epoch, somewhere between twenty million and ten million years ago, in the depths of an ancient sea, fed by giant rivers—now called the Mississippi and the Red—that drained the nascent North American continent as it drifted away from Europe and Africa. With the Atlantic Ocean slowly growing larger, the nearly enclosed sea that would become the Gulf of Mexico remained remarkably unchanged. The giant rivers that fed nutrients from the eroding land into its warm confines created an explosion of life, most of it microscopic. Contrary to popular myth (and oil company logos), dinosaurs only ruled certain terrestrial neighborhoods of earth—and their corpses didn’t turn into oil. In many ways the most significant impact on the planet has always been from the smallest life-forms, not the largest. Microorganisms produced the oxygen that transformed the earth’s atmosphere. And microorganisms are largely responsible for the formation of oil and natural gas deposits, the burning of which is altering the atmosphere once again.
At any given moment, microscopic ocean life accounts for a larger number of living organisms than there are stars in the universe. It’s been that way for three billion years. Every drop of water in the ocean contains more than a million microscopic organisms. While alive, most of these organisms employ ingenious strategies to keep themselves near the ocean’s surface, where they can transform sunlight into food via photosynthesis. They ride the currents, take advantage of the wind and wave-induced turbulence, propel themselves with tiny whiplike paddles, or even create their own buoyancy by pumping lipids between their cellular membranes. But when they die, the quest for sunlight ends and they drift into the darkness of the deep, to the bottom, where they collect and decay by the trillions of trillions.
The balance between collection and decay is crucial. Certain conditions, the ingredients the Gulf has always offered in abundance, kick the bloom of microscopic ocean life into high gear: warm water, upwelling currents, and the inflow of nutrients. In combination, they spark an orgy of creation and a spike in the microbial population. All that life brings on an avalanche of death. The dead cells rain down in a blizzard—it’s actually called “marine snow”—and accumulate on the bottom faster than they can decay. Compressed and covered by the sediments pouring in from the rivers, the thick mat of sludge is cut off from oxygen, which over time might have burned the biomass away. Instead, the accumulated weight keeps pushing the organic matter deeper into the earth. The heat and pressure of the earth’s core begin to crush and cook the molecules themselves, squeezing them into a series of ever simpler forms until, after many millennia, they reach their ultimate simplicity. Crude oil. Natural gas. Or methane, whose molecular composition is elegant simplicity itself, a single carbon atom surrounded by a pyramid of four hydrogen atoms.
Now much lighter than everything surrounding them, the liquid hydrocarbon reservoirs exert a powerfu
l upward pressure as they struggle to rise to the surface, a geological version of CO2 bubbles in a glass of Coca-Cola. They migrate through tiny cracks and fissures or slide up along the inclines separating layers of rock until they reach the surface. Scientists estimate that every year 500,000 to 1.5 million barrels’ worth of oil and natural gas seep into the Gulf of Mexico—that’s about double the range estimated for the spillage from Exxon Valdez.
In geological time, most oil eventually evaporates. Some geologists believe the Ohio River valley may have once had oil deposits as extensive as those in the Middle East. Now, of course, they are long gone.
But as the hydrocarbons slide along the underside of impermeable barriers toward the surface, sometimes they get stuck. They slide up a slope made of nonporous rock or compacted salt deposited by shallow ancient seas, seeking higher ground, only to find the incline has become a trap. These traps are dome-shaped deformations, inverted cups where hydrocarbons slowly collect, eventually forming vast reservoirs of oil and gas. The Gulf of Mexico happens to have a lot of these upside-down cups of oil.
In the past two decades, ships towing three-and-a-half-mile-long cables studded with sensitive underwater microphones (called hydrophones) have made carefully charted sweeps of the North American continental shelf. Periodic bursts into the water with an air gun or a charge of dynamite create seismic waves that penetrate the sea bottom. As the waves hit each new obstacle—a bank of mud, an outcropping of limestone—a portion of the wave energy is reflected back toward the hydrophones. Mud reflects differently than limestone, and limestone reflects differently than salt deposits or impermeable rock. The techniques are not new. Seismic calculations were first made by engineers during World War I to triangulate the positions of large enemy guns. But the equipment developed thereafter was so sensitive, and the computers analyzing their data so powerful, that they allowed geologists to create three-dimensional maps of structures thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface.
