An offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico in 2014.
An offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico in 2014.
For more than a decade, Chris Pleasant didn’t want to talk about his near-death experience on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, not even with his wife.
He was a supervisor on the Transocean-owned rig when it exploded 40 miles off the southeast Louisiana coast in 2010, killing 11 of his crewmates in the worst offshore oil disaster in U.S. history. Even after government investigations found that safety devices Pleasant controlled on the bottom of the sea weren’t properly maintained and didn’t work as designed, Pleasant backed his employer in legal proceedings; he even testified on Transocean’s behalf during an unrelated legal dispute with an oil company, helping Transocean win a $185 million settlement.
But now, Pleasant said he’s reached his limit. He’s not only speaking out for the first time, he’s suing Transocean for more than $1 million, alleging the company’s negligence on another drillship in 2020 caused him pain and suffering, lost wages and almost led to another deepwater disaster.
This time, the issue was how Transocean managed the safety of the Deepwater Asgard drillship when it was in the path of Hurricane Zeta. Lawsuits filed by Pleasant and other Asgard crew members allege Transocean did not move quickly enough to get out of the storm’s path, and remained connected to the deep sea well it was drilling at the time, all to maximize profits.
“I don't want anybody else to go through what I've been through on the Deepwater Horizon and the Deepwater Asgard because of profits,” Pleasant said in a recent interview.
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Transocean denies the allegations, saying in court that quickly changing weather forecasts caused it to miss its evacuation window. The captain of the ship testified in a deposition that the rig owner, Beacon Offshore Energy, paid Transocean the same rate during a storm whether it stayed latched to the well or not.
Company attorneys also questioned Pleasant during his deposition about why it took him two weeks after the storm to report being injured, casting doubt on whether the longtime employee from Monroe was looking for a payday at the end of his career.
The larger concern might be whether drilling rigs are following proper safety protocols in the face of stronger hurricanes. In August, the Noble Globetrotter II, a mobile floating drilling rig owned by Noble Corp., got caught in Hurricane Ida’s path. Noble downplayed the incident until crew members started posting harrowing videos and photos on social media of the rig listing badly and taking on water.
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“At 3 a.m. I woke up to everything in my room slamming across from one side to the other,” said Steve Cochran, the assistant driller on the Noble Globetrotter II, in an interview.
Cochran said he was thrown against the wall, and he had to use a towel to wipe water away and climb back to his bed on the tilting floor of the cabin.
“The thoughts are going through your head like, ‘This is it’,” he said. “Like, ‘How’s this rig not about to flip over right now?’”
With near-misses in each of the past two hurricane seasons, the federal offshore safety agency - an Interior Department unit called the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement - established new oversight rules for the 2022 hurricane season, requiring rig owners to report the time needed to evacuate ahead of a storm, known as the “T-time.”
Some companies were writing their own T-time reports before they were required to submit them to the government. In both the Asgard and Globetrotter II cases, T-time reports showed the rigs had more than enough time, with a 20% buffer built in for complications, to move each rig safely from danger once weather forecasts showed them in the cone of uncertainty of the storm’s projected path. But in both cases, the crews missed their windows to leave and decided to ride out the storm, with heavy drilling equipment still dangling hundreds or even thousands of feet in the churning seas below them.
With that in mind, the government now requires Gulf of Mexico operators to send regular updates of how each of their rigs are progressing with the lengthy process of safely shutting in an oil well, lifting heavy equipment off the sea floor and getting out of the path of a storm.
The Offshore Operators Committee, a technical advocacy group, said it collaborated with the government, operators, drilling contractors and the Coast Guard to establish best practices for improving communication for hurricane avoidance.
Noble Corp. says it’s ready to comply.
“Over the course of the last nine months, Noble has taken a leadership role in working with government agencies and industry trade associations to ensure offshore operations are implementing lessons learned to improve efforts to protect the environment and keep the men and women in our industry safe,” Noble spokesperson Craig Muirhead said.
The Coast Guard backed Noble’s assertion that the Globetrotter II was always seaworthy. The area of the rig that took on water in the videos is designed to do so, and the rest of the ship was properly sealed off by watertight doors. Noble also provided injured crew a chance to leave after the storm on helicopters, but Cochran stayed on board. Court records show he did not report being injured until he filed a lawsuit seeking damages more than a month after the incident.
Still, an investigation by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement and the Coast Guard found in May that Noble and Shell, the oil company that hired the Globetrotter II, made "poor operational decisions" by "waiting on notification of a direct path [for Ida] rather than following" clear schedules for shutting in the well and leaving the area.
Shell said it accepted the government’s findings, adding “the detailed learnings will help us and our contractors continue to improve operational planning and safety during hurricane season. Shell’s top priority remains the safety of our people, the environment and our assets.”
A separate incident report by Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement found that several days went by before the storm’s arrival without Noble making any progress in evacuating. The report also blasts Noble for making a last-moment crew change that "delayed an operation already hours behind schedule and resulted in a failed evacuation."
Cochran, the assistant driller, said he arrived on the Globetrotter II barely a day before the storm, on a helicopter that was also being used to evacuate other rigs in the area, a statement confirmed by the federal investigation.
“When I landed at 3 p.m. on Friday, they already knew it was too late,” Cochran said. Asked what he could do about it, he said, “Get to work. That's all you can do.”
Much can go wrong during a rig’s evacuation process, especially in worsening tropical storm conditions. It can take days to plug a newly drilled oil well, test the cement seals and “packers” used to make sure oil and gas can’t escape and then lift a steel riser pipe that can descend a mile or more through the sea with the lower marine riser package, a massive, multimillion-dollar piece of equipment attached to the other end.
The riser package is a stack of steel pipes, control mechanisms and wires that latch to the top of the blowout preventer, an even larger metal structure that uses valves and clamps to open or close the well at the sea floor.
In both the Asgard and Globetrotter II cases, the rig crews ran out of time to raise their riser packages before gale-force winds hit, leaving them both in tenuous situations.
In the Asgard case, the rig was still attached to the well when Hurricane Zeta passed close by, and the storm blew the ship so far off-center that the riser pipe almost snapped. As the subsea supervisor in charge of the riser package and blowout preventer, Pleasant hit an emergency disconnect button. It worked, but the storm then blew the Asgard into shallower water and the riser package crashed into the seabed, causing major damage. At the upper end of the mile-long pipe, the riser’s metal joints banged against the ship’s hull, and Pleasant feared it could puncture a hole and cause the ship to take on water.
“If we took on water, we would have sunk,” he said.
The Globetrotter II case was similar, but the crew made more progress. The rig had already unlatched from the well before Hurricane Ida arrived. The riser package was still dangling on the riser pipe about 500 feet below the rig, however, and the Globetrotter II could go only about 3 knots, a third its normal speed. It couldn’t outrun the storm, and the riser and riser package snapped off and fell to the bottom of the Gulf.
Three crew members reported injuries immediately, and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement and Coast Guard investigation found 88 barrels of oil from the rig polluted the Gulf.
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