Fire on the Horizon (21 page)

Janet had missed out on all that. She’d been camping in the mountains with her husband. That’s part of why she was driving out to Sandtown on the evening of April 14, to make up for lost time.

She rolled through pine thickets down the familiar honeycomb of gravel roads to his double-wide trailer home with the brown siding, in the middle of nowhere. She and Dale stood out by the road in Dale’s front yard at dusk for about an hour and a half, talking as night fell. Two bright security lights on wooden poles that flanked the little house came on, reflecting off the sandy, patchy front yard and the road in front. Dale never wanted to give up his last day at home, so instead of driving down to the coast at a reasonable hour and getting a hotel room, he would leave around midnight and arrive at the helipad for the morning ride out to the rig. Janet always fretted about that part of the journey. She worried about Dale making the drive when he was sleepy. And she worried about that helicopter ride to a tiny target in the middle of that big ocean.

Sometimes she wished he didn’t have to work so far away, and stay away so long when he was gone. But she understood, of course. Everybody in rural Mississippi and Louisiana understood.

Out in front of the house, there was a little plastic wading pool sitting next to a leaky faucet. Little fish were painted on it, swimming tentatively in airy circles above a fingernail’s worth of water in the bottom. Just the other day Dale told Janet, “Sis, I’m going to get a real swimming pool for all our kids and nieces and nephews and other kids in the neighborhood.”

She knew he’d do it, too.

But it wasn’t just the money that kept him on the rig. Dale enjoyed being out on the water for that long stretch of days. He talked all the time about how pretty the Gulf was and how he would see dolphins jumping and fishermen catching big fish out by the rig.

Janet loved that about her brother, how he could find so much to appreciate in the world. And she loved that he was such a good listener. She always felt safe around him, not just because of his size and his fierce protectiveness, but because she knew he always had her best interests at heart.

Janet felt she could tell him just about anything. Now she found herself telling her brother about her concern for her son, who was about to go into the sixth grade. Janet was a special education teacher, and she knew all about vulnerabilities in children, maybe too much. She was worried that he might be too young for middle school, wondered if she should hold him back.

Dale put his big bear arm around her and gave her a smile so full of love it made her shiver. He said, “Oh, sis, Scott’s gonna be okay, and you’re a good mother and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

Janet cried, and he hugged her and gave her a kiss as they stood there in front of the house by her car parked on the road.

The last thing she said to him was, “Be careful.”

Alyssa Young had been through it dozens of times. She knew all the feelings. There was the heightened appreciation of Dave’s
presence
—the rhythm of his breathing beside her in the dark, the laugh that turned everything into their private joke, the way he could lose himself in play with their children, almost childlike himself. And then there was the creeping tension that accumulated as his departure day neared, and the battle against her own self-pity for being left alone to deal with three small children and a needy dog in a big house at the end of a lonely New England gravel road.

She reminded herself she had signed up for even worse when she married Dave. He was out on that cable repair ship for three or four months at a time, barely reachable. Since he’d been on the Horizon, she spoke to him practically every day, at least once, usually more. And three weeks was a far cry from three months. Just twenty-one days until they’d have three blessed and almost completely unobstructed weeks together as a family.

She knew she was luckier than so many others. But the void when he left, and the anticipation of it, never seemed to get any easier. And every time the day came for her to drive him to the airport to catch his flight to New Orleans, all the complex calculus of gain and loss would swirl through her mind as another good-bye rushed toward her at sixty miles an hour.

But this time there was something else in the car with them, something she’d never felt before—a sheer animal dread, a suffocating presence that clutched at her and wouldn’t let go. This was nothing like the usual knot of anxiety that she’d come to associate with the helicopter flight from Houma, Louisiana, to the rig. That was at least a partially rational fear. She’d looked up the stats and knew that he was safer on the commercial flight to New Orleans than they both were on the drive to the airport. But helicopters were something else. She knew all about the ones that had gone down while
shuttling workers to rigs, and she always half held her breath until he called to say he’d touched down on the Horizon. Then she didn’t think about it again until he was on the helicopter back to shore.

That familiar, nagging twitch of concern had no relation to what gripped her now. She came close to telling Dave what she was feeling and begging him not to get on the plane, but that would have been crazy, she knew. She didn’t believe in this. She refused to believe in it.

The sick feeling persisted. It stayed with her on the lonely drive home, swirling around her in a black fog until Dave called the next day, April 15, to say the helicopter had landed on the rig. She could feel her muscles relax. Now he was safe.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

POSITIVE TEST

April 19, 2010

Block 252, Mississippi Canyon, Gulf of Mexico

Jimmy Harrell didn’t like what he was hearing.

He was at the 11 a.m. meeting on April 19. They had been running the final long string of casing down into the hole since the day before, and now they were looking ahead to the final significant task before leaving Macondo behind—the cement job that would seal off the bottom of the well. Ronald Sepulvado, the senior BP company man he had worked with for years, had been called to shore to participate in a mandatory well control school to refresh his knowledge of how to deal with a well that threatened to go out of control. Sepulvado’s temporary replacement was Bob Kaluza, a man who’d been flown to the Horizon from BP’s biggest asset, the Thunder Horse PDQ production rig.

Kaluza had plenty of experience, thirty-five years in the oil field, but having spent just a few days aboard the Horizon, Sepulvado’s notes could not have adequately conveyed Transocean culture, the personalities of the crew, the specifics of the equipment the Hori
zon used, or how to handle operations on an asset not owned by BP. But here he was nonetheless, outlining to the Horizon’s drill crew the plan for the upcoming cement job.

Something he said took Jimmy by surprise, and taking Jimmy by surprise on a rig was not an easy thing to do. Rigs had been his life for more than three decades, and he’d worked his way though just about every job a man could have on the rig, beginning with deckhand, and he’d seen just about everything there is to see.

Now he was the OIM, the boss, and the senior drilling hand aboard. Like so many in the Gulf, he was a southerner, born in Mississippi, and a true gentleman, careful to call the men in positions above him, even men years his junior, “Sir,” and all women, regardless of age or position, “Ma’am.” His round face, soulful eyes, and droopy white mustache made him seem approachable, like a favorite uncle. Everyone just called Jimmy “Jimmy,” or “Mr. Jimmy” if they were a junior hand and felt presumptuous addressing the boss by his naked Christian name. But Jimmy wouldn’t have minded if they had. He had the kind of self-confidence that expressed itself as extreme calm in difficult situations. He had been in enough tight squeezes in his life to know that if you kept an even keel, tough times usually ended up for the best.

He had needed that faith on a well like Macondo, which had been a true bitch of a project right up to the end. Now this cement job would all but finish it up.

What caught his attention now, and kind of shocked him, was the company man saying they intended to run special, and more expensive, nitrogen foam cement for this job.

Let me stop you right there, Jimmy said. He knew a thing or two about nitrified cement. He was no stranger to the stuff; they used it all the time—they’d used it earlier on Macondo. But they’d always used it up near the top of the well, at the muddy sea bottom.
In his more than three decades in the business, he’d only seen it used in a deep part of the well twice.

The problem was that at great depths—and this cement was going down three and a half miles—the high pressure threatened to squeeze the nitrogen bubbles right out of the mix, which would then rise up the well, creating tiny holes and channels that would render the cement job worthless as a seal against oil and gas. Jimmy didn’t like this at all, and he didn’t even
know
about the tests Halliburton had been running on the proposed cement slurry—so far, the mix had failed to prove itself stable.

His objections came from the gut, and his long experience. But Kaluza wasn’t giving in. Lighter cement, less likely to break through the well’s fragile walls, was essential to the plan. The nitrogen had to stay.

