Fire on the Horizon

by Tom Shroder

  Brent was crammed into a tight space near a bunk holding another injured man. Steve slid in between the two, determined to keep Brent awake. Steve had always heard that if people who’d suffered head injuries slept, they could fall into a coma or die. The truth was a bit more complicated than that, but Steve wasn’t taking any chances. Every time Brent started to drift off, Steve nudged him awake by adjusting his oxygen mask and talking about whatever came to mind.

  As badly as Brent was hurt, the man on the bunk above him looked to be in even worse shape. It was Buddy Trahan. Buddy kept drifting off, too, so Steve doubled his efforts and tried to keep both men conscious. It was like spinning plates on sticks. Every time he’d focus on one, the other would start to wobble.

  Some time after the Coast Guard helicopters arrived around 11:30, a rescue swimmer appeared. He was all got up in a Navy SEAL type of wet suit. They’d clearly expected to be fishing people out of the water, but it hadn’t worked out that way. Now he was going to begin the evacuation of the seriously injured.

  “Who’s the critical?” he asked.

  The medics pointed to Buddy. They brought in a gurney and Steve moved around to the backside of the bed to help get Buddy moved. He put one hand on Buddy’s hip and one on his shoulder and began to roll him as slowly and gently as he could onto the gurney. At the first tilt, Buddy bellowed in agony about his leg. The blanket fell away and Steve could see that Buddy had a deep gash on his left thigh, below which his calf was mangled and oddly twisted. Buddy’s fingernails were gone, and the hole in the side of his neck was just the most terrifying of a net of lacerations all over his body.

  As Steve braced himself to roll Buddy a little farther toward the gurney, the medic standing on the opposite side of the bunk gasped. Steve looked where the medic’s horrified gaze had fastened and saw that Buddy’s back was burned black from belt to head.

  When the medics took Buddy out to the helicopter, Steve stayed until they came for Brent, then he made the rounds of his crew again. After that, he climbed up to the Bankston’s uppermost level, where he sat alone and looked out across that narrow yet infinitely vast stretch of water between where he was now and where he had been.

  The Horizon refugees were crowded together in whatever makeshift space could be found, the ship’s lounge, its galley, the open deck, and in whatever berths the Bankston crew had given up to them. There were still some who didn’t have dry clothes, and many were barefoot. They were stuck here until the Coast Guard released the Bankston from search-and-rescue duties, which wouldn’t happen until long after almost everyone on board had lost hope that there was anyone to search for or rescue.

  Randy Ezell looked around bitterly. There must have been twenty-five boats on the scene, plying the waters in search patterns. He could see no reason for them to have to just sit there, helplessly. Every minute within sight of the raging holocaust on the Horizon was torture to him, disfiguring him in a way he wasn’t sure he’d ever completely recover from. Yet it went on and on as they sat there through the night, denied comfort and rest, forced to linger in the light of the very flames that had consumed their brothers. He’d never felt that word resonate more truly.

  Randy knew all the names left unchecked on the muster, of course. As senior toolpusher, he had held himself responsible for all of them, even the mud engineers, who had worked for a contractor. Three of the missing were his assistant drillers, Donald Clark, Stephen Curtis, and Wyatt Kemp. Donald had a wife, two sons, and two daughters. Today was Stephen’s fortieth birthday, a fact that wouldn’t make things any easier for his wife and two teenage kids. Wyatt was just twenty-seven, and only recently promoted. He had a pretty young wife, Courtney, and two daughters, Kaylee, three, and Maddison, just four months old. Kaylee and her mom had a ritual of counting down the days until Wyatt’s return on a calendar. The mud engineers, Gordon Jones and Blair Manuel, both worked for the contractor M-I SWACO, but were as nearly family as anyone else. Gordon’s pregnant wife, Michelle, was due any day now. At fifty-six, Blair was as irrepressible as a teenager about the summer wedding he and his fiancée were planning.

