Fire on the Horizon

by Tom Shroder

  His skin began to smolder in the intense heat from the fire. They would have to walk right past the derrick to get to the bridge, and the lifeboats, if those amenities still existed. They turned to the left, upwind of the flames, and made their way forward, shielding their faces from the heat with their hands.

  Steve Bertone ran back to his computer thinking that the engine should be restarting. The engines were designed so that in a power disruption, after twenty-five to thirty seconds the two auxiliary engines would come on line and automatically start feeding power to the thrusters. But there was no indication that had happened.

  While he was puzzling over the negative indicators on his screen, Steve heard the door to the bridge bang open. He turned to see a man covered in blood from head to foot leaning toward Curt. The man cried, “We have no propulsion, we have no power, we have no ECR!”

  Curt looked uncomprehending.

  “You need to understand,” the blood-covered man said, pleading. “We have no ECR. It’s gone. It has blown up. Engine Number 3 for sure has blown up. We need to abandon ship now.” Steve suddenly recognized the voice. It was his number two, Mike Williams.

  “You need to calm down,” Curt said. “Just calm down, sit down, we’re working on it.”

  Doug Brown had come in the door behind Mike Williams. “He needs a medic,” Doug said. Steve ran over to them and saw that the source of all the blood was a deep laceration across Mike’s forehead. Steve hollered, “Where are the medical supplies?” Someone said they were in the restroom, in the back of the bridge. Steve couldn’t find any gauze there, so he grabbed a roll of toilet paper, sprinted back, and put the roll to Mike’s head. “Hold this there,” he said.

  He went back to his station still expecting to see the engines coming back on line—he just couldn’t believe those engines were gone. But there was still no power. The realization took hold. They were on a dead ship above a blown-out well and there was precious little they could do about it.

  Daun Winslow stood between the two forward lifeboats looking up at the derrick, which was blazing like a 250-foot high Bunsen burner. He was wishing he’d see more people coming out of the accommodations.

  The decks were covered with mud and a substance with the consistency of snot that had to be the remnants of that double dose of spacer. It was slippery as hell, and hell was exactly what it looked like all around him. People were screaming that they had to get off the rig. People were crying, begging God not to let them die. As Daun tried to help guide them forward on the treacherous surface through the mass confusion, Curt appeared above him, just outside the starboard door of the bridge. Curt caught Daun’s eye and waved his arm in a gesture Daun took to mean that he wanted him to get everyone back inside the accommodation block, as if that would be the safest place for them to be. Clearly Curt hadn’t yet realized the extent of the damage there. Daun ran up the stairs to tell him what was going on.

  “Captain Curt,” he said, “the accommodations are destroyed. We’ve got to get people to the boats.”

  “Okay,” Curt said. He may have been about to say more but Daun heard someone screaming, threatening to jump overboard.

  Daun raced back down the stairs. A man Daun had never seen before was clinging to the outside of the handrail.

  “Hey,” Daun said, “where are you going? There’s a perfectly good boat here.”

  The man leaned away, toward the ocean.

  Daun came closer and made eye contact. “Do you trust me?” he asked.

  “I don’t know you,” the man said.

  Mark Hay, the senior subsea supervisor, appeared beside him. Daun pointed to Hay. “Do you trust him?”

  “I don’t know,” the man said. “I’m not sure.” But he seemed to lean back in, away from the seventy-five-foot drop into the ocean. Gently, Daun and Mark Hay took the man’s arm and coaxed him back onto the rig.

  “Go on,” Daun said. “Get on the lifeboat with everyone else.”

  Then he turned and looked back toward the derrick. It was still burning as high as ever, and that didn’t make sense. The well should have been sealed by now and the BOP separated into two parts and disconnected from the well, cutting off the gas that fueled the flames. What was going on? Why hadn’t they pushed the disconnect button? He ran back up the stairs to the bridge.

