Fire on the Horizon (6 page)

And then there were those who just couldn’t hack the military-style discipline, even the relaxed SUNY Maritime version.

Dave could hack it just fine. For most cadets, working off all those pinks by—what else?—even more chipping of rust and painting was almost unendurable. But Dave would quickly talk his way out of chisel duty into something more skilled and consequential, like repairing damaged fiberglass, a job he performed more expertly than the professional sailors aboard. As his ability made itself known, Dave came more into demand. If, say, the captain wanted wood flooring in his cabin, the ship’s carpenter would come find Dave. He’d complete his task hours before his fellow pink-slippers finished chipping their rust, and spend the rest of
his sentence joking around with the ship’s crew. Soon Dave didn’t need a pink slip invitation. He actually found comfort at the end of the day in trading slacks for a boiler suit, dark blue coveralls of the type worn by auto mechanics, and walking down to the ship to assist in repairs and maintenance.

Dave also discovered he had a taste for the school’s traditions. In his freshman year he joined the Pershing Rifle fraternity, a military drill society founded in 1891 at the University of Nebraska by an obscure second lieutenant named John J. Pershing, later to become General “Black Jack” Pershing, who led American forces in World War I. At SUNY Maritime it was a work-hard, play-hard club with its own hideaway in the neglected basement of a campus building. Dave liked the exacting standards to which the fraternity members held themselves, their pressed uniforms, the synchrony of their parade march, and their sense of self-discipline. He also liked doing Jell-O shots in the rank basement with his frat buddies. It was the latter—strictly against the rules—that eventually prompted the administration to shut the frat down in Dave’s senior year.

But despite his unruly streak, and the fact that his bright yellow monster truck took up three spots in the dorm parking lot, the campus brass embraced Dave (to the point of letting him stash the truck on the football field access road, conveniently opposite his dorm) and Dave embraced the school—especially its tradition of sending all students for summer-long training cruises on the
Empire State VI
.

In May, the whole college would steam across the Atlantic. The cadets did everything: loaded the supplies, mopped the decks, stood the watches, steered the ship. Every day at sunrise and sunset they were required to use their school-issued sextants, instruments
from the epoch of sailing ships in the era of Global Positioning System satellites, to read the ship’s exact position from the alignment of the stars. For a grade.

Dave’s crew figured there was a better way, a way that didn’t involve waking up before dawn. They knew that at any point in the day, if they could sneak up to the bridge, they could find where the ship had been at sunrise from the history in the GPS. But that wouldn’t do them any good—it was like having the answers to a long-form math exam, one in which you were required to show your work. They needed to show the astronomical alignment that, in theory, had led them to the ship’s position.

In the quest for more sleep, they pulled consecutive all-nighters, trigonometry books spread out around their cabin, poring over the formulas until they got it: a way to reverse-engineer the results from the pilfered sunrise position. From then on, they slept through the morning observation. When they got up, feeling refreshed and pleased with themselves, they found a reason to be on the bridge, created a diversion, got the sunrise navigational fix. Then they’d work their mathematical magic and voilà, the exact astronomical alignment above the ship at the moment the sun peaked above the horizon. They charged their shipmates five dollars apiece to replicate their work.

When they made port, in Bermuda, Barbados, Athens, Tenerife, Lisbon, Malaga, Hamburg, Portsmouth, Naples, they got a different kind of education. The school catalog called it “exposure to international cultures.” They quickly learned that it could soon become overexposure. The locals were happy to see them when they arrived—young men would offer to show them the town, young women wanted to practice their English on them—but by the end of the week, as often as not, they’d board the ship running.

There’s a maritime saying that in rough weather, a sailor needs
one hand for himself, and one for the ship. So when any Schuyler cadet got in over his head in a crowded Lisbon bar, talking to the wrong woman within earshot of the wrong man, he could yell “one hand!” The streets, perpetually filled with shipmates, would empty at the call, and a dozen guys from the Bronx would come surging through the door.

The SUNY Maritime cadets discovered the more literal meaning of “one hand” on the summer training cruise of 1996. One beautiful morning the sunrise was particularly colorful—the entire western horizon glowed red. Despite the old nautical saw “red skies in morning, sailor take warning,” few of the officers, some of whom were veterans of winter North Atlantic runs, Alaskan swells, and transits through subarctic oceans, were worried.

But the ship was heading toward a monstrous storm with hundreds of cadets aboard. One of the few who saw what was coming was the senior deck training officer, an eccentric nautical sciences professor named Gregory P. Smith, forever referred to by his initials, GPS. His ability to grab a sextant, shoot a sun line, and calculate it without looking at tables seem in retrospect bizarrely predestined. Now Smith looked at the sky and the barometer and realized what was bearing down on them just as the digital weather forecasts began to spit out of the ship’s fax at a fever rate.

To the cadets’ amusement, Smith began tying down all his belongings as if the ship were about to be turned upside down. He suggested they do the same. He urgently shared what he claimed to be the only true cure for seasickness: a strict diet of diluted lemon juice and saltine crackers. The cadets laughed among themselves at what they considered a craggy professor’s melodramatic concerns.

But Dave Young wasn’t put off by eccentricities. In GPS he saw someone with smarts and hard-won experience, and he knew that when someone like that issued a warning, he needed to heed it.

While most on board continued their daily rituals, Dave took proactive measures. He packed his belongings in his foot locker, then tied it down with heavy manila rope and stashed a supply of lemons and saltines. His friends, who had rarely seen Dave worried about anything, soberly took note and did the same.

Then, like a hammer, the first wave hit, a swell the size of an office building. The wind worked itself octave by octave into an unceasing wail. Soon bodies, desks, magazines, footlockers, pillows, heavy tools—everything aboard that had not been securely tied down to welded steel—shot through the air. The walls caught the mess as they turned into floors and ceilings, the ship rolling on its port side, pausing as if to catch its breath, then rolling on an equally merciless angle starboard. One particularly naïve or reckless cadet had ignored the warnings to such a degree that he was casually running on a treadmill when the first wave hit. On the upward roll, his jog became a desperate scramble up Everest’s peak, which, on the downward roll, transformed into a toboggan ride to hell. Sick cadets vomited on decks, creating a dangerous game of summer slip-and-slide, and prompting one extra-large cadet to skid down a hallway and plunge through a wall.

For days, work ground to a halt. Doors leading topside were dogged shut to keep water out and cadets mad with seasickness in, for fear they’d stumble onto the deck and be swept away by a towering wave. Dave alternated between nights spent in bed with his life jacket and Gumby suit (a wet suit designed to totally encapsulate you in neoprene), wedged beneath his mattress to pin him
comfortably to the wall, and days spent aboard a lawn chair he’d suspended from the ceiling. As the ship pitched wildly, he swung like a pendulum high above his shipmates, smiling widely, looking serene and slightly unworldly up there, Buddha-like.

But after a few days of enjoying the relative safety created by their preparations while their shipmates retched and rolled miserably in their berths, the boys got bored and decided to leave their secure zone and venture out. First stop was the bow store, a gymnasium-sized space that, due to its distance from the ship’s center of gravity, gyrated most dramatically in the waves.

Dave waited until the bow reached the top of a wave, then jumped just as the floor fell beneath his feet and the ceiling plunged toward his outstretched hands. Grabbing a lattice of pipes on the ceiling, he held tight until the bow began to fall again, cushioning the twenty-foot drop back to the deck.

He was just getting started. Dave, Matt Michalski, and Rich Robson decided that for the next trick they would climb monkey island, the topmost deck, so named for the abundance of antenna and halyards that any young monkey would dream of playing on. Going up by the outside staircase, exposed to the waves crashing on deck, would be suicide, so they walked through the dark heat of the ship’s engine room, then climbed a ladder inside the ship’s smokestack—just feet from the evaporating steam and burnt smoke of the ship’s boilers. Luckily, the hatch at the top was one of the few that had been left unsecured—no one else had wanted to make the climb to secure it. They threw it open and pulled themselves onto the flat deck. Huddling behind the steel protection of the mast as the storm thrashed the ship, Dave and Matt and Rich stood against the weather feeling fearless in each other’s company.

Five years later, after he had finally subdued the engineering curriculum, Dave Young sat beneath a cloudy sky, surrounded by the protective stone walls of Fort Schuyler and bored out of his mind. His butt went numb as the graduation ceremony droned on. He and his fellow cadets were dressed in their “salt and peppers”—white nautical dress shirt and black pants—listening to the speeches, just waiting for the moment when it would be over. He was two years late to this ceremony, but he’d beaten the odds. Three out of four who began freshman year with him hadn’t made it at all, and most of those who had made it had opted for easier tracks of study. His degree had been a tough get. Still, he knew his indifferent academic record was not likely to entice the leading naval architectural firms to knock on his door. Nor did Dave plan to make any effort to solicit their invitations for employment.

During his summers sailing the North Atlantic, Dave had been bitten by a bug that had ruined the higher aspirations of countless mariners before him: He had fallen in love with the independence, camaraderie, and excitement of a life at sea.

As Dave’s mother, brother, and father all sat dutifully in the family section to the side of the stage, cadet after cadet proceeded up the stairs and across the platform from right to left, pivoting for the sheepskin handoff and breaking for daylight. Dave could only curse his surname, which had doomed him to be one of the very last. But finally his turn came. He grabbed the rolled diploma and stepped down onto the beautiful lawn. He faced east, into the salty spring breeze pouring over the pentagonal stone walls of Fort Schuyler from Long Island Sound, and looked into the future.

Dave was thinking ships, sailing the seven seas, that kind of thing. In his six years at Maritime, not once had anyone ever suggested a career on offshore oil rigs.

CHAPTER FIVE

KING NEPTUNE

May 2001
The Indian Ocean

As Dave Young grasped his diploma, the Deepwater Horizon was halfway around the globe, sixty days into a seemingly interminable maiden voyage.

It hadn’t helped that the Horizon’s derrick, rising 320 feet above the water, meant that it was too tall to fit under the Suez Canal’s Mubarak Peace Bridge. The crew faced a course that would wind fifteen thousand miles around the southern tip of Africa and bring them to the Gulf of Mexico.

Slowing the journey further was the rig itself. Many earlier rigs had been able to take advantage of a remarkable marine technology that came of age in the very shipyards that built the Deepwater Horizon and its ilk. Called heavy-lift transports, they were essentially gigantic seagoing flatbed tow trucks. Using the same ballast control principles that worked in the Horizon’s pontoons, the transports were able to submerge their long, flat, low-lying cargo deck thirty feet below the surface, allowing a rig to float into place
above it. Then the heavy-lift ship blew out the ballast and rose up in a gushing fountain of displaced water, lifting the entire rig from the sea.

It was an expensive operation, but the advantage was huge: It could carry a rig at three times the speed the Horizon could make on its own.

And now more than ever, speed was essential. The Horizon was no sooner out of the drydock than it was signed to a three-year lease to drill in the Gulf of Mexico for British Petroleum, the fourth-largest corporation in the world. BP, once partly owned by the British government, was now a publicly traded multinational corporation that operated 22,000 service stations in more than 80 countries and produced nearly 4 million barrels of oil a day. In 2000, BP logged annual revenue of $148 billion, and that number would double over the next decade. The company had successfully developed offshore oil fields in the North Sea and was now a key player in the race for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. To lease the Horizon, it was willing to pay the 2010 equivalent of $350,000 a day for the bare rig, an amount that would only grow over the years—to
half a million
dollars a day.

The agreement came with one overwhelmingly significant proviso: If the Horizon wasn’t drilling, BP wasn’t paying. Every day the Horizon crawled across the ocean toward the Gulf, Transocean was out a half million dollars. So cutting the crossing by two-thirds would translate to a savings of tens of millions of dollars.

But the Horizon had to make the crossing the old-fashioned way. Ironically, it was the rig’s ability to propel itself that was the problem: The eight thrusters hanging beneath its pontoons made hitching a ride on a heavy-lift transport impractical. Disassembling the thrusters that had just been assembled would be troublesome and time-consuming. Besides, Transocean engineers thought they
had an alternative: The Horizon would hook up with a tow ship that would pull as the Horizon pushed, theoretically doubling the rig’s maximum solo speed of only 4.6 knots.