Fire on the Horizon (27 page)

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 involved 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.

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.