  After Chris Pleasant told Buddy Trahan to run, they both ran, but in opposite directions. Buddy headed back into the accommodations, and Chris toward the moon pool to try to find out what was happening. When he got to the exit he ran into Chad Murray, the electrician. “Man, I wouldn’t go that way,” Chad said. “Something bad just happened.”

  “What?” Chris asked, but Chad had already run off, back down the hall.

  Chris turned up the stairs taking two at a time to get to the main deck and the drill floor. Then he saw the fire. He turned around and headed straight for the bridge, and his BOP control panel. As subsea supervisor on duty, he was the person responsible for executing the EDS, which is what he damn sure intended to do right now. Curt stepped in front of him.

  “I’m EDS’ing,” Chris told him.

  “Calm down,” Curt said. “We’re not hitting the EDS.”

  Chris stepped around Curt to the panel. Don Vidrine, the company man, was standing there looking at the indicator lights. “We got the well shut in,” he said.

  Chris looked and saw the lights on the panel that indicated the lower annular was closed, but clearly it hadn’t done the job. The rubber seal on the annular preventer had not been powerful enough to stand up against a full-roar blowout. And the gas must have already been past the BOP, into the riser, by the time Jason had managed to close it. The fuel was still flowing to the fire. Chris knew he had to go to the last resort, the shear ram, the most powerful intervention on the BOP—hydraulically powered pistons that would drive through the drill pipe, detach the BOP, and seal the well, cutting off the continuing flow of fuel to the fire and freeing the rig to move away.

  “Don, I have to get off,” Chris said.

  “Get off,” Don said. “Push the button.”

  Chris pressed down the enable button, held it, then hit the fire button.

  The indicator lights flickered from green to red, open to closed, just as they were supposed to do. Chris felt a wave of relief, until he noticed another set of indicators that measured the flow of hydraulic fluid that drove the shear ram through the drill pipe.

  The gauges read zero. The hydraulics were dead.

  The bridge door slammed open and Daun Winslow came in. Over his shoulder, Chris heard the captain ask Daun for permission to EDS. As Transocean performance manager, Daun was the highest-ranking company employee on the rig.

  “You haven’t already?” Daun asked. “Yeah, hit the button.”

  Someone on the bridge yelled out, “He cannot EDS without the OIM’s approval.”

  As if on cue, Jimmy Harrell burst through the door onto the bridge.

  “EDS, EDS!” Jimmy was shouting as he ran toward them.

  Chris looked up from the panel.

  “I already did,” he said.

  Steve Bertone ran over to Chris. “I need confirmation that we’ve EDS’d.”

  “Yes,” Chris said.

  “Chris, I have to be certain. Have we EDS’d?”

  Chris said yes again, and pointed at the lights in the panel.

  Steve didn’t wait for part two, the part about the hydraulics not flowing. He turned and hollered across the room.

  “Captain, do I have permission to start the standby generator?”

  “Will it give me fire pumps or any propulsion?”

  “No,” Steve said. “It’s going to give us lighting, and it will give us the ability to bring engines back on line later.”

  His assumption was that now that the ram shear had sealed the well, the fuel still in the riser would soon burn out, then they could use the standby generator to run the air compressors needed to restart the surviving main engines.

  “Yes
, go,” Curt said.

  The standby generator was located near the derrick, very near the fire. Steve turned to go. Dave Young came over with a pair of handheld radios so Steve could call for help if the fire trapped him. They turned them on but couldn’t get them to work, even standing five feet apart. They verified they were on the same channel, and tried again. Still nothing.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Steve said, laying the radio down on the table.

  As he opened the door to leave, Mike Williams pushed the door closed.

  “You’re not going alone, chief.”

  “Don’t be crazy, you’re bleeding.”

  “You can’t do this alone. If I’m not going, you’re not going.”

  Steve shrugged.

  “Well, come on, then,” he said.

  Paul Meinhart, the motorman, grabbed Mike’s shirt. “I’m coming, too,” he said. And they went in a line like that, the three of them, back to the fire. Steve looked up where the top of the derrick should have been and saw nothing but flames. He kept nearly losing his footing on the slippery deck. To get there they had to pass by the BOP storage area. He looked into the moon pool. It was filled with flames.

  But the standby generator room was pitch black. Mike put a penlight in his mouth so they could read the startup procedure posted on the wall. Steve flipped the switch from automatic to manual, and hit the reset button and the start button.

  Nothing happened.

  He tried it again, the reset button then the start. Again, nothing happened.

  “I have battery power,” Mike said. “We have twenty-four volts.”

  Paul was standing over by the watertight door, looking out at the flames.

  “Shut that door,” Steve said.

  He had to think. If they had twenty-four volts, why wasn’t the engine turning over? He flipped the breaker shut, then reopened it. He ran back to the panel and again tried the reset and the start. Absolutely nothing.

  “That’s it,” Steve said. “Let’s go back to the bridge. It’s not going to crank.”

  They opened the door to start back. It was like walking into an oven.

  Dave Young was torn between staying on the bridge and going back on deck. The bridge was still in chaos, Curt seemed overwhelmed, but as chief mate his responsibility was to direct the emergency response and firefighting. He had to go.

  As he was leaving, Andrea stopped him. She told him the captain had told her to stop the mayday call.

  “Do it anyway,” Dave said, running out the door.

  When Dave got to the emergency gear locker, the muster point for the emergency team, only one person was there, a roustabout named Christopher Choy. Apparently, everyone else on the fire team had ignored their training and already gone to the lifeboats. The fire was spreading, and there were small explosions crackling all over the rig. Oddly, Dave didn’t feel afraid, just desperate at the thought that there might be people trapped by the flames, and that any reasonable chance of rescue was quickly vanishing.

  Dave knew he had to hurry.

  As soon as he began to put on his fire suit, the padded, fireproof pants, the helmet, mask, and air tank, he decided that would take too long. He just grabbed the coat and ran toward the column of flame. Chad Murray, chief electrician, came running the other way.

  “Dale Burkeen is down,” Murray said. He said he figured Dale had been trying to climb off the crane when the blast knocked him to the deck. He wasn’t moving.

  Dave started to sprint toward the crane. Another blast knocked him off his feet and drove him back twenty feet. He picked himself up, stunned that all his body parts seemed present and operational. He could still run, he discovered, as he dashed toward Dale’s prone figure. Dale was on his back, unconscious, bleeding. Dave felt for a pulse. He couldn’t find one, but knew he couldn’t stay there trying. He tried to pick him up, but Dale was much larger than even an average rig worker, and Dave couldn’t budge him. He ran back to the gear locker, but there was still nobody there but Chris Choy, who weighed all of 150 pounds. But Chris was young, twenty-three, and strong—he’d been on his high school power-lifting team back in his hometown of Tyler, Texas. And Dave knew they were running out of time.

  “Dale’s down on the deck, and I can’t move him by myself,” Dave told him.

  They retraced Dave’s steps to the spot on the drill floor where Dale had fallen. Small explosions burst all around them. The rig was beginning to yield to the heat. They heard things popping and falling, crashing and banging. They knew that if you cooked a derrick long enough, at some point it would come down. They just hoped it wouldn’t come down now, on top of them. They kept moving. They must have been less than fifty feet away when a jet of flame flared in front of them. A blast of heat knocked them back, blocking their path. Without fire hoses and water, without a team of men, without proximity fire suits, there was nothing they could do.

  “Chris, we can’t get to him,” Dave said. “The boats are going to launch. You need to go.”

  Chris looked like he was about to protest, then turned toward the boats.

  Dave looked back into the fire once more, hoping he’d see another way around. There was none. He kept thinking that he’d been right there, he’d had Dale in his grasp, and he’d had to let go. Now it was too late.

