Beauty and the Beast

The view can be breathtaking from Platform Ellen, nine miles off Huntington Beach.

On some days, you can see the coastline from Palos Verdes to San Clemente. Summer evenings bring the sparkle of fireworks displays over Disneyland. And on especially clear afternoons, crew members say, you can read the Hollywood sign above Los Angeles just as clearly as if you were seeing it in a book.

The postcard views tell a story, but only part of it. Poised 10 stories above the water, the oil platform is a place where life is measured by hours of tedium and moments of sheer terror. For the 40 men--and one woman--who live and work here, there is the camaraderie of the barracks coupled with the isolation and claustrophobia of a prison.

“It’s a way of life,” Larry Shahan, platform supervisor, said of existence on Ellen, a virtual offshore city 265 feet above the ocean floor. “We actually become a family out here. When you spend 24 hours a day with people, you become very close.”

This particular family is employed by Aera Energy LLC, a company based in Bakersfield that produces about 7,000 barrels of crude oil a day from Platform Ellen and its two sister platforms--Elly, connected to Ellen by a 200-foot-long bridge, and Eureka about a mile away. Drawn from 65 underwater wells, the raw petroleum is divided into its three major components: water, pumped back into the ground; gas, used to produce energy on the platform itself; and crude oil, pumped through a 16-inch underwater pipeline back to a refinery in Long Beach.

‘It’s a Fairly Stressful Job’

Every day and night, seven days a week for 24 hours a day, the pumps and wells of this steel island on stilts are monitored and maintained by the crew’s engineers, mechanics, electricians, technicians, crane operators and rig hands. They keep their vigils in 12-hour shifts, working 6 to 6 in rotating stints of seven days on and seven days off.

“It’s a fairly stressful job,” Shahan said. “You’re sitting on top of the water, and you’re scrutinized for every mishap. You can’t make a mistake out here, but I enjoy it.”

The platform itself is an intricate network of walkways and pipelines. Weighing in at 13,400 tons, it consists of a lower deck housing the rig engines and air compressors, and an upper deck supporting the crew’s living quarters, galley and offices. Topping everything is a helipad and, rumbling back and forth over the platform, a derrick tower that can be moved over each well in need of repair.

While the pumping happens on Ellen and Eureka, most of the processing takes place on Platform Elly, where the heaviest responsibility falls on Mike Jones, 44, the bushy-haired, talkative control room operator.

Seated at a console strewn with telephones, Jones stares at two walls covered with gauges, switches and red-and-green lights that monitor the three platforms’ major systems for temperature and pressure. When one of the red lights suddenly flashed, a momentary look of terror came over Jones’ face as his eyes darted frantically from gauge to gauge. Then he smiled. “No biggie. They’re testing the alarms.”

One of the major functions of the safety system is to warn of spills out in the Beta field, which the platforms are draining. Every platform worker has a keen professional and personal interest in preventing a spill. Under federal law, each worker can be held liable for any mishap and the penalties are stiff: up to 10 years in prison and/or a $100,000 fine for willfully causing a spill--$10,000 a day for knowing about one and not reporting it.

“If a drop of diesel fuel goes into the water,” Shahan said, “I have to report it.”

That only happens a few times a year. The good safety record, the workers say, has improved their public image.

“When I started in this business,” Jones said, “if there were two guys--one an oil worker and the other raping a baby--people would be real mad at the oil worker. Today they’re a lot more open-minded--I haven’t heard that in a while.”

Even Hollywood has been putting a more positive spin on the profession, as evidenced by the recent hit movie “Armageddon,” in which Bruce Willis plays an offshore oil driller who ends up saving the world. The opening scenes were scheduled to be shot on Ellen, but company officials objected to what they considered too graphic sex. “They thought it wouldn’t reflect well on the industry,” Shahan said.

On a real platform, physical contact between the sexes is virtually nonexistent. The only intimacy occurs over the telephone in long, communing conversations with girlfriends and wives back on shore.

Sex notwithstanding, the workers most resembling Willis’ tough roustabout are the men who repair and maintain the underwater wells. Dressed in greasy jeans and khakis, they keep the black liquid flowing, wrestling thousands of feet of pipeline to inspect and repair any flaws.

“It’s just like a football team,” Dave Whitteker, 35, a derrick hand, said during a recent night shift. Standing at the controls of a huge crane inside the derrick tower, he labored with five men to withdraw 6,000 feet of pipe from the ocean depths. Whitteker kept watch as the others attached 90-foot segments of pipe to the end of the crane. At their signal, he hoisted each length of pipe to a rack high above their heads where another worker secured it for inspection.

