Fire on the Horizon

The Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster

John Konrad, Tom Shroder

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2011
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062063021
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"A phenomenal feat of journalism. . . . I tore through it like a novel but with the queasy knowledge that the whole damn thing is true." —Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and War

Blending exclusive first-person interviews and penetrating investigative reporting, oil rig captain John Konrad and veteran Washington Post writer Tom Shroder give the definitive, white-knuckled account of the Deepwater Horizon explosion—as well as a riveting insider's view of the byzantine culture of offshore drilling that made the disaster inevitable. As the world continues to cope with the oil spill's grim aftermath—with environmental and economic consequences all the more dire in a region still rebuilding from Hurricane Katrina—Konrad and Schroder's real-time account of the disaster shows us just where things went wrong, and points the way to a safer future for us all.

CHAPTER ONE

THE BEGINNING

December 2000
Ulsan, South Korea

Half dead from lack of sleep, Doug Brown was staring out the bus window at the gates of the Hyundai Heavy Industries shipyard in Ulsan, South Korea, five thousand miles from home, when a raging flood of scooters and mopeds burst through the winter morning’s fierce grip and woke him up for good. As the violent buzz bore into his eardrums, Doug recoiled at what his American colleagues called the “Hyundai 500,” a name that didn’t sound so sinister back in the States. Some of the scooters were doubled up and stacked so high with bundles and packages that the slightest bump would surely have knocked one into the next and sent the whole mass crashing like dominoes. It seemed to Doug that all ten thousand workers at the world’s largest shipyard were arriving at the same instant, moments before the 0900 start time.

What he could see of the yard through the window looked like an industrial version of Disney World: walkways lined with flowers, buildings seemingly wet with fresh coats of paint, impeccably dressed security guards with helmets and badges buffed to a pristine, reflective shine. Uniformed signalmen positioned on platforms in the center of the road moved robotically as the chaos swarmed below. The whole crazy scene was framed by five-story-high gantry cranes straddling immense drydocks at the water’s edge, and seagoing vessels laid section by section on a blacktop the size of a Walmart parking lot, as if playful giants had abandoned their toys there.

Rising from the drydocks and floating at mooring cables were more finished or nearly completed ships than at any other shipyard in the world. The vessels were of astonishing variety and power—liquefied natural gas carriers crammed with cryogenics and studded with insulated domes, each the size of a small basketball arena; supertankers capable of carrying two million barrels of oil; car carriers with their tall boxlike hulls and internal maze of ramps capable of holding thousands of vehicles; and countless container-ships without a single container on deck.

If the scooter stampede hadn’t so thoroughly woken him, Doug might have believed he was still dreaming. He’d only been working for the offshore oil company R&B Falcon for two years when his managers pulled him aside and offered him a prestige assignment: chief mechanic of their newest, most technologically advanced rig, still being built in Korea. That was barely a month ago, and now he was in this fantastical place halfway around the world, about to see his new rig—his new home—for the first time.

Doug had grown up in a middle-class family in California. He was a round-faced, round-figured man of average height with kind blue eyes and a laid-back temperament in that open, Pacific Coast way. Nothing about him said striver, yet here he was making a rapid climb in one of the fastest-growing and most profitable industries in the world. He didn’t even have a college degree, but what he did have was a natural ability to work with machines, and experience.

He’d started out working in construction and landscaping. When the lawn tractors broke down, he was the one who got them running again. He had an intuition about engines, a feeling and liking for them. For most people an engine is an unorganized cacophony of sounds, but to Doug the fast beats of compression and ignition formed an intelligible rhythm. He could tell when a piston misfired by the sound of a missed beat. He had a talent, but no formal training, something he thought he could rectify when he decided to join the army in 1989, at the age of twenty-nine. He started out learning to maintain helicopter engines, then migrated to an oxymoronic job: working on army marine engines during the Persian Gulf War—landing craft, tugboats, and barges used to ferry troops and equipment across rivers and between ports. The closest he and his heart rate came to combat were the poison gas alarms that screamed across his base in Kuwait, signaling the launch of Iraqi Scud missiles in his general direction.