  He sprinted back up to the stairs. As he barreled through the door onto the now dim and smoky bridge, the captain asked him why he wasn’t fighting the fire. Dave didn’t think Curt was getting it. He grabbed hold of the captain’s shirt and led him outside. They could see the growing column of flame from the bridge windows, but they could not feel the heat. Dave waved at the flame and screamed, “Look! We have no pumps, no thrusters, no way to get off the well. There’s nothing we can do. We have to abandon ship.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ABANDON SHIP

  2157 Hours, April 20, 2010

  Block 252, Mississippi Canyon, Gulf of Mexico

  The forward lifeboat deck was bright as day in the light of the blazing derrick. As the stunned, dazed, and injured gathered at their assigned muster points, they only found singed and twisted holes in the rig. They kept stumbling forward to the only two lifeboats remaining.

  The boats were shaped like booties, fully enclosed, capsule-like cylinders with benches on both sides long enough to fit 73 110-pound Koreans hip to hip and knee to knee—but they could only fit from 45 to 60 of the much larger Americans, depending on the number of 250-pounders aboard. Any way you looked at it, with two of four boats gone, the math didn’t quite work now. Sixty times two was still some short of the 126-member crew.

  When Doug Brown boarded, an assistant driller he’d known since the Horizon left Korea was checking names off a muster list. The man looked at Doug blankly.

  “Name?” he asked.

  People were screaming, “Why can’t we leave now” and “I don’t want to die.”

  Doug tried to remain calm, but he was scared. The fire was growing; the rig was coming apart.

  Not more than fifteen minutes earlier, Micah Sandell had been sitting in the cab of the port-side crane. Now, waiting to board the lifeboat, that seemed a lifetime ago. Micah was still shaken from his narrow escape, the screaming and hollering of people who wanted the boat to leave without him weren’t helping hold back his fear. A man screamed through a megaphone, but what he was saying was lost in the roar bursting from the derrick and the lungs of the terrified. Some were trying to count heads and load the wounded, but others were yelling, “Drop the boat, drop the boat!”

  Micah attempted to follow the procedure learned in every-Sunday drills, but some were broaching the line and jumping into the boats. Others had frozen, hypnotized by the flames, unable to move or respond.

  Gregory Meche, a mud engineer, was astounded by the size of the fireball roaring into the sky, high as a skyscraper. He wasn’t panicking, exactly. He thought the muster situation was fairly controlled given the circumstances. It looked just like a fire drill, only with everybody involv
ed at once, and a little more chaotic. But as he stood there, Greg felt the passing seconds weigh on him. The thought of sitting in one of those crowded, closed boats not knowing when or if it would leave made him queasy. He hadn’t been waiting there for more than five minutes, but he just couldn’t stay another second. He had to move.

  And he did. Down the stairs to the deck beneath—the smoking deck—and over the edge into blackness.

  Something flashed in the mercury vapor lights. The crew on the Bankston leaned as far over the rail as they could for a better look. Was it a life ring? Or something else? Then an arm came out of the water. It was a man trying to swim toward them. Anthony Gervasio broke for the rescue boat on the back deck. He saw a second jumper out of the corner of his eye as he ran. Cook Kenneth Bounds had seen the jumpers, too, and sounded the man-overboard alarm, alerting Captain Landry on the bridge. Landry ordered Mate Jeffrey Malcolm to launch the rescue boat. The deck was slippery so Malcolm didn’t flat-out sprint, but he got there as fast as he could without taking too big a chance. Gervasio got there first, and by the time the third and fourth bodies hurtled from the rig, he was already trying to get the rescue boat lowered and ready to go. He had to concentrate on freeing it from the belly straps that held it in place. He pulled on them to get them to release, consciously keeping his motions deliberate, ticking down the familiar process as he went. Remove the charger from the battery. Make sure the painter line was clear. Tilt the motor. Lift up the seat and switch on the battery. Lower the boat. Lower the motor. Start the engines and make sure they were running right. He knew they would be, because he’d just used the boat in a drill, but he didn’t want to skip a step. He didn’t want to make any mistakes. This was no drill.