  Karl Kleppinger, Jr., was thirty-eight, a roustabout and a veteran of Desert Storm with a teenage son named Aaron, who had special needs, and a wife named Tracy, who took care of them both. Floor hands Shane Roshto and Adam Weise were just getting started in the business, and in life. Shane was only twenty-two but already shouldering big responsibilities. He was putting his wife, Natalie, through college and they had a three-year-old boy, Blaine. Adam was just twenty-four, a high school football star who’d gone straight from high school to the rig.

  Then there was Dewey Revette, Randy’s forty-eight-year-old driller, bright and good-natured as the day was long, and on a rig, it was longer than most. And Dale Burkeen, the big-hearted crane operator whom everyone loved.

  As for Jason Anderson, the irony that April 20 was to have been his final full day on the Horizon was too painful to consider. Just hours from now, when the sun rose, Jason was supposed to have been gathering his bags and preparing to helicopter off to his new assignment, senior toolpusher on another rig. There would be no helicopter ride to a bright future now. Randy had looked forward to staying in touch, trading e-mails from one senior toolpusher to another. Instead, now—and he didn’t doubt for the rest of his life—Randy would replay Jason’s last moments in his mind. As Jason fought to control an uncontrollable well, his final request had been for Randy to come help.

  Not fifty feet away, Doug Brown stared out at the fire burning above the black plane of the ocean and thought of the day, many years earlier, when he had first laid eyes on the Deepwater Horizon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  GOING HOME

  April 21, 2010

  Gulf of Mexico

  Sometime after midnight, Curt found Dave on the main deck of the Bankston. Dave was in a kind of trance state now, operating in a part of his brain that probably never slept. Curt had gone from the rescue boat straight to the Bankston’s bridge, where he’d showered and changed into borrowed clothes. Captain Landry had asked Curt to coordinate the effort to fight the fire, but insisted he clean up first—the powerful kerosene scent wafting off his clothes was distracting the bridge crew. Now Curt urged Dave to do the same.

  No way, Dave said. None of the others had been able to shower, and as long as they couldn’t, he wouldn’t, either.

  Suit yourself, Curt said, and he went back up to the bridge.

  It was early morning when the Transocean rig manager for the Deepwater Horizon, Paul Johnson, reached his OIM, Jimmy Harrell, on the Bankston’s satellite phone. Paul was Jimmy’s direct supervisor and had always thought highly of him. He asked Jimmy how he was, but Jimmy could barely speak. Paul thought he might be crying, but he wasn’t sure.

  Jimmy said he was still having trouble with his eyes. Insulation from the destruction of the accommodations had gotten in there and it felt like it had never gotten out. He was struggling to see and his hearing was off.

  Paul tried to reassure him but found that difficult. Then he asked the question that had been burning a hole in his brain all night.

  “Jimmy, what happened out there?”

  “I don’t know, Paul,” he said. “She just blew. I don’t know what happened. She just blew.”

  Now Paul was almost certain Jimmy was crying.

  “Don’t worry about it, Jimmy,” he said. “We’ll find that out later on. Just take care of yourself.”

  And then he hung up.

  The Bankston was finally released from search-and-rescue duty and got under way at 8:13 the next morning. As they left the rig in their wake, it was still burning as fiercely as ever and was beginning to tilt to one side. But even now the survivors weren’t taken directly to shore. They were about to begin a zigzag voyage across the Gulf without receiving any explanation of where they were going or when they would finally reach their destination.

  Throughout the night, they had been left to struggle with thoughts of
wives and children and family desperate to learn their fate, but whom they were unable to contact. The voyage stretched on interminably. First they stopped off at another drilling rig, Ocean Endeavor, where Bankston crew took on medical supplies and cigarettes, which were seen as one of the most urgent needs. They also dropped off Daun Winslow, who had been up all night charting post-blowout logistics with Transocean colleagues in Houston. Daun transferred to another workboat and immediately headed back out to the Horizon to direct an attempt to activate the failed BOP shear ram using ROVs, and to supervise firefighting efforts until contractors arrived to take over.

