How Not to Do It

When the tender boat (one of those open-decked pickup-trucks-of-the-sea I talked about many posts ago) arrived yesterday to pick several others and me up from the rig and transfer us to shore, I had the privilege of using a personnel basket for the first time.

There are several ways to get on and off of a rig, and each has its hazards.  The fastest is via helicopter, where the copter simply lands on the helipad and folks get off and on.  This is what the Mexican customs and immigration officials did on Wednesday, while the rig was still under tow (and moving): the copter landed and they got off.  This is fastest and seems safest but there are enough over-water helicopter accidents to at least make you think.  (And also to necessitate escape-and-survive classes like the one I took a week ago).

For rig-to-boat transfers and vice versa, the personnel basket is standard.  This is an octagonal platform linked to one of the rig's cranes, large enough for several people and bags, and having a set of vertical ropes to hold on to as the crane lifts you up and over and then sets you down, from rig to boat or the other way around

(So obviously a lot is riding on the skill of your crane operator, that he doesn't start swinging you around like a yo-yo.)

Yesterday I got some first-hand experience in how not to do this.

The tender arrived, and fresh crew transferred to the rig.  Next it was our turn to get off, so we dutifully piled our bags into the middle of the basket, stepped aboard, clutched the ropes and the crane lifted us off.  Now, the deck from which we'd started was one of the upper decks, below only the helipad and (of course) the derrick for how high it was off the water.  So ground zero for us was already a good, oh, eighty to a hundred feet above the water surface.  Then the crane lifted us up another twenty or thirty feet.  Problem was, the tender was no longer in position beneath the crane.

It's hard, and dangerous, for an unattached boat to try to hold position sten-in toward a rig, for very long.  It's a precarious position relative to the rig, and of course, waves and currents can sweep the boat left or right and just make a mess of things.  So really, it makes sense that the boat would have to vacate the area and then re-set for each transfer.

Problem was, the boat was now a good half a mile off, and seemed to be showing no signs of moving.  It was almost as if they'd forgotten about us, like, "Oh...you mean you wanted us to bring some other folks back in, too?....oh, OK, I guess so."

Now, I hate heights.  I mean, I really hate heights.  Like Indiana Jones hates snakes, like cats hate water, I hate heights.  So we were now just hanging there, maybe 120 or even 150 feet above the water.

Did you know that, when you fall from 90 feet, water is as hard as concrete?  It is.  That's due to a phenomenon called surface tension, basically that the water molecules are very close together, compared to the air, and kind of hold onto each other.  Not as hard as, say, iron atoms do in metal, but hard enough from 90 feet to make life very uncomfortable.  Guys who jump from that height to escape burning vessels break their legs.

Of course, the crane is a strong crane, rated to lift many tons, used regularly to transfer steel and other supplies back and forth.  This is remarkably little consolation when you're swinging in the breeze at a nauseating height above the water.  All that matters is the height.

And I wasn't alone.  The poor cook was panicking, in that stone-cold-expressionless-is-he-even-breathing? kind of panic, the kind of thing which I imagine might make him think about looking for a less-well-paying job ashore.  He couldn't even answer a question when one of the other guys (obnoxiously--just leave him alone man!) asked if he was okay.  Obviously he wasn't.

The boat still wasn't showing signs of moving, a good minute or two later--quite a long time when dangling over the water at a deadly height--so the crane operator lowered us to more like twenty feet off the water.  This was actually a gigantic relief, because a fall from that height is not nearly as big a deal.


Then the crane man decided to mess with us.


Not much, admittedly, but enough.  He raised the basket back up to 100 feet or so, and then lowered us back down to boat level, and then back up again to 40 or 50 feet.  By this time the boat was moving in, so we could all breath a sigh of relief (and the cook could just breathe), but much more of that and I'd have started getting angry.  And thought about filing some kind of complaint.  Not to be prissy about things, but I just don't like heights.


Anyway, we safely got on the boat and left.

The Shining

Okay, not quite.  There are no monstrous evil presences on this platform that I can detect (not even after beans), and I’m not sitting around slowly becoming murderous while typing over and over “All work and no play makes Mike a very dull boy.”

But this is a very confining space, not unlike the Overlook Hotel in winter.  While in transit, we have no satellite link, and we’re too far from shore to communicate via cell phone.  (Though in a cruel twist my cell does pick up a roaming frequencyband, but I think that’s just the platform’s dedicated satellite phone.  I try to make a call on it anyway once a day but it never works.  At least, it hasn’t yet.)

And even though I have roughly 20 gigs of books (hellllllooooo, Pirate Bay!) on this little computer of mine, well, sort of like having 250+ channels on your TV but no lease on life, it gets kind of old.  (Especially when I realize that about 4 gigs—all the earth science and astronomy—are corrupt PDFs and won’t open.  I was looking forward to the Encyclopedia of the Solar System!  But all isn’t lost.  I still have nearly all of the Cambridge Histories, which would take me about fifteen years to read, not to mention the acoustics books that I need to study.)

But being cooped up is a bad thing.  I need some physical variety, a bit of activity, in order to tolerate sitting down for any length of time and concentrating.  As my mother told me, I’m not a true hyperactive (people who compulsively keep moving at all times), but I’m kind of borderline.  A confined space is not a healthy environment for me, especially when I can’t communicate with my family or get any information about the world.

(Thoreau, I’m not.  As he put it, a ten-year-old newspaper would tell him as much about current events as he ever needed to learn.  And this is true: there’s always trouble, and we humans are still vicious.  So it’s not really news.)

Enforced idleness is a chance for the mental bedbugs to come crawling out and rule the night.  In my case, the bedbugs are green and wear white a white capital D on their backs.  They sing a rasping and malicious chorus of dreams strangled by cowardice and drowned with alcohol.  Even the knowledge that I have a wonderful family, who all make me glad every day for the accidents and choices that brought them into my life, isn’t much defense against these bugs.  Because they wake up memories of my earlier life, before I met Kate, before Eva and Eliot were born or conceived.  The only cure is kind of a therapy, how I force myself to walk through the choices I did—and did not—make as a younger man, and understand myself better now.

In one of his interviews, Joseph Campbell (my intellectual hero) talked about identifying your most cherished possession, goal, facet of your life—and then giving it up.  Willingly letting it go.  Now there is a mystery in this, how abandoning the one thing you wanted most, gives you a lighthearted kind of courage to pursue the rest.  Only I’m a congenital worrier (like Kate is), so lighthearted courage is an ephemeral thing at best in me.  More often, what I’d call courage is deciding “*bleep* this, I’m sick and tired of how this is going,” and then acting to make a change.  (Kate has seen exactly this response in me many times.  It leads to mixed results.)

More often than not, when the bedbugs are rasping their evil chorus, any fresh determination  I find within myself is of this sort.   I missed my chance in college to start putting my empathetic instincts and my love of attention to work in an acting career.  There are times, like when I’m sitting idle in a floating metal shed on the hot water of the Gulf of Mexico, that I wonder what on earth I’ve done so wrong.  And the one coherent answer I have, is that my life is much more than time spent in a metal shed on the water.

Furthermore, it's not all unrelated to Kate, Eva and Eliot.  There are many nights--at home or away--when I lie, eyes open in bed, terrified that my irresponsibility with money (buying a condo before I'd gotten a job?  And worse, at the height of the price bubble?  Come on.) and my wandering career choices have doomed my wife and children to struggling, semi-poor lives.  That would be an outcome for which I can't forgive myself.  

So let’s just say this has been a buggy week.  Living in a small metal shed with nowhere to go and nothing to do but read will be like that.  (For the record: I like to read.  I don’t love to read.  I own a lot of books.  That was mostly therapeutic shopping in years past.  I mean, hey, it’s possible to have a sense of humor about things and say that I’m a good working example of a lot of 20^th- and 21^st-century neuroses.  But anyway…)

That’s exactly the problem with idle time on the water.  Altogether too much “me” time.  The crevices of your navel start to resemble the Himalaya.  So the real cure, I suppose (since there will always be bedbugs in my mind) is a return to life where things are actually happening--that is, leaving the Overlook Hotel behind.

Kansas Is Flatter than a Pancake

Someone recently did a geometrical comparison between the topography of Kansas and the roughness of an ordinary pancake, and found the pancake to be rougher.  So Kansas really is flatter than a pancake.  Texas isn’t flatter than a pancake, though it feels like it is.  (Before my sophomore year in college, I helped lead one of the so-called Freshman Trips, a sort of initiation rite for incoming Dartmouth freshmen run by the Outing Club.  It’s a three-day excursion, usually hiking, in backwoods New Hampshire or Vermont, concluded by an evening celebration at the college’s ravine lodge on Mount Moosilauke.  One of the incoming freshmen in my group was from Texas, and I thought he was a grandstanding liar, especially when he talked about the great piney forests of east Texas…until years later, when I learned about the great piney forests of east Texas.)

But Brownsville is sloped enough to go from dry land down to sea level, though tides in the Gulf of Mexico aren’t much to speak of.  In fact, if you aren’t looking for them, and paying close attention, you won’t notice any tide at all.  That tends to be the way with semi-enclosed seas, like the Gulf, or the Mediterranean (in fact the Gulf is sometimes called the American Mediterranean).

I’m on an oil drilling rig, lying in the port of Brownsville waiting to be towed out of the harbor and down along the coast to offshore Mexico, where we will potentially then be towed further offshore to the drilling location.  I say potentially, because that is of course the plan, but the offshore relocation could be immediate or a matter of a few more weeks.  If the latter, I won’t be staying on board to wait.

There are many types of drilling rigs, depending on just how particular you want to get, but I’ll break them down into three categories: (1) fixed, (2) jackup, and (3) semisubmersible.  The oldest kind, hearkening back to the development of offshore oil drilling in California and Louisiana, is fixed.  In California, the rigs were really just derricks mounted on very long piers which extended out from  the beach.  The southern half of Louisiana is basically a gigantic swamp, so piers weren’t as practical as self-standing platforms, fixed in the soil but unattached to any dry land.  The very first platform was built in 1937-8, about a mile offshore of Cameron, Louisiana, in about 14 feet of water (14 foot water depth at a mile out! Now that’s delta country).  The pilings were driven deep into the mud and sand, and a deck was built 15 feet above the water, designed to detach and float away in the event of a hurricane, so as not to pull up all the pilings with it.  In 1940 this design was vindicated, as a hurricane destroyed the deck but left most of the pilings, so the platform could be rebuilt.  The offshore oil industry was off and running.

 

Such fixed platforms were the standard throughout the subsequent decades, but eventually, the water depths (over 1000 feet) became prohibitive in building the enormous leg structures.  By the 50's, a second kind of rig had already become common: the jackup, basically a mobile version of the fixed platform.  Jackups have three or four legs which can be cranked up or down, and the platform thus jacked up over a specific location in the water for drilling.  Cranking the legs down and planting them on the sea floor is known as “pinning”.  The rig might have its own motor, and be able to power itself to its next location, or it might require towing.  This kind of mobile platform is economical for exploration in the event that no oil is found (known as a dry well, though there is always water).  Movable rigs save the expense of building permanent fixtures where finding oil is uncertain—that is, for all exploration--and the same rig can be used to drill many different wells at different spots.  Functionally, jackups operate in maximum depths of 300 feet.  Longer legs become structurally impractical.

In 1988 Shell commissioned the tallest fixed oil rig in history, Bullwinkle, in the Gulf of Mexico.  The platform stands over 1700 feet (nearly 500 m) above the sea floor.  But transporting, positioning and successfully sinking (on its feet and not it side) such huge leg assemblies was risky and difficult.  And the search for oil was already moving deeper.

For this deeper water the semisubmersible was developed, the giants of today, huge platforms of over 300’ on a side, sitting on gargantuan

pontoons.  The rig is towed out to its drilling location and the pontoons partially filled with water, so that the hull sinks to a depth below ordinary wave depth (i.e. out of range of all wave motion except for hurricanes), while the platform deck is more than 50 feet above the water.  This provides enough stability, considering the size of the platform, for drilling operations, and is tall enough to keep the deck equipment from being ruined by the waves of a hurricane.  This type of platform is known, straightforwardly enough, as a semisubmersible.  They are quite complex now, self-propelled and using GPS and computer models to position themselves dynamically to within a few centimeters’ accuracy.  The Deepwater Horizon was such a rig, going to show (again, as ever) that the fanciest tools count for nothing against human recklessness and incompetence.

The Noble Tom Jobe, where I am, is no such giant.  It’s a modest enough three-legged jackup, with legs over 200 feet tall, due to be towed by three tugs down to Mexico.  The quarters are identical to every survey and research vessel (except for the Persistence, but that was just a fire boat unfit for survey work) I’ve ever boarded.  That is to say, steel and composite flooring, plastic paneled walls, fluorescent lighting, the annoying stench of Simple Green, and piercingly cold air conditioning in the bunks.  The food’s about as bad as any other ship, too.  There’s one somewhat subtle difference: the crew’s quarters are a three-story structure toward the bow of the rig, so you go up and down the stairs much more than you would in a ship, which tends to be longer and not so vertical. 

But the biggest difference between a ship and a rig is the deck.  On a ship, you generally have open space at the bow and stern, where you can walk out and enjoy a bit of a view, perhaps feel some of the spray (provided it’s not an ice-cold shower bath).  On a rig, there is no such place except for the helideck, which is frighteningly exposed (for someone fearful of heights like I am), and of course off-limits (for exactly that reason) except for those getting on or off the helicopter, and the landing crew.  Otherwise, the deck is cramped with the huge machinery needed to drill for oil: cranes, tanks full of drilling mud (pumped into the borehole for two reasons: to lubricate the drill bit and, by means of its weight, to keep oil, gas and other pore fluids in the rock from rushing to the surface—which is what happened to the Deepwater Horizon), the drilling derrick.  It’s a crowded, dangerous, dirty, ugly space, befitting the complexity and difficulty of the oil drilling industry.  Rigs like this are part of the bowels of modern society as we know it.  With these machines we gain the leisurely, energy-rich life we know.  For how much longer is a very good question.

I have lots of down time, particularly when the rig is being moved (as we are now—the tugs are rotating the rig in preparation for tomorrow morning’s departure).  I’ve run a few very basic tests on the sonar units, but haven’t even put them in the water.  I might not get that chance.  My job here is to operate a small scanning sonar—like a sidescan, only it’s not a torpedo-like fish that we tow, but instead a little cylinder that I drop into the water and rotate—to take an image of the seafloor where we might put the legs down, in order to verify that there are no hazards (like equipment or big holes).  I’m basically part of the insurance policy against a storm, if the rig needs to put its legs down and ride out rough weather while the tugs cast off and leave.  If all goes well on this transit, I will have no work to do but remain on standby.

There are worse ways to support the family, I guess.