Whitteker predicted that it would take at least 10 hours to withdraw the segments of pipe from their snug encasement deep beneath the ocean floor, inspect their linings and joints, and stuff them back into their hole. With 50,000 pounds of equipment swinging crazily over the men’s heads, he said, they’d have to take it slow.

“One mishap could kill,” Whitteker said, sweeping his muscled arm over the strange, rhythmic dance going on in the surreal yellow light of the nighttime rig. “We watch out for each other. Everybody knows his job, and we watch each other’s backs.”

The caution seems to be paying off. The crew averages an accident once every 24 months. Only once in the past six years has an employee been injured seriously enough to lose time from work.

Homes Far From the Sea

Not everyone on Platform Ellen works directly with oil. There are cooks who provide meals in the platform’s spartan cafeteria, a small room with a few tables smelling slightly of grease. Inside the windowless galley is a special rack for hard hats and a constant supply of banana cream pies.

Boatmen make three daily trips to and from Long Beach on a 65-foot crew ship called the “Doug C” ferrying newspapers, materials and--every Thursday--workers to and from the beach. Then there’s Rodney Wells, 45, who signed on 10 years ago to provide housekeeping services for the platform’s tiny cell-like rooms, each containing a bunk bed, sink, toilet, TV set and telephone.

“It’s better than any of the rest of the jobs I’ve had,” said Wells, who once managed a liquor store in Long Beach. “You’re away from all the stress, you don’t have to spend much money, and you don’t put much wear on your car.” Because there’s nothing to spend money on at sea, he said, “you can afford to keep a nice apartment” for the weeks that you’re off.

Many workers do accept long and difficult commutes to stay in areas of their choice during the time between working. Jones lives with his wife in a small town called Stage Coach, Nev., where he will rise at 3:45 a.m. on a Thursday to drive to the airport for the 80-minute flight to LAX. From there he takes an hourlong ride in a shuttle to Long Beach Harbor, then hops on the crew ship for the 60-minute trip to the deck of Platform Ellen, which he swings onto by rope.

Other platform workers--whose salaries average about $50,000 a year--live in Northern California, Colorado and Arizona. “It allows you to live where you want,” said Allan Knowles, 48, a mechanic who spends off-hours with his wife at the couple’s home on 1.5 acres in the Tehachapi Mountains, about 175 miles north of Long Beach. “I prefer the peace and quiet to city life.”

Taking a Toll on Family Life

But the crew pays a price for the long periods away from home. Divorce rates are high among the platform’s workers, Shahan said. And for those with young children especially, the separations can be excruciating. “It’s extremely tough,” said Ken Bidney, 43, an electrician who lives with his wife and 3-year-old son, Dalton, near San Bernardino. “I’ve missed half of his life and it pains me. He needs his daddy.”

The company has tried to ease the problem by, among other things, providing free phone service for employees to talk with their families. And, in truth, there’s not much else to do on Ellen during the few fleeting hours between work and sleep. They read, watch television, work out in the cramped company weight room and sometimes go fishing off Ellen’s upper decks. “The fishing’s fantastic,” said Jon LeBoeuf, 34, a crane operator from a town near Fresno. “I’ve caught shark, calico and squid--I used to get 30 to 40 pounds a week.”

He quit fishing because he needed more sleep.

Mostly, the workers rely on the camaraderie of peers, a long-cured comfort with one another developed over years and displayed casually in lengthy cafeteria rap sessions during the hours between shifts. Lori Randall is part of that too, though it hasn’t always been so. “It took the guys about two years to accept me,” said Randall, a production technician from Mesa, Ariz., and the only woman on the platform.

When she started in 1984, she was given the silent treatment. “It was tough breaking into the boys’ club,” she recalled. “I thought about quitting a lot, but I was too stubborn--I won them over one by one.”

Like many industries, this one has experienced significant downsizing. Aera Energy LLC, according to Shahan, is now in escrow with an independent oil production company to sell its interest in the three Beta platforms, making the project’s future uncertain.

The workers on Platforms Ellen, Elly and Eureka say that they will weather this storm as they have many others. “We’re just waiting on our options,” said Steve Hallada, 46, a well bay operator from Pico Rivera who monitors the amount of oil coming out of the ground. He hopes the new company will offer him a job, but knows there are no guarantees.

Sea Lions and Moonlit Nights

For the casual visitor, there’s a strange allure to this place. You feel it on the upper decks as you gaze down on the blanket of sea gulls circling over a seascape occasionally darkened by the shadows of hunting sharks. It’s present in the mournful baying of sea lions against the constant hum of machinery. Mostly, it’s evident at night as the cool offshore breezes breathe gently against the platