Fire on the Horizon (26 page)

“What’s going on?” Buddy asked.

“Buddy, we got to go,” Chris said, jumping up. They took off running, but got separated. Buddy ended up here, underneath this steel door. The door was sticky with blood and as they heaved to push it aside, they saw why. One of the steel hinges had pierced Buddy’s neck, leaving a hole the size of a golf ball in the flesh a half inch from the carotid artery. As Randy bent to comfort him he saw that what at first looked like a black shirt was the bare, blackened skin of his back where his clothes had burned from his belt to his head. A long, deep gash on his left thigh pulsed blood onto the floor. Between pulses, Randy thought he could see bone through the torn cloth and flesh. It was hard to understand why Buddy was conscious.

Clearly, he was their most critical casualty. So when Chad came back with the stretcher, they loaded Buddy first. It took all three of them to get the stretcher out into the open because one of them had to go ahead and clear the debris hanging from the ceiling and jutting up from the floor. The space they had lived in for years was unrecognizable to them. When they emerged on deck, Stan and Chad took the stretcher and headed to the forward lifeboats. Randy stayed with Wyman. He’d said he would not leave him, and he couldn’t do much, but he intended to at least honor that promise.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

MAYDAY

2149 Hours, April 20, 2010

Block 252, Mississippi Canyon, Gulf of Mexico

Andrea Fleytas had been monitoring the dynamic positioning system on the bridge of the Horizon when she felt a jolt. Before she could make sense of it—a rig-shaking shock that came out of nowhere—magenta warnings began flashing on her screen. Magenta meant the most dangerous level of combustible gas intrusion.

Andrea was a triple minority on Deepwater Horizon. She was a woman, a Latina, and she was a Left Coaster. It was hard to say which one made her stand out the most. She grew up in an East Los Angeles barrio, excelled in high school, and graduated from the California Maritime Academy. When she earned her four-year degree at the top of her class, she got this job with Transocean. Not many years ago, the offshore business was an insider’s game—you had to know someone in Transocean to have a prayer of getting hired. And that’s if you were a man. The oil business was an old boys’ club, and everyone knew it. A woman taking that on had to
have special self-confidence, and even at the young age of twenty-three, Andrea had it.

But when faced with the multiple magenta alarms, she froze. Her training had taught her that when more than one warning light flashed, she needed to hit the general alarm immediately. Now there were so many lights flashing, she didn’t know how to respond.

Andrea’s supervisor, Yancy Keplinger, felt the jolt, too. He abruptly left Captain Curt and the puzzled BP VIPs he’d been tutoring on the dynamic positioning simulator in the middle of the bridge and strode to where Andrea sat at the main control console a few steps away. He punched a few buttons to point a closed-circuit television camera to the starboard side of the rig. On the monitor, he saw mud streaming out of a diverter pipe.

The phone rang and Andrea answered it.

It was the rig floor. A voice said they were fighting a kick from the well, then hung up. The magenta alarms kept flashing, indicating one part of the rig after another.

Then all the screens blipped off. The room went dark. For a moment, there was an almost complete silence.

A backup battery kicked on and the screens came back to life. Andrea and Yancy checked the monitors. No engines, no thrusters, and except for the emergency battery on the bridge, no power whatsoever. A flash of light lit the walls followed instantly by a bang so loud it was impossible to tell if it was heard or felt. Yancy called the rig floor. Nobody answered. Now Andrea jumped up and hit the general alarm. She grabbed the radio and began calling over an open channel, yelling, “Mayday, mayday. This is Deepwater Horizon.”

Curt heard Andrea repeating the mayday. It was a direct violation of chain of command. Regulations permitted only the captain to give the order to call mayday.

He came up behind her: “I didn’t give you authority to do that.”

The first blast shook chief engineer Steve Bertone out of bed. Bertone was thirty-nine. His black hair was shaved close on the sides and flat on top, and he had the shadow of a goatee on his chin. He’d been on the Horizon since 2003, and he’d been chief engineer for seventeen months. He was a direct and earnest man with an intelligent intensity about him. He wasn’t excitable, a “sky-is-falling” type. But that huge thump that kicked him awake must mean that
something
was falling. He thought that the wire holding the fifty-ton top drive block must have parted, and the shattering crash was the block coming down the derrick. His first thought was that he needed to get to the bridge. He pulled on clothes, work boots, grabbed his hard hat and life vest, then ran out into the hallway. Four or five people were clustered at the bottom of the central stairwell, frozen, looking up as if they couldn’t understand what they were seeing. Steve followed their gaze. There was so much debris, he couldn’t tell if the stairs were there or not. Either way, it was completely impassable.

Steve had to break the spell. “Take the port forward or starboard forward spiral staircases!” he hollered. “Go to your emergency stations!”

Steve took the port staircase up to the bridge and went to his station, the rear port-side computer. He saw immediately what they were dealing with. No power and no thrusters. He picked up the phone and punched 2268, the engine control room, before he realized there wasn’t a dial tone. He put the receiver down, then picked it up. Still no dial tone. He did it again. There were no phones.

“We have no coms!” he shouted. He ran over to the starboard
window and looked back at the derrick. In shock and denial, he hadn’t even registered the second explosion. He was still expecting to see a jumble of steel and pipe that had crashed down on the rig floor. Instead, where the derrick had been, he saw a great wall of fire.

Doug Brown and Mike Williams stumbled from the collapsed engine control room onto the rear of the rig. When they got their eyes cleaned out enough to see, they noticed several things. Where there had been a lifeboat deck, there was no lifeboat deck. Where there had been two lifeboats, there were no lifeboats. Where there had been a walkway and handrails, there was only a ragged ledge dropping off into darkness. If they had stumbled one more step, they would have been in the ocean. Mike was still horribly confused, but he knew this: Something really, really bad had happened, and it wasn’t going to get any better any time soon.

Now Doug was sure Mike was in shock. Blood was still pouring from the wound in his forehead. Doug decided that whatever else he had to do, he first had to get Mike to a medic. Now that the rear of the rig had blown off, they had no choice but to make their way clear across the rig to the bow.

They took the back steps to the main pipe deck. As they cleared the last step, they were almost knocked over by a blast of heat followed by an unbearable hissing sound, like something emitted from the lungs of a gigantic and predatory creature on the verge of roaring. Flames shot more than 200 feet into the sky, consuming the derrick from legs to peak. They understood now for the first time what had happened. Doug felt sick as he looked at the place where the drill floor should have been and saw only fire. He wanted
desperately to imagine a way the drill crew could have gotten out in time, but he couldn’t do it.

His skin began to smolder in the intense heat from the fire. They would have to walk right past the derrick to get to the bridge, and the lifeboats, if those amenities still existed. They turned to the left, upwind of the flames, and made their way forward, shielding their faces from the heat with their hands.

Steve Bertone ran back to his computer thinking that the engine should be restarting. The engines were designed so that in a power disruption, after twenty-five to thirty seconds the two auxiliary engines would come on line and automatically start feeding power to the thrusters. But there was no indication that had happened.

While he was puzzling over the negative indicators on his screen, Steve heard the door to the bridge bang open. He turned to see a man covered in blood from head to foot leaning toward Curt. The man cried, “We have no propulsion, we have no power, we have no
ECR
!”

Curt looked uncomprehending.

“You need to understand,” the blood-covered man said, pleading. “We have no ECR. It’s gone. It has blown up. Engine Number 3 for sure has blown up. We need to abandon ship
now
.” Steve suddenly recognized the voice. It was his number two, Mike Williams.

“You need to calm down,” Curt said. “Just calm down, sit down, we’re working on it.”

Doug Brown had come in the door behind Mike Williams. “He needs a medic,” Doug said. Steve ran over to them and saw that the source of all the blood was a deep laceration across Mike’s
forehead. Steve hollered, “Where are the medical supplies?” Someone said they were in the restroom, in the back of the bridge. Steve couldn’t find any gauze there, so he grabbed a roll of toilet paper, sprinted back, and put the roll to Mike’s head. “Hold this there,” he said.

He went back to his station still expecting to see the engines coming back on line—he just couldn’t believe those engines were gone. But there was still no power. The realization took hold. They were on a dead ship above a blown-out well and there was precious little they could do about it.

Daun Winslow stood between the two forward lifeboats looking up at the derrick, which was blazing like a 250-foot high Bunsen burner. He was wishing he’d see more people coming out of the accommodations.

The decks were covered with mud and a substance with the consistency of snot that had to be the remnants of that double dose of spacer. It was slippery as hell, and hell was exactly what it looked like all around him. People were screaming that they had to get off the rig. People were crying, begging God not to let them die. As Daun tried to help guide them forward on the treacherous surface through the mass confusion, Curt appeared above him, just outside the starboard door of the bridge. Curt caught Daun’s eye and waved his arm in a gesture Daun took to mean that he wanted him to get everyone back inside the accommodation block, as if that would be the safest place for them to be. Clearly Curt hadn’t yet realized the extent of the damage there. Daun ran up the stairs to tell him what was going on.

“Captain Curt,” he said, “the accommodations are destroyed. We’ve got to get people to the boats.”

“Okay,” Curt said. He may have been about to say more but Daun heard someone screaming, threatening to jump overboard.

Daun raced back down the stairs. A man Daun had never seen before was clinging to the outside of the handrail.

“Hey,” Daun said, “where are you going? There’s a perfectly good boat here.”

The man leaned away, toward the ocean.

Daun came closer and made eye contact. “Do you trust me?” he asked.

“I don’t know you,” the man said.

Mark Hay, the senior subsea supervisor, appeared beside him. Daun pointed to Hay. “Do you trust
him
?”

“I don’t know,” the man said. “I’m not sure.” But he seemed to lean back in, away from the seventy-five-foot drop into the ocean. Gently, Daun and Mark Hay took the man’s arm and coaxed him back onto the rig.

“Go on,” Daun said. “Get on the lifeboat with everyone else.”

Then he turned and looked back toward the derrick. It was still burning as high as ever, and that didn’t make sense. The well should have been sealed by now and the BOP separated into two parts and disconnected from the well, cutting off the gas that fueled the flames. What was going on? Why hadn’t they pushed the disconnect button? He ran back up the stairs to the bridge.

After Chris Pleasant told Buddy Trahan to run, they both ran, but in opposite directions. Buddy headed back into the accommodations, and Chris toward the moon pool to try to find out what was happening. When he got to the exit he ran into Chad Murray, the electrician. “Man, I wouldn’t go that way,” Chad said. “Something bad just happened.”

“What?” Chris asked, but Chad had already run off, back down the hall.

Chris turned up the stairs taking two at a time to get to the main deck and the drill floor. Then he saw the fire. He turned around and headed straight for the bridge, and his BOP control panel. As subsea supervisor on duty, he was the person responsible for executing the EDS, which is what he damn sure intended to do right now. Curt stepped in front of him.

“I’m EDS’ing,” Chris told him.

“Calm down,” Curt said. “We’re not hitting the EDS.”

Chris stepped around Curt to the panel. Don Vidrine, the company man, was standing there looking at the indicator lights. “We got the well shut in,” he said.

Chris looked and saw the lights on the panel that indicated the lower annular was closed, but clearly it hadn’t done the job. The rubber seal on the annular preventer had not been powerful enough to stand up against a full-roar blowout. And the gas must have already been past the BOP, into the riser, by the time Jason had managed to close it. The fuel was still flowing to the fire. Chris knew he had to go to the last resort, the shear ram, the most powerful intervention on the BOP—hydraulically powered pistons that would drive through the drill pipe, detach the BOP, and seal the well, cutting off the continuing flow of fuel to the fire and freeing the rig to move away.

“Don, I have to get off,” Chris said.

“Get off,” Don said. “Push the button.”

Chris pressed down the enable button, held it, then hit the fire button.

The indicator lights flickered from green to red, open to closed, just as they were supposed to do. Chris felt a wave of relief, until he
noticed another set of indicators that measured the flow of hydraulic fluid that drove the shear ram through the drill pipe.