Fire on the Horizon (29 page)

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.

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 su
pervisor 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.