Fire on the Horizon (13 page)

CHAPTER NINE

A CAPTAIN’S COLORS

June 2008

Baltimore County, Maryland

Curt Kuchta had that college quarterback look—six foot three, square jaw, dark complexion, bright smile—the easy smile of someone confident that he was going to be liked. Curt graduated from the Maine Maritime Academy in 1998 and found his way to offshore oil exploration and Transocean the same way Dave Young had, through the web of contacts he’d made while a student at the academy. In fact, he’d married the sister of one of Dave’s SUNY Maritime dorm mates.

Curt loved his work and was good at it. The photo he chose for his Facebook profile showed him happily dangling from a harness, doing maintenance on the side of a lifeboat. He loved the rig lifestyle, which allowed him to live in a pleasant Baltimore suburb even though his commute was 1,200 miles each way. He had three weeks out of every six to focus on enjoying life with his wife and young children, whom he indulged with trips to amusement parks and train yards and an endless variety of games, which he
enjoyed almost as much as they did. Curt also liked playing with his man toys, afforded by Transocean’s generous pay. He went fishing on his deep-V Grady-White ocean fishing boat powered by a 225-horsepower Mercury, skidded in the mud in his off-road truck, or plopped his son on his lap and ran circles around his yard on his John Deere riding mower. Once a year he got together with his old maritime academy friends for an annual pig-out and pigskin event that commemorated the life of his wife’s brother, who had died two years after graduating from SUNY Maritime. They drank beer, played touch football, and told real and embellished sea stories—all of which Curt excelled at.

Aboard a Transocean rig, you could tell a lot about a person by his appearance—especially in the Gulf, where fiercely independent American southerners had refused to accept the Transocean standard of coveralls for everyone. The workers complained to the managers and the managers stood up for them at headquarters by resisting the coverall mandate, and even delaying for years changing their uniform color from ocean blue to red, despite the obvious safety reasons. But it took Transocean three years to win even that battle, and the company gave up entirely on mandating coveralls. The corporate compromise allowed three types of dress; the red coveralls, jeans with a red button-up shirt, or bib overalls, of a type worn by farmers, with a red shirt underneath. These inevitably became cultural markers. The bibs were selected by those who wanted to emphasize their country roots, while the jeans were the choice of supervisors who didn’t mind referencing a subtle class distinction.

Curt chose the jeans and added a belt with a large brass buckle embossed with the Horizon’s image and a Transocean “T” logo. Since first entering Calvert Hall College High School—a private Catholic school—then going on to Maine Maritime, his uniforms
had always set him slightly apart from general society, which was fine with Curt. He took pride in his appearance.

The crew had the option of two styles of hard hat: one with a full brim circling the head and another with a visor in front. When Curt first joined Transocean, this had been a false choice: the good old boys who controlled some of the company’s older rigs issued hard hats with visors to anyone considered to be a Yankee, which in their strict accounting meant anyone living much farther north than Interstate 10. The insularity had largely faded away by the time Curt joined the Deepwater Horizon, but it still took a lot of confidence for a Yankee like him to choose a full brim. Curt had a lot of confidence.

But along with confidence he had some striking commonalities with his southern colleagues, from his casual but courtly charm to his staunchly conservative political views. Like a great majority of those he worked with, nearly all except a smattering of “bleeding hearts,” he preferred Fox News to CNN and Limbaugh to NPR.

The final clues to his personality he wore on his forehead. Literally.

Transocean was so focused on making things run smoothly, top executives decided it might help if every employee wore his personality on his hard hat for all his coworkers to see. To accomplish that, all new hires, at all levels of the company, were administered an hourlong diagnostic test in which they were asked mind-twisting questions like “Do you think you are timid or courageous?” or “Are you generally introverted or extroverted?”

The theory is that the answers reveal four types of personalities, and that each individual is a combination of two of the four, with one personality type dominant and another a secondary influence. For easy reference, each type is associated with a color that must be displayed, via red, blue, green, or yellow stickers, on everything from hard hats to office doors.

Green is the color of a thinker, a perfectionist, someone who is precise but also critical, picky, argumentative, and slow to make decisions. Blue is the color of the feeler, someone who tends to be dependable, agreeable, supportive, and calm, but also reserved, awkward, possessive, and insecure.

Curt’s dominant color was yellow—the color for socializers, who, according to the analysis at least, tend to be enthusiastic, optimistic, talkative, persuasive on the upside, disorganized, undisciplined, and at times overconfident on the downside. Curt’s secondary color, red, was common among upper-level supervisors, signifying high ego strength, strong will, a desire for change, but also someone who is pushy, impatient, domineering.

There was one thing about Curt that no one needed personality tests to see: He was a hard worker, an important trait at Transocean, where there was little tolerance for anyone with the luxury of too much “ass time.” Between his industriousness and his native likability, Curt was in the right place at the right time.

In the past, it had taken a couple of decades to rise through the ranks to make captain—the pinnacle for a merchant mariner, tantamount to membership in an exclusive club that all but guaranteed lucrative employment for life. But as the search for offshore oil expanded rapidly after 2001, promising young officers could rise quickly, and Curt was well on his way. He’d gotten hired on an R&B rig as third mate right after graduation in 1998. In 2004, he made chief mate of the Horizon, by then a Transocean asset. He’d always received high marks on his evaluation reports, and by 2008, just ten years into his career, Curt’s hopes for making captain got a huge boost. A Transocean friend and colleague—another chief mate on a nearby rig—walked into the HR office at Transocean headquarters in Houston and got a look at something called the “ascension list,” the short list of chief mates in line to be promoted
when a suitable captain’s spot opened up. Curt’s name was there, third from the top.

When the company announced the building of new drillships in Korea, however, Curt had an opportunity to take the chief mate’s spot on the new rig. He took it, even at the risk of losing his place in line on the ascension list. He was always up for an adventure, and going off to Korea as part of the all-star crew that would help oversee the construction of the latest technological marvel definitely qualified. So he put his captain ambitions on hold and accepted the chief mate job.

But he never made it off the drydock in Korea. Back in the Gulf, the Deepwater Horizon’s pontoon inadvertently filled with water just two months after Curt’s departure. Since Curt’s history on the Deepwater Horizon counted for even more than a slightly higher spot on the ascension list, Curt leapfrogged over the names ahead of him and got the call. He was just thirty-two, and he had made captain of a half-billion-dollar rig.

The fact that—except for the belt buckle—Curt’s work uniform made him look more like a building code inspector than a ship’s captain was worth contemplating. The traditional image of a captain—an aloof, imperious, and unquestionable authority—formed in a time when ships in the middle of the ocean might as well have been alone in the world. Things were very different on an oil rig. For one thing, in daily phone and Skype conferences, both Curt’s bosses at Transocean and the clients at BP tried to steer things from “the beach,” often crossing into micromanagement. Even on the rig itself, the captain was officially subservient to the offshore installation manager except when the rig was moving from one well to another, which was less than 10 percent of the time. And both were beholden to the “company men,” BP project managers who lived aboard the Horizon.

BP kept two company men on board the Horizon at all times. The Transocean personnel managed all the rig’s activities, from drilling to maintenance, but the overall strategy of the project, and the well design itself, was all controlled by BP engineers and contractors with Houston offices, all of whom reported to a shore-based well team leader. The company men, who were called well
site
leaders, made sure the concerns of the well team leader were attended to on the rig.

The company men held a special place in the chain of command, an off-the-books dotted line on the organizational chart. While not exactly able to issue orders, they were in the position of homeowners haunting a construction site to ensure the contractors satisfied all their expectations. Few questioned their authority. Further, they got the best rooms on the rig, their choice of channels on the TV system, and if their laundry came back wet or stained, everyone would hear about it and the problem would be quickly rectified. Besides having the power to make the laundryman’s life miserable it was their job to keep the train on track and on schedule.

According to Transocean policy, the OIM had the final say on all decisions, but in practice, the OIM’s only recourse to an order from a company man was to stop the job and send the complaint to his immediate superior, the rig manager in Houston. This naturally caused his phone to ring incessantly with questions from the beach…something most OIMs strived to avoid.

Some company men took this power in stride and became one of the crew and an advocate for the crew’s interests and the rig’s safety during meetings with shore. But the majority of company men justified their informal title. If BP wanted the crew to jump,
the company man made sure they jumped; if the shore wanted to give the guys a pat on the back, he provided the service. And if they wanted to pick up the pace he would start pushing.

Company men weren’t out-and-out adversaries, but they did tend to maintain their distance from the Transocean personnel. They ate at the “BP table” in the galley, set apart from the crew, and they only communicated with the OIM and the toolpushers.

Even the captain was usually beneath their interest.

All of that was fine with Curt. He was spared the bother of daily client requests, and both his OIMs were veterans of the position who made it clear they respected Curt and the way he ran the “ship” parts of their rig.

There was no denying that his was an ambiguous position. Even in the eyes of his own crew, a captain’s status was vague. All that most really knew about Curt’s job was that his was the voice coming over the PA, the man in charge during Sunday emergency drills.

So while the title sounded grand, it was a good idea for rig captains to appreciate the reality of their situation. Those who tried to adopt the trappings of command only managed to provoke derision. Any captain who insisted on being addressed by rank got very little respect. Successful captains learned to be self-deprecatory, to make light of their own situation by saying things like “‘captain’ is just for the courtroom” or “I’m only the bus driver.” If you had to tell people you were in authority, you weren’t. A captain’s leadership should speak for itself. Because sooner or later, it would have to.

Dave Young’s career at Transocean was elegant testimony to how fast a young officer could climb the ranks. In less than three years, he went from being a trainee to chief mate on the Deepwater Ho
rizon, promoted in early 2009, less than a year after Curt became captain.

Making chief mate was a big step up. Chief mates are considered senior officers and the job meant leaving the tedious hours of standing watch to others. Dave was liberated to roam the deck. In fact, his job required it. One of his duties was ensuring the rig’s stability. That meant tracking and stowing all heavy equipment so that no imbalances were created and maximum capacity was never exceeded. To do this, he needed to enter the precise location and weight of each item into the rig’s stability computer. For Dave, with his degree in naval architecture, picking off the precise location of a piece of equipment from the auto-CAD drawings of the ship was routine, and finding the weight of each item was made simple by the fact that each had been pulled off a workboat by the rig’s massive cranes, equipped with scales. The hard part for Dave was learning the names of each item. Dave had no direct involvement with most drilling procedures, with the exception of being responsible for storing and then delivering the powdered cement that would be mixed and used in the well. But unlike some of the marine staff, he took an active interest in the process and saw his new role as an opportunity. It allowed him to pull guys aside and ask questions: how equipment was used, how it was handled on deck, and, most important, what it was called.

As he became more familiar with all the complex tools and materials used in deepwater drilling, he was better able to appreciate what the Horizon accomplished in the summer and early fall of 2009.

To the crew it was just another well, one of nearly thirty wells it had drilled since the rig floated. One well was pretty much like the next. There was the derrick-topped, crane-studded, 200-foot by 300-foot rectangle of the rig itself, and the 360-degree panorama
of the Gulf of Mexico. One patch of ocean surface looked the same as another. As they moved from drilling one well to drilling the next, without a GPS reading you wouldn’t know the rig had gone anywhere.

All that was true of the well they drilled in the Tiber Field, a deepwater oil site located in the Keathley Canyon in the Gulf of Mexico, 250 miles southeast of Houston. The work, the drilling and construction of a well structure beneath thousands of feet of ocean, was like every other well the Horizon had worked. Except that it kept going on, and on. By the time the drilling team had hit its objective, they had reached 35,000 feet beneath the mud line and 39,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, the deepest well ever drilled.