Jimmy figured he wasn’t going to win this argument. The company man was the customer, the man who wrote the checks. This was
BP’s
project. But it was Jimmy’s rig, and he wasn’t going to let it drop without at least a little razor-edged sarcasm.

“Well,” Jimmy said, “I guess that’s what we got those pinchers for.”

The cement job began at 8 p.m. on April 19. The first step was to make sure the hole was clean and safe and the casing ready to adhere to the cement. For this particularly delicate job, the standard practice called for a full bottoms-up circulation, achieved by pumping enough clean well fluid down the hole to push all the existing mud out the top.

This can be critical to getting a good cement job. Drilling mud’s tendency to gel when sitting idle is a useful property. If it remained entirely liquid, whenever the pumps stopped during drilling, all the cuttings and debris the mud had been pushing out of the hole
would just sink back down to the bottom. The gelled state is thick enough to hold the debris in suspension until pumping resumes. But that very property can introduce serious problems. Vigorous circulation of clean mud will break down the clots and push them out of the well. If the circulation is too gentle or too short, some of the clots will remain clinging to walls, especially where the casing is squeezed against the wall of the well—exactly the scenario Jesse Gagliano had warned about.

Incoming cement seeks the path of least resistance. It will flow around the clots rather than displace them, or force the clots to finally dissolve, only to contaminate the cement, riddling it with channels that can be invaded by pressurized oil and gas.

But BP elected not to do a bottoms-up. Doing a full circulation may have threatened to fracture Macondo’s fragile walls. The pressure of the pumping had been reduced to avoid that, but reduced pump pressure also meant that doing bottoms-up would take hours of rig time—possibly more than BP was willing to budget.

After circulating only 342 barrels of mud, about half the amount that would be needed to do a bottoms-up, Halliburton contractors began to pump the cement.

They actually began by pumping a lighter-than-water base oil. This was yet another way to address the fear that the cement job would push out the well’s bottom again. Even the lighter foamed cement was more than twice as heavy as the base oil. Stacked up in the annulus for 1,000 feet, the cement, plus 12,000 feet of drilling mud on top of it, would have added up to tons of pressure bearing down. Pumping in the base oil would displace an equal volume of drilling mud out the top of the riser, significantly lightening the overall load on the well’s bottom.

After the base oil went in, followed by spacer fluid to prevent contamination from the oil, they began to pump in the cement itself. The amount had been carefully calculated and measured so it would fill 190 feet in the bottom of the final casing, then get pushed up, as gently as they dared, from the bottom of the hole into the annulus, reaching a thousand feet toward the surface. When all the cement was in place, they checked the returns in the mud pits. The drill crew carefully calculated the amount of mud displaced. It was a match for the amount of cement that went in—what they called “full returns.” This meant that all the measures they had taken had succeeded in preventing the well walls from giving way.

But it didn’t say much, if anything, about whether cement had formed channels, as predicted by the model. The cement could have channeled like crazy or failed to adhere to the casing and still give full returns.

The only way to determine whether the cement was solidly in place would be to let the Schlumberger crew that had been waiting on board do the cement bond log test. They would run their delicate instruments down into the well, dangling from a hook at the end of a wire cable, unspooling from a huge reel and making thermal and sonic measurements as they went. Computer analysis of the results would create a 360-degree image of the cement in the annulus, revealing any voids the cement had failed to fill.

But the BP engineers, both on the rig and in Houston, saw the full returns and declared the cement job a success. The Schlumberger crew would be sent home on a morning BP flight off the rig without conducting the bond log test, saving BP $118,000 and the half day it would have taken to run the test—amounting to roughly another half million dollars saved.

A few days earlier, the nitrogen foamed cement had been tested in a lab to determine how long it would take to set under the antici
pated temperature and pressure conditions that would exist at the well bottom. The lab test revealed that after twenty-four hours, the foamed cement still hadn’t set. It took forty-eight hours to reach maximum hardness.