In 2003, after months of seismographic trolling, the sound shadow of one of these domes appeared on a study of an area forty-one miles off the southeastern coast of Louisiana in the middle of the Mississippi Canyon, a five-mile-wide undersea ravine that runs along the Gulf bottom for seventy-five miles. The resulting charts of the survey looked like a series of Rorschach tests, and what British Petroleum saw in them was profit.
Five years later, in March 2008, BP bought the rights to drill in what was officially designated Block 252 of the Mississippi Canyon in the United States’ exclusive economic zone of the Gulf of Mexico—or actually leased them, since all oil rights on the outer continental shelf, which extends two hundred to three hundred miles from the coast, belong in perpetuity to the federal government. For the rights to explore for oil on the 5,760-acre block of ocean bottom under five thousand feet of water, they narrowly outbid five competing companies by offering $34 million.
In order to maintain secrecy about their new lease, and perhaps with a lingering romantic sensibility from the wildcat days, oil companies designate their prospective sites with code names. BP saw an opportunity for taking care of corporate business in the naming rights. Who hasn’t dreamed of bestowing an everlasting name on a continent, a mountain, a star? Why not an oil well? Naming rights for Block 252 were made the prize in a company United Way fund-raising contest. The winner, a BP employee with a literary bent, came up with the name Macondo, after the fictional town created by Gabriel García Márquez and the setting of his masterpiece of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
In the novel, Macondo starts out as a speck of a town in the middle of the jungle, then expands physically and culturally until it is a dynamic but deeply flawed city whose citizens fall prey to their own greed and begin to take moral shortcuts. Macondo’s promising beginning succumbs to a series of plagues and wars, until finally it is blown off the face of the planet by an explosive windstorm. In a final irony, the citizens of Macondo have been warned, in writing, of the tragedy to come, but the warning has been written in a language nobody is able interpret until the final moment, when it is already too late.
For those looking for ill omens in retrospect, the name couldn’t have been more tragically apt. Nor could the initial choice of rig to drill the well.
BP chose the Transocean-owned Marianas, a twenty-four-year-old semi-submersible with a long history. The Marianas had been destined to brush up against disaster from her 1979 birth as the MSV Tharos at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ shipyard in a city synonymous with catastrophe, Hiroshima, Japan. She was designed to fill what the offshore industry perceived as a worrisome gap in its plan to establish oil-producing platforms ever farther from shore. The Tharos and others like her were built not just for saving lives, but also to save the environment by performing well-kill operations that could forcefully bring an uncontrolled well blowout to an end. She was outfitted with what was then state-of-the-art technology: a dynamic positioning system to maneuver her into position alongside a burning rig, an enormous gangway that could activate off her side to give survivors a dry means of escape, and monstrous fire cannons capable of shooting 40,000 gallons per minute a distance of 240 feet, powerful enough to blow a man off the deck of a nearby rig or worse. Get too close, and they could cut a man in half.
The Tharos also carried multiple fast rescue boats and its own Sikorsky S–76 helicopter capable of plucking twelve men at a time off a burning rig and transporting them to the Tharos’s ninety-bed hospital outfitted with all the gear needed to sustain life, including an operating room and patient monitoring facilities. She cost a then unheard-of amount, exceeding $100 million. The Duke of Edinburgh called her “the most expensive fire engine in the world.”
Not for long. In July 1988, the Piper Alpha platform was at work in the North Sea doing what she’d been built to do—tapping into existing wells, separating the oil from gas, and pumping both cargos through undersea pipelines to tanks 128 miles away on the Scottish shore. The disaster was set in motion by a series of unlucky coincidences and a mundane human error. The rig was undergoing an upgrade, which its managers decided to complete while pumping continued, rather than absorb the high cost of shutting down. A small part of the work involved replacing an old valve on a backup gas pump with a new one. The technician’s shift ended before the work was finished, and his replacement was busy with something else. The maintenance worker filled out the paperwork that should have warned everyone on the rig not to operate the pump under any circumstances, but it got lost. That evening, the primary pump went down. When the backup was started, gas poured from the valve vent. A random spark ignited an explosion, which triggered a cascade of increasingly violent secondary explosions, fed by thousands of gallons of crude oil and natural gas.
The blasts took out the main control room, the generator, and the power distribution system, and also destroyed the one chance of fighting the fire—the deluge system, a curtain of lifesaving water. The raging fuel-fed fires made launching lifeboats impossible. Some risked the hundred-foot plunge into the fire and ice hell of the frigid North Sea, now covered with flaming oil slicks. But almost half the crew mustered in the large accommodation area to await evacuation by the Tharos’s helicopter then located only a thousand feet way. The helicopter never came. The fire and smoke made landings impossible. Most of the crew burned to death or were overcome by smoke and toxic fumes. Nor did the Tharos’s water cannons do much good. The continual replenishment of explosive fuel made fighting the fire a losing battle. And the Tharos’s huge gangway failed at the critical moment, just as it started to extend its arm of safety. The rig’s crew was close enough to choke on the smoke and feel the heat of the huge fireball, to see the burned faces and charred bodies. Some worked for thirty-two hours without a break, only to watch helplessly as the platform disintegrated.
So confused was the Tharos’s crew that the first man it saved swam unassisted to her pontoons and climbed an external ladder to safety. It was only after he told Tharos hospital staff wh
o he was and where he came from that they realized an actual survivor was on board. Of the 226 men aboard the Piper Alpha that day, only fifty-nine survived, many with severe burns. Few of those had been rescued due to direct assistance of the Tharos.
While vessels like the Tharos often did save lives offshore, the Tharos would be remembered mostly for her failure. The industry could have taken the lesson as an opportunity to improve MSV design. Simple improvements, like adding a winch on the helicopter capable of dropping a basket down to a burning rig’s deck without the helicopter having to land itself, could have had a sizable impact in the response to future emergencies. Instead, the rig’s failure killed the idea of prepositioning emergency support vessels near offshore oil fields, making all future offshore oil workers reliant on distant helicopters and hospitals. And the residents of nearby shores would have to resign themselves to waiting precious days for the arrival of equipment capable of fighting blowouts and stopping the uncontrolled flow of oil into surrounding waters.
The Tharos had changed owners as well as names and seemed destined to take a final voyage to the shipbreakers when, in 1996, she was bought by Transocean Sedco Forex for conversion to a semi-submersible drilling rig capable of being moored in seven thousand feet of water. The company removed the hospital, firefighting equipment, helicopter hangar bay, and even the thrusters to prepare her for her new life. All she needed was a new name to go with it, one appropriate to her role in the company’s bold move into ever deeper waters. Transocean sponsored a “name the rig” contest among its employees, and twenty-one-year-old Nora Dossett claimed the honors by coming up with Marianas, in honor of the world’s deepest ocean trench.
If BP executives were even aware of the macabre portents of their choice of code name or drilling rig for their new lease in Mississippi Canyon, there was no particular reason for them to fear they were tempting fate. The Piper Alpha disaster was two decades in the past, while the Tharos had been remade and renamed. And the town of Macondo was just a fiction, after all. Plus, by the daunting standards of deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, the Macondo Prospect was not especially challenging. The plan called for the prospect to be drilled in 4,992 feet of water, to a depth 14,569 feet below the ocean floor. BP geologists had identified two likely hydrocarbon reservoirs in sandstone formations, the most promising at 13,319 feet and one a thousand feet farther down, close to the bottom of the proposed well. At 5,000 feet, the ocean depth would be only half that of the record 10,000 feet in which Chevron and the Transocean rig Discoverer Deep Seas teamed up to successfully drill a well in 2003. Likewise, the 14,569-foot penetration beneath the ocean floor was less than half of the 35,000-foot record drilled by BP just a month before the first drill bit hit Macondo. For the record-breaking effort, BP had also used a Transocean rig: the Deepwater Horizon.