  Both endeavors were doomed to fail miserably. When the hydraulic and communications cables from the rig to the BOP pods—which ran from a spool near the moon pool—were destroyed in the fire, the BOP should have gone into automatic “dead man” function. The loss of signal should have triggered bottles of pressurized gas to drive shut the rams and close the well. Later analysis indicated that low charge in a battery in the blue control pod and a faulty solenoid valve in the yellow pod rendered the dead man function inactive. Twenty attempts by Daun and his team to directly force various blowout preventer rams shut using the ROV all failed to stop the flow.

  Fireboats poured hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and flame-retardant foam on the Horizon, possibly contributing to its top-heavy instability. The rig would capsize and sink at 10:22 a.m. on April 22. It would pick up speed as it descended and make the mile-long plunge to the bottom within minutes. Long before it crashed into the mud, the riser ruptured and began spewing crude oil into the Gulf at a rate of as much as two and a half million gallons a day. One plan after another to kill the well or cap it failed. It wasn’t until July 15, eighty-six days and an estimated 185 million gallons of spilled oil later, that an effective cap finally halted the flow. Macondo was not declared permanently dead until September 19, after the completion of two relief wells.

  The months-long ecological catastrophe—a catastrophe whose consequences will continue to manifest for years to come—would soon overshadow the loss of eleven Horizon crew members and the suffering of all who had been aboard in the final hours of April 20.

  For now, as April 21 dawned, their ordeal was not over. The Bankston still had another stop to make. Coast Guard and MMS personnel were waiting on the Matterhorn production platform to board the Bankston. They had targeted key Horizon crew members for questioning about the sequence of events leading to the blowout and evacuation. The interviews proceeded while the Bankston finally headed to Port Fourchon, southwest of New Orleans. When they arrived at 1:30 a.m. on April 22, nearly twenty-eight hours after the blowout, the Bankston’s decks remained covered with drilling mud, and some of the Horizon survivors were still barefoot.

  Micah Sandell was among the many who hadn’t slept. He was beat, desperate to call home, desperate just to be away from there and begin to put this nightmare behind him. But as he walked off the Bankston he noticed some Coast Guard officers sitting at a table in front of a row of portable toilets. Before he left, he and everyone else would have to provide a urine sample. Sandell was furious, or as furious as he could be in his extreme mental fog. He stood in one line to fill out the testing forms, and then another to use the porta-potty to fill his little plastic cup. They thought that somehow the blowout might have been his fault?

  Everyone knew how ludicrous that was. But Coast Guard regulations required that after any maritime accident resulting in death or more than one hundred thousand dollars in damage, those involved in the incident needed to undergo drug testing within thirty-two hours. The decision was made that rather than try to determine who had been “involved” in the blowout, it would be simpler just to have everyone tested.

  Simpler for the Coast Guard, maybe.

  Doug Brown had ridden up, up, up in the basket as the thudding chop of the helicopter grew into an all-encompassing reality. Then he had been inside. He’d turned his head to find beside him Buddy Trahan. Buddy had been conscious, but fading in and out. Every now and then Doug had heard him moan.

  The chopper set them down on BP’s Na Kika production rig, not far from the Horizon. He’d been taken to a room set up for triage, then put on another helicopter and sent to the University of Southern Alabama Hospital, where he discovered they’d also taken Paul Meinhart. Doctors ran tests and treated Doug’s leg injuries, then released him to two Transocean consultants, who drove Doug and Paul to the Crowne Plaza Hotel in New Orleans.

  Getting wheeled into the lobby of a luxury hotel hours after escaping a blowout and a burning rig was a jarring experience. Given how exhausted and shaken he was, it seemed more hallucination than reality. Doug was handed some clean clothes and then wheeled into a debriefing on the blowout with Coast Guard officers. Somehow he managed to participate. He kept telling himself it would only be minutes before he could close a hotel room door on the world and fall into bed.

  But when the Coast Guard was done with him, he was taken to another room. There were two men in suits who introduced themselves as legal representatives for Transocean. A court reporter sat beside them with an air of alert anticipation and a transcription machine.

  They had a few questions for him.

  At 7 a.m. on Wednesday April 21, a Houston attorney named Steve Gordon got a call on his 800 number. The woman identified herself as Tracy Kleppinger. She said her husband, Karl, was on the Deepwater Horizon, an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Steve knew where this was going. He had been blipped awake at 4:30 that morning by an alert on his smartphone to a CNN newsflash about the explosion on the rig.

  Steve specialized in maritime law, and he had represented the families of rig workers before in personal injury lawsuits. He’d recently represented the widow and one-year-old child of a man on another Transocean rig. The man had been working a double shift. He was using hand signals to direct a pipe handler, telling him where to drop a one-ton pipe. It was a hot day without any breeze, so the man found a shady spot to stand in. The pipe handler didn’t see the man in the shade. The pipe swung out of control, crushing the man against a steel stanchion. Steve was there to help the widow hold Transocean accountable.

  But in this case, Steve’s assumption was off.

  “I don’t want you to sue anyone,” Tracy Kleppinger said. “I just want you to find my husband.”

  When the phone rang at 5 a.m., Alyssa Young was in the shower getting ready to start her day, always a complicated proposition when you were alone in a house with a six-year-old, a five-year-old, and a four-month-old baby. Getting dressed, she saw the phone blinking one message. For a fraction of an instant, she felt a shock, a sudden vivid glimpse of a nightmare she’d managed to forget, that black cloud on the drive to the airport with Dave. But it instantly faded, just like a bad dream can vanish.

  Then the day started and the kids decided to have a bad morning. Last night, Dave had messaged her that he wouldn’t be able to call, he was busy with some cement job or something. He’d probably decided to call early and catch her before the day started, is all. He’d call back later. She couldn’t think about it now. Between getting everyone a different breakfast and getting them out the door, she didn’t even have time to turn on the news.

  Tracy Kleppinger had gotten a call before dawn. Someone with a dull mechanical voice, almost robotic, said, “I’m calling to tell you that there has been an explosion on your husband’s rig. We don’t have details at this time. You’ll be contacted when we know more.” Nobody had called back. She’d found Steve Gordon’s name in an advertisement on gCaptain, a networking website for mariners. and called for help.

  Steve got a number for the Transocean human relations chief, who took Steve’s number and Karl’s name and promised to call when he knew something. Steve didn’t wait to hear. He kept calling all morning, but learned nothing.

  Steve planned for the worst. He chartered a flight for his investigator to go sit with Tracy Kleppinger in her home in Natchez, Mississippi. He’d arrived at her house at n
oon.

  Around 2 p.m., Steve got the news he’d been dreading: “We have now been able to conclude that there are eleven men missing, and that Karl was one of them.”

  Steve hung up, swallowed, then called his investigator’s cell phone to warn him what was about to happen, and admonish him to stay close to Mrs. Kleppinger. Then he called the house.

  When he told her that he had bad news, that Karl was one of the missing, he expected her to drop the phone or weep or scream. He didn’t expect what happened.

  “He’s not missing,” she said, buoyantly. “They found him!”

  She was watching MSNBC. “They’re reporting right now that they found a capsule with the missing eleven.”

  “Oh my God,” Steve said. He patched in the Transocean HR chief, and repeated what Tracy had seen on TV: “They have found Karl and the others.”

  “No,” the HR chief said.

  “Yes, they have!” Tracy said. “Go to MSNBC.com, you’ll see.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m sorry, but we have followed that story, and that is not correct.”

  Tracy Kleppinger, whose voice had been so alive, so full of hope and relief, just disappeared.

  Steve’s law partner flew into Natchez and spent the next three days with her. There was still a nominal search operation going on, but nobody really believed anyone would be found.

  Within hours of the official cancellation of the search and rescue, on Thursday, April 22, Steve Gordon filed a wrongful death suit in federal court on behalf of Tracy and Aaron Kleppinger.