He learned a little about working on the edge of danger, but even more about the complex machines that powered seagoing vessels. Engines were engines—gas had to be delivered from a tank to a chamber where it would mix with air, compress, explode, and drive the movement of a shaft—but ship engines were larger, with more moving parts. He also had to learn the mechanics of auxiliary systems needed on a self-contained vessel at sea: water desalination, ventilation and cooling, hydraulics, even the processing of sewage. While managing these systems lacked the glory of combat infantry, the skill set he’d developed paid off when his army career approached an end in 1998 and he posted his résumé online.

The offers all came from offshore oil companies. He accepted the one from R&B Falcon. The company was not the largest or the most profitable. If Doug had had a background in finance its balance sheet might have caused him to reconsider. But R&B was pushing into the new frontier of deepwater drilling with an aggressive program of building new rigs, each among the most advanced in the world, and, most importantly to Doug, they offered the highest pay. He wasn’t married, so the schedule of twenty-one days on and twenty-one days off didn’t present any family problems, and the rig’s atmosphere—the smell of burning diesel and the constant grind of heavy equipment, the hierarchical command structure—all reminded him of the military.

He signed on as a mechanic on a rig in the Gulf of Mexico, was promoted quickly to chief mechanic, and had barely settled in to his new supervisory responsibilities when he was swept up in this Korean vortex.

As quickly as the storm of scooters appeared, it passed. The flow slowed to a trickle, and the bus lurched forward, carrying Doug and his future rig mates on a clear path to the docks. As they approached their destination, Doug cocked his head flat against the cold window to get a glimpse of the derrick towering above the Deepwater Horizon.

 

The Horizon had begun life as simple sheets of thick steel, lifted from trucks by powerful magnets and placed on a gigantic conveyor belt. First stop was an industrial-strength version of Goldfinger’s powerful laser cutter, which sliced the metal into the proper shape. From there the cut steel rolled into the bending room. No machine had yet been invented for the task of shaping such thick steel, so the yard relied on an age-old manipulation by fire and water. The steel was laid down on prefabricated plywood molds, then, with a fire torch in one hand and a garden hose in the other, the master bender, sitting directly on the steel on a wooden stool, heated the metal till it began to wilt over the plywood frame. Once it fit the form, he’d douse it with water, cooling and immediately hardening the steel. Now cut and shaped, the steel sheets were welded to form tanks, rooms, bulwarks, derrick sections, or any one of the hundred other modules of a rig; then every inch was painted. The finished sections were carted outside to the asphalt assembly lot. There they were outfitted with pipes, electrical cables, gauges, hoses, and the myriad other small components, then stacked and welded together to form massive megablocks, the biggest ones twelve stories high and one to two hundred feet square.

The job of moving these behemoths around the yard fell to oddly small devices called transporters. Just a few feet tall, the transporters had a flat deck, beneath which were 144 small wheels connected to powerful hydraulic jacks. The short profile of the transporters allowed them to crawl underneath the megablocks, where they were linked by a wireless signal from a computer. They moved in unison into position, then the hydraulics engaged, elevating the transporters and lifting the entire megablock off the jacks. Traffic stopped, the roads cleared, and the entire immense assemblage rolled down to the dock. In a short few weeks, huge cranes on barges lifted each megablock into its precise position. Now the growing skeleton was swarmed by workers donning masks, starting generators, lifting spray guns, each performing a single task that inched the rig closer to completion. At first the welders dominated. Men and women wearing leather smocks and face masks covered every corner of the structure, maneuvering across scaffolding and through holes in the bulkhead, which they would eventually weld shut. Painters followed behind the welders, laying coats of protection over the steel. As the rig got closer to completion the ratio of welders to painters tipped and the metallic smell of burnt steel was replaced with the noxious fumes of drying paint. Then came electricians, pipefitters, electronics techs, quality control engineers, and a myriad of other specialized workers who added layers of complexity until the rig was ready for its final assembly.

This was where Doug came in, about three months before the rig was scheduled to be launched. He and his busload of future rig mates, each of them handpicked from other company assets, arrived as the multi-tiered deck was hoisted one hundred feet in the air by some of the world’s largest cranes, then settled carefully atop the four columns rising from the pontoons.

To the uninitiated, the Deepwater Horizon was far from beautiful. None other than John Steinbeck once described one of the Horizon’s early ancestors as having “the sleek race lines of an outhouse standing on a garbage scow,” and nearly a half century of technological advances hadn’t changed that.

In place of a single hydrodynamic hull, the rig would float on its two long, narrow pontoons, each twice the size of a 727’s fuselage. The pontoons were lined with computer-controlled ballast tanks that could be flooded or emptied in precise increments that finely adjusted the rig’s trim, and the main deck’s elevation above the ocean surface.

When the rig moved from one spot to another on its own, powered by eight 7,000-horsepower electric thrusters mounted beneath the pontoons, the ballast would be adjusted so the pontoons rode thirty feet below the surface, submarine-like, and the deck towered more than a hundred feet above the water. When the rig moved over a well and prepared to drill, the pontoons would take on more water and sink to a depth of seventy-six feet, creating a more stable base and lowering the deck to just sixty feet above the sea.

The four massive support columns looked like highway trestles, or the limbs of a brontosaurus, supporting what appeared to be a crowded construction site in the early stages of the creation of a small skyscraper. The Eiffel Tower–like steel structure in the middle of the rig was an oil derrick, rising to 260 feet above the deck from a forty-eight-foot-square base. Two built-in cranes to either side of the tower were designed to transfer steel pipe and other heavy equipment used in well drilling from supply boats to what was known as the rig floor—a platform surrounding the derrick one level above the main deck. Clinging beneath the main deck was the “accommodation block,” a two-deck honeycomb of steel that was basically a combination hotel and office building. In addition to crew cabins, conference rooms, and offices, there was a kitchen, a dining hall, a movie theater, a gymnasium, an infirmary, and a lounge—everything needed to house, feed, care for, and entertain the full complement of 126 oil workers, sailors, and managers.

Some of those top managers, beginning with the offshore installation manager (always called the OIM), who was the top on-rig authority, and the captain, who answered to the OIM except when the rig was moving between wells, had already been in Korea for months. They had been monitoring the progress of the rig construction from a temporary field office, the working euphemism for two large shipping containers that had been dropped a hundred yards from the drydock where the Horizon sat.

As the February 2001 launch grew near, more and more managers—layers of management, really—arrived to familiarize themselves with the rig’s equipment and systems and to set about preparing step-by-step procedures for everything from maintenance of the air-conditioning system to emergency evacuations. The managers of the drilling operations—men with quaint oil field titles like senior toolpusher, toolpusher, driller—were joined by mariners with familiar titles like chief mate, second mate, and not so familiar ones like dynamic positioning officer. Doug’s group included technical specialists—the mechanics, electronic technicians, supply supervisors, and subsea engineers who dealt with some of the most important equipment on the rig, the tools that would be lowered beneath the sea to control the well when drilling began. R&B Falcon had given the rig managers a virtual blank check to furnish and appoint their brand-new homes. So many crates of expensive equipment—from new wrenches to reading lamps, flat-screen TVs to office chairs—would eventually accumulate in their cramped work area that movement was nearly impossible.

But they were still a long way from any of that as the bus stopped to drop off Doug and his new colleagues at the crude field office, which they immediately took to sardonically calling “the White House,” where they were destined to spend most of their time for the three tedious months remaining until the rig floated. As they acclimated to the strange surroundings, getting used to kimchi at every meal and the way the Korean workers began each morning with mass calisthenics to the beat of American rock songs blaring from loudspeakers, the resident project manager made it clear that until the rig floated, all that any of them could do when they ventured onto the Horizon was watch how the Koreans handled the equipment and take notes.

For much of their twelve-hour shifts in the White House, they were planted in front of computer screens, writing a kind of owner’s manual for the new rig and all its equipment. In Doug’s case, as chief mechanic, that meant creating procedures for the operation, care, and maintenance of his primary concern—the six huge engines—and all the gritty details: the sewage systems, ventilation blowers, fuel lines, water delivery, and the myriad of other mechanical components required to keep the ship afloat and the rig hands comfortable. If the rig were a Ferrari, Doug and his staff would be the staff of full-time mechanics who not only maintained and repaired the engine, but saw to the air-conditioning, the brakes, the suspension, the power windows, the wiper fluid—everything that moved or sparked from bumper to bumper.

It was all essential, if not always exciting.

For now, though, tapping away at the keyboard in the White House, it was mostly just boring.

 

At his first opportunity, Doug pushed away from the table he was calling a desk, the computer he’d barely set up, and went out to the rig. It rose 395 feet from the ground to the top of the derrick, the equivalent of a forty-story skyscraper.

He took the temporary stairs that had been plopped down beside the rig by a crane and climbed to the third deck, which was actually the first deck from the ground. He threaded his way through the uniformed workers, an incongruous white giant passing through the crowded construction site, and headed for the engine room. The engines were lined up at the aft end of the third deck, three on the port side and three on the starboard. Between them, and half a deck up, was the engine control room, or ECR, which would be Doug’s office. But he went straight for the engines.

There were six diesels, all muscular curves and cast steel sinew, the length of a semitrailer and three times his height. The nearly 10,000 horses they generated served a single purpose—to rotate a generator shaft 720 times per minute, sweeping it through a magnetic field to create 11,000 volts of pure electrical energy. The electricity would surge through the ship’s veins, arteries, and capillaries to power everything from the smallest light socket to the big thrusters mounted 125 feet below his feet. The engines were what you’d build if money were no object, gleaming with as-yet untapped power.

The Korean technicians fussed around them, looking like laboratory assistants with clipboards, timers, and measurement devices recording every vibration—every movement—each engine made. As Doug drew near, he could feel the Koreans watching him skeptically, this large, lumbering American with sloping shoulders and thick legs, drawn to the engines as if against his will.

For the first time he felt the urge he would feel a thousand times more, to reach out and run his hand along the diesel’s flank, to whisper his admiration. But the next thing he knew, the Koreans coalesced around him in a protective knot and admonished him shrilly. The translation was clear: look but don’t touch. Until all the papers were signed and sealed, this rig still belonged to them, and they weren’t going to let Doug lay a finger on those engines.

Coming back down the stairs, Doug felt the bitterness of the Korean winter wind. It was so cold. Growing up in California and spending his working years between the waterways of Iraq and the balmy Gulf of Mexico, Doug had never known a high-latitude winter. If he had, maybe he wouldn’t have left his cup of coffee in the cold while he sought out his engines—he returned just then to a mug of caffeinated slush. And maybe he’d have packed more than a sweatshirt to stay warm.

Doug had a streak of stubbornness in him, too. He sat there every day typing up his procedures, his body tensed against the cold, shivering and turning a bluish tint. When he had to go outside, he ran from one door to the next, his shoulders to his ears.

A big, strong, moon-faced man had been watching this dance with equal parts amusement and sympathy. He approached with a duffel bag and pulled a pair of thermal coveralls from it with a mangled, four-fingered hand. “Looks like you might need these more than I do.”

His name was Jason Anderson. He’d worked oil rigs since his first (and only) summer at community college, when his dad pulled strings to get him a job chipping paint and lugging garbage. It was scut work, the bottom of the ladder, but something about the life aboard a rig grabbed him. Jason got through another year of school, but as fast as he could manage he was back on a rig full-time, moving quickly to the center of the action as a drill floor roughneck. Roughnecks were pushed hard twelve hours a day by the drillers, who weren’t always picky about their motivational techniques. With the sun beating down hard and no protection from the wind and rain—coupled with the scuffs and bruises of constant manual labor—most roughnecks had the physical proof of their position after a couple of years. Some remained in that job much longer than it took for the skin of their necks to coarsen, but Jason was smart and motivated. He worked his way up the stations of the rig, the jobs as blunt as their names–shaker hand, pit hand, derrickman. Everyone knew he’d eventually make toolpusher, the drilling foreman. He had a gift for getting people to want to work for him. He was the kind of man who would give up a pair of warm coveralls to a cold stranger in a strange place. It was a gesture that sparked a friendship that would last as long as the Deepwater Horizon.

CHAPTER TWO

OIL AND WATER

1896
Summerland, California

Since a time beyond memory, black streaks of oil and thick veins of tar have seeped from the rocks and sand of the California coast. Native people used it as caulk for their canoes and glue for their tools. Early European settlers dug pits to mine it for building material and fuel. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, oil wild-catters working on the California coast south of Santa Barbara in a place called Summerlan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Prologue
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Chapter Seventeen
• Chapter Eighteen
• Chapter Nineteen
• Chapter Twenty
• Chapter Twenty-One
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher