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Lost in the catastrophic aftermath of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is the gripping tale of the rig workers and the Coast Guard crewmen who rescued them.
Sean Flynn re-creates their long, harrowing, heart-pounding night.
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By eleven o'clock, when the daily safety meeting begins, the cement has been curing for more than eleven hours. Mike Williams listens as the managers and supervisors outline their plans for the next twelve hours. Then it gets tense. Jimmy Wayne Harrell, Transocean's OIM—offshore installation manager—goes last, like he always does. Mike finds it strange that Jimmy is using more technical language than usual when he's talking about sealing the well.
"Jimmy," the man sitting next to Mike says, "my procedure is different than that."
Mike recognizes BP's senior man on the Horizon.
"This is how we're gonna do it," the OIM says, "unless I hear different."
The BP man says: "I'm the company man. And you're hearing it from me."
The two senior guys on the rig arguing about how a vessel with 126 crew on board is going to safely disconnect from a punctured reservoir of explosive hydrocarbons…yeah, tense is the right word.
The driller, Dewey Revette, breaks in, tries to ease the moment: "You know, guys, why don't we work this out on the drill floor? Let's go to work."
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Drilling mud rains down on the Damon B. Bankston, a 260-foot service boat tethered to the Horizon. She's been there all day, and for the past four hours she's been waiting for the Horizon to deliver 1,400 barrels—58,800 gallons—of drilling mud into her holds, on top of the 3,100 she took on earlier.
Captain Alwin Landry and his crew close the Bankston's hatches to keep mud out. Landry isn't particularly worried. He's worked crew boats for twenty-three years, been captain for a dozen, and he's seen the evolution of oil-rig safety up close. He knows it looks dangerous, but he also knows all the procedures, the fail-safes and redundancies. Still, mud shouldn't be speckling his boat.
Landry radios the Horizon, asks why his deck is slicking with goo. He's told there's a problem with the well, and he hears worry in the words.
Then another voice comes on the radio. Landry is told to move the Bankston, to stage his boat 500 meters away.
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Three short whoops of an alarm sound through the PA system at the Coast Guard air station in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, at 10:07 p.m. Kurt Peterson, the chief rescue swimmer at the base, hears fragments of the announcement that follows, but that's all he needs: Rig explosion, people in the water, possibly 130. He hustles toward the tarmac.
Just off the hangar, Lieutenant Commander Tom Hickey and his copilot, Lieutenant Craig Murray, are finishing their paperwork following a routine two-hour training flight. They're both senior pilots, top-ranked instructors.
Possibly 160 in the water, with injuries.
Hickey tells Murray to restart the helicopter, an HH-65 Dolphin, then sprints into the operations center to get the Horizon's coordinates. The flight mechanic, Scott Lloyd, loads a mass-casualty raft. By 10:20, with the rotor spinning, Murray and Hickey learn Good Samaritans—private boats—are in the area. Lloyd unloads the raft to save weight and space in the cramped Dolphin; better to hoist survivors out of the water and fly them to stable vessels. Peterson's job will be to cable down to the wounded and help get them ready for Lloyd to haul up.
The Dolphin, the first one in the air for the rescue, takes off at 10:28. It climbs to 700 feet, half the height of the Empire State Building. Murray and Hickey drop their NVGs—nightvision goggles—and they see a glow on the southern horizon, like a setting sun.
"Is that it?" Peterson hears them mutter. "Holy shit, I think that's it."
The Deepwater Horizon is 145 miles away.
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