I once stood where the men of the now-destroyed Deepwater Horizon stood, on the pipe floor of a semi-submersible drilling rig, five stories above the rolling swells of the Gulf of Mexico.
It was a dangerous place, where men working in confined spaces wrestled with steel, hydraulics, heights and heavy loads to drive steel pipe down, down, beyond crushing depths and deep into Earth's mantle. Injuries seemed a daily occurrence. When a worker was hurt, there rose at that moment a collective sigh among the men, not unlike a football team seeing one of their players go down on the field.
Prior to my arrival, a man was cut in two when he got caught in a steel cable. Deaths were extremely rare, but missing fingers were common. I ended my stay on the rig with a crushed fingertip that earned me a helicopter trip to the hospital and the comment by an experienced nurse in an oil country hospital, "You'll be fine. You just lost a little meat."
Far worse than a worker injury is a blowout. This occurs when the drill hits a pocket of gas that has sufficient pressure to blow the pipe back up and onto the rig like a string of spaghetti. Explosive vapors increase the risk of damage and death. To counteract this threat, a blowout preventer surrounds the pipe at the ocean floor. Consisting of a tower of generators, its purpose is to ram mud at high pressure into the hole, plugging the blowout before it could do damage.
If this fails, the unit can crimp the pipe casing, sealing the hole and sending 4,000 feet of very expensive pipe crashing to the bottom of the sea. Our blowout preventer broke down while I was on the rig. It was pulled up and dangled over a steel platform while I stretched underneath to replace a steel O-ring the size of a manhole cover. Tons of steel gently rocked three feet above me. If the cables had snapped, I would have been juice.
This, for me, was a summer job. Driven by the desire of high pay and adventure in the spring of my freshman year of college, I contacted the CEOs of the major oil companies asking for a job on a rig.
I eventually landed a position as a roustabout on the Rowan "Midland," a drilling rig of the same type and in the same location as Deepwater Horizon. I was 19 at the time, and the only one among the natives of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas to have a Boston accent and a student ID.
An offshore drilling rig is fantastically expensive to operate. For this reason, a strict
hierarchy runs it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. At the top is the rig supervisor, who acts as general manager of the entire operation. Mine was Mule Spellam, a man who didn't make it to junior high but knew the rig better than anyone. It was Mule who picked me up at the heliport and drove me to the hospital after I was injured.
Underneath the supervisor are two toolpushers, each responsible for running a 12-hour shift on the rig. Mine was Richard, who I first met when I was dragged before him at dawn at a heliport on the Texas/Louisiana border. Looking at me grimly through mirrored sunglasses, a plug of chewing tobacco protruding from his lower lip, he drawled with menace, "Boy, what do you think of Teddy Kennedy?" It was Richard who later saved my life when he yanked me out from between two steel tanks that clanged together where I had been moments before. "Boy, that pig iron don't feel a thing."
Below the toolpushers are the drillers and roughnecks. They worked high up on the derrick, screwing together 30-foot-long sections of pipe and sending it down ever closer to the oil deposit that we hoped was within reach of our ever-devouring drill bit. Below the roughnecks were the roustabouts. I was one of those. We worked on the pipe floor, hooking pipe to a crane that would carry it to the derrick.
In addition to the regular crew, there are specialists such as mudmen. A mudman ensures that a special concoction of mud is continually pushed through two miles of pipe with such force and consistency that it powers a drill bit through solid rock at the far end.
Geologists were on board as well, desperately surveying charts, taking samples, hoping for oil-bearing deposits. Crane operators ran the two cranes on the rig, carrying pipe from the floor to the derrick as well as hauling up material from supply ships. My crane operator's name was Smelly. He was so proud of his earned name that he had "Smelly" carved into his belt.
My favorite specialists were the cooks. When you are living with 90 men on a platform 100 miles off the coast of Louisiana, you don't have many choices for entertainment, except eating, sleeping, insulting each other, and watching the sunrise and sunset
After dinner we would slowly migrate to the edge of the rig, lean on the rail and spit chaw into the tranquil Gulf waters died pink by the sun's afterglow. The chew would counteract the taste of steel you got in your mouth from smelling machine oil and generators all day.
A cook would come out of the kitchen to toss kitchen scraps through a hole in the rig to hammerhead sharks circling below. The temperature would be at a happy balance, lacking the steam of the day and chill of the night.
We would eventually retire to our quarters with the knowledge that another 12-hour shift would be coming too soon. The bed was made for you, your bunkmate already gone to start his 12-hour night shift, the room was cool and fresh from purified air pouring in though vents in the wall. With closed eyes you would hear the muffled hammering of the mechanical hive, the drilling rig, and feel the ever-slight roll of the sea.
This was the life of the men on the Deepwater Horizon.
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