by Tom Shroder
The fireball over the derrick flared larger. The sudden surge of energy transmitted to the people waiting at the lifeboats made them push forward, scrambling over each other for a seat. Roustabout Stephen Stone climbed into Lifeboat Number 2, strapped himself in, and waited. Time dragged like fingernails on a chalkboard. Every passing second made him squirm in excruciating discomfort. Stephen knew he was going to die. It was odd how he could just sit there and wait, wondering how it would happen. Maybe the derrick would topple on them. Or maybe they would all suffocate from the smoke in the lifeboat.
Some people who were already on the boat must have been thinking the same thing. They jumped up and ran back off onto the deck. Some kept going down the stairs and over the rail. Meanwhile, someone was still futilely trying to get a head count. People kept screaming, “Drop the boat, drop the boat!”
A tall, lean man with thinning hair leaned in from outside.
“Don’t launch yet,” he said. “You have to wait.”
It was Daun Winslow. He put one foot into the boat and kept another on the deck, as if to dare them to launch.
Daun coaxed more people into the boat. Two men walked up carrying a stretcher. The man’s injuries were so terrible that it wasn’t until Daun was helping load it that he recognized the man on the stretcher as Buddy Trahan, the Transocean colleague he’d flown out to the rig with just hours earlier, hours that now seemed to belong to some alternate universe. The lifeboats were designed for people who could sit on benches, not people laid out on stretchers. Buddy was loaded across a row of laps. He’d been in and out of consciousness, but he stirred into a fog of awareness. He could hear the people around him gasping at his injuries—“look at his leg, look at the hole in his neck.” The thought that he might die soon made him think of his three children. The nine-year-old would soon find it hard to remember him, and the teenagers would never get over losing him at such a vulnerable time. He felt himself sinking again, but before he blacked out, he saw the tower of flame. It shocked him into a clear thought, a stab of pain. Nobody on the drill floor could have survived that. They were all gone.
“Get in and shut the door and let’s go,” someone inside the boat said. There was still a crowd of people waiting to board. Daun watched the frightened faces flickering in the fire’s light.
“We’ve got plenty of time,” he said.
The words were barely out of his mouth when a drilling block and traveler, 150,000 pounds of equipment, fell fifty feet from the derrick, crashing into the deck only yards away.
Daun backed out of Lifeboat Number 2.
“Take it down,” he told the coxswain.
Dave hurried to the lifeboats. When he got there, Number 2, the port boat, had already launched. Daun Winslow was in the door of Number 1 and it looked like they were preparing to follow. Dave was making calculations in his head. There were about a half-dozen people still on the bridge, and he knew that Chad Murray and Steve Bertone were bringing Wyman up from the accommodations.
“Hold the boat,” Dave said. “We’ve got a man down, and it may take us a while.”
“Don’t go far,” Daun said.
But as Dave climbed back to the bridge he saw Daun duck down into the lifeboat, the door closing behind him. Dave knew he would have done the same.
As Steve, Mike, and Paul made their way back to the bridge from the auxiliary generator room, Mike looked over the starboard side of the rig and saw Lifeboat Number 1 motoring away. They picked up their pace.
When they got to the bridge Curt said, “I’ve given the order to abandon ship. We can’t fight this fire. It’s time to leave.”
Yancy and Andrea were still at the radios coordinating the mayday response.
“That’s it. Abandon ship!” Dave hollered at them. “Let’s go, now.”
As they funneled out of the bridge Dave was realizing he was the only one without a life jacket when a hand tapped him on the shoulder. It was Andrea. “I saved this for you,” she said.
Now, as they all took off running down the steps to the forward lifeboats, they saw Lifeboat Number 2 descending.
Randy Ezell waited for another stretcher to come. Time had warped into an unrecognizable form, an enormous and implacable void that had neither shape nor movement. Wyman Wheeler lay beside him, quiet for the moment. Randy was sure Wyman’s leg was broken and when they’d tried to lift him he’d screamed in pain and said his shoulder hurt. He listened to Wyman breathing and waited for footsteps. He had no idea how long it had been—five minutes? a month?—before Stan Carden and Chad Murray returned.
They lifted Wyman on the stretcher and moved as gently as they could, but he grimaced in pain as they maneuvered through the obstacles. When they were outside, they walked past the flames to the bow. As they came up to the lifeboat deck, they saw the captain and the rest of the bridge crew running down the steps.
The lifeboats are gone, the captain said. We’re taking the life rafts.
The rafts were essentially twenty-foot-wide kiddie pools with a tentlike canopy, roughly the size and shape of an early Mercury space capsule. They were stored in plastic cases that could be cranked up on a davit, rotated over the side until clear of the rig, then automatically inflated with a nitrogen cartridge. To board, you had to step out over the side of the rig into the raft through a flap in the tent cover. That was the theory.
The theory didn’t account for the fire burning out of control above and below the raft launching point. A twenty-foot bulkhead behind the lifeboat station provided their only shield from the gargantuan conflagration, and it was quickly losing its effectiveness. The rig was coming apart. Projectiles were sizzling past in all directions. They discovered as they came to the edge of the deck that a back draft was coming up the underside of the rig and converging right on the lip where the raft would dangle as they tried to board it.
Explosions had become nearly continuous now, like the crescendo to a fireworks display. Every second’s delay seemed potentially fatal. Dave took charge of deploying the raft, but as he frantically cranked the davit handle lifting the raft, it yanked to a halt. They had missed a rope tethering the raft to the davit. Someone yelled for a knife, but nobody had one. A no-knife policy was one of Transocean’s safety measures. Mike Williams grabbed on to the rope and followed it to where it was attached with a small metal shackle. He tried to unscrew the shackle by hand, but it was too tight.
The heat of the fire was so intense now they could smell hair singeing and feel exposed skin burn. Mike reached into his pocket and pulled out one of his electronic tech tools. It looked like an oversize pair of nail clippers. Using them like pliers, he managed to unscrew the shackle and free the raft.
When they finally got the raft over the side, it jolted down and stopped three to four feet below the edge of the rig, tilting slightly and spinning away. It wouldn’t be easy to get everyone loaded, and the stretcher was going to be dicey. It might tip the raft. Or worse, they might drop it into the ocean…
Dave realized that someone needed to be inside the raft to control the swinging and pull it close to the side of the ship. He climbed atop the handrails, waited for the raft’s door to turn toward him, and leapt inside. The raft now dangled by a cable. The smoke billowing down the side of the rig had a clear path into the raft’s door. Dave stood at the door and leaned his body across the gap between the raft and the side of the rig to pull the raft in closer.
Steve looked at Wyman on the stretcher, and then at Curt. He thought he heard Curt say, “Leave him!” Paul Meinhart, standing beside Curt, didn’t hear anything like that. But Steve wasn’t going to leave Wyman no matter what. He ran to the stretcher.
“Let’s get him to the life raft,” he said.
Chad Murray jumped into the raft to help Dave receive it. Dave struggled to hold on to the rig’s edge. He didn’t just smell burning rubber; he could taste it. He realized that the heat radiating from the fire looming above them had been met by an updraft from beneath the rig. The steel deck had
been shielding them from it, but both currents of superheated air now converged precisely where the raft dangled over the edge. He felt his flesh cooking, but he willed himself to hold on.
Steve fell to his knees on the deck and fed the end of the stretcher to Dave and Chad. His knees burned through his pants and he could feel the heat through the leather work gloves he didn’t even remember putting on. The raft lurched as Dave and Chad hauled in the stretcher. Wyman started to scream, “My leg, my leg!” When the stretcher disappeared into the raft, Steve jumped in next, then Andrea and the others, leaving Curt at the edge of the rig, Yancy Keplinger and Mike Williams still standing behind him. The raft was melting; they all knew it.
Then two explosions occurred, one right after the other, blasting the air from their lungs. Andrea, who had been the calm, strong voice of the Horizon projecting the maydays across the Gulf, started to cry and scream, “We’re going to die!” Steve had to agree with her. So did Dave and Chad. They were going to cook right there.
The raft filled with black smoke. Everyone ducked to the floor to find breathable air, everyone except Dave. Clutching the rail, all he could do was take small sips of foul air and wait for it to be over.
“Take it down,” Curt told Dave. Dave reached up to release the brake. The raft rocked forward, then plunged fifty feet. As it fell, it caught on the painter rope designed to tether it to the side of the rig, flipping first to one side, then the other. They tumbled around like clothes in a dryer. Andrea fell right through the door into the water. The raft plopped down beside her and, sputtering, she grabbed on to the edge. The smell of burning rubber and petroleum was overwhelming. A hundred feet away, directly beneath the rig, the water was on fire.
Curt, Mike Williams, and Yancy Keplinger, alone now on the burning Horizon, watched the raft plunge into the ocean.
Yancy couldn’t believe the captain had sent the raft down without them. “What about us?” he screamed.
Curt had thought he would take one last look around to make sure everyone else had gotten off the rig, but the flames had grown to the point where there was nowhere to look.
“I don’t know about you,” Curt said, “but I’m going to jump.”
Mike eyed the two remaining life rafts. He thought about how long it had taken to deploy the first one with ten people to help. Now it was just the three of them, and Mike felt his strength failing fast. They’d never make it.
“We can stay here and die,” he said, “or we can jump.”
He remembered his training: Reach your hand around your life jacket, grab your ear, take one step over the edge, look straight ahead, cross your legs, and fall. The problem was that now there was a life raft down there. They couldn’t just step and fall without crashing into the raft.
“We’re going to have to run and jump,” he said.
Curt took three steps and leapt.
“He just did it. You’ve got to do it,” Mike said.
Yancy did.
Now Mike was alone. He backed up a few steps, closed his eyes, spoke to God about his wife and daughter, then took off running.
At seven minutes past ten, Paul Johnson, the shore-based rig manager for the Deepwater Horizon, got a call in Houston from Paul King, a Transocean colleague.
“You know, I don’t want to alarm you,” King said, “but we’re getting mayday calls from the Horizon.”
It can’t be, Johnson thought. My phone is right here. Someone would have called.
Just then, his phone began to beep.
When the raft splashed down, Dave found himself in the water. Steve Bertone jumped out the exit door to join him. The raft started drifting underneath the rig into the spreading pools of oil floating on the surface, and toward the furnace raging at the center. They paddled around the side, grabbed the rope, and swam away from the burning water, away from the rig. Chad Murray and Paul Meinhart splashed in behind them. All four kicked and stroked and pulled on the rope. As Steve side-stroked away, he looked up at the rig above him, clouded in smoke like a fog. A pair of boots and work pants came shooting through the smoke. It was Curt. He plunged in five feet away. A second pair of boots came flying out of the smoke and hit the water about ten feet away. It was Yancy Keplinger.
Steve could tell they were making progress. His angle on the rig was widening. He’d gotten to a point where he could see above the edge of the rig deck just in time to watch a man sprint full speed and leap off the edge. He was still running in midair as he began to drop. Just before he splashed into the water, he seemed to look directly at Steve. It was Mike Williams.
Curt and Yancy swam to the raft to help pull and shove it away from the fire. Suddenly, they couldn’t move it any farther. Someone in the raft yelled, “Oh, my God, the painter line is tied to the rig!” Steve looked over his shoulder and saw a taut white line stretching from the raft back toward the rig until it vanished in the smoke. Chad Murray started screaming for help. Dave and Steve followed Chad’s eyes. Fifty or sixty yards away, he saw the rescue boat, and two flashing lights in the water. The boat converged on the lights, and as Steve watched, the flashing lights became people in life vests, as first one, then the other, was hauled aboard.
Then the boat turned and raced toward them.
Mike fell for what seemed like a very long time. He went deep into the ocean, silent and black. He looked where he thought up might be and saw an orange glow far above him. Then he began to rise. He burst to the surface and his lungs filled with air. His heart pounded with relief. He’d made it. He was going to live.
And then he noticed that his skin was burning. His face and eyes were burning. He was burning all over. Was he on fire? The water felt like grease and smelled like diesel fuel. And then he saw the fire on the water, not far from where he was and coming closer. He had to get out of there. He swam. He kicked and pulled and kicked and pulled and something strange happened. The pain in his head went away. He couldn’t feel anything. He was wondering if he might be dead when he heard a faint sound. It was a voice, saying, “Over here, over here.”
He was still trying to make sense of it when his life jacket seemed to rise of its own power, carrying him with it. A pair of strong hands hauled him up and flipped him into the open bow of a speedboat. He still didn’t know where he was or why, but he didn’t care.
The fire crept closer to the raft, no more than twenty-five feet away now, as the rescue boat approached. The people splashing in the water and sitting in the raft were all screaming for a knife. The boat cut the engine to neutral and glided toward them. A man came to the bow holding a large folding knife. Curt swam to the boat, took the knife, then swam back to the raft and cut the rope.
Now they all started swimming the raft toward the rescue boat. They threw the man standing at the bow a line. He caught it and wrapped it around a cleat. The boat shifted into reverse, backing them away from the fire, away from the rig.
With his last strength, Dave swam to the side of the boat. The final few feet seemed like miles. His arms and legs felt like dead weights, heavy enough to pull him to the bottom. He went limp in his life jacket and waited. Hands reached down and pulled him in. All the adrenaline his brain could produce had been used up. The fear he’d kept one step ahead of all night finally overtook him. He felt the pain in his body for the first time. The burns on his arms and head throbbed. He looked back at the Horizon burning in the night, and he thought:
“Holy shit! Holy shit!”
The Deepwater Horizon had blown up, and he was alive.
CHAPTER TWENTY
MUSTERING
2200 Hours, April 20, 2010
Block 252, Mississippi Canyon, Gulf of Mexico
When all the survivors were aboard the Damon Bankston, hurting and bleeding and disbelieving, they watched the flames a half mile distant and wondered who hadn’t made it off.
The Bankston crew had pulled seventeen out of the water, including Andrea and the group in the tangled life raft. The rest had come over in the two lifeboats, bu
t in the chaos, nobody was really sure who had been on the boats and who hadn’t, or even how many there were. Dave had nothing left inside him; he was done. But he knew he had one more task to perform. He had to get people who only wanted to collapse into oblivion to line up and give a definitive roll call. They had to know.
On the Bankston’s main deck, the boat’s crew had created a makeshift field hospital where the most severely injured were being tended by medics. For the other survivors, Bankston crew were giving up berths, and in many cases the clothes off their backs, to provide whatever small measure of comfort they could. Dave found some reserve he’d had no clue existed in him and managed to keep upright and moving among his hollow-eyed rig mates, trying to make sure they had water or blankets or something warm and dry to wear.
As he went, he ran through a list in his mind of those he’d seen near the drill shack on his last visit before the well blew; he searched the shadowed faces huddled on the deck looking to find them there. Some appeared just when he’d given up hope. Others never did. There was one face he saw over and over again, but he knew for sure he would not find it on the Bankston: the big, open, smiling moon face of Dale Burkeen.
They took roll, twice. A quick-thinking radio operator on the Horizon had brought the rig’s muster list, so they had that to work with. On the first attempt, they came up with fifteen missing, but by the second time through, there were just eleven names unaccounted for. When Dave considered the names, and that each of them had been on duty on the rig floor when the well blew, he knew that all the search boats in the world wouldn’t make any difference.
After the muster, Steve Bertone circled the Bankston to check on his engineering crew. He found them all, except for one: Brent Mansfield. He proceeded to the only place he hadn’t yet looked, the makeshift hospital. He found Brent lying on a stretcher on the floor, though it took a while to realize that that was him. Brent’s tangle with an angry steel door in the engine control room hadn’t gone well. His head was entirely covered with bandages and gauze. He had an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose and a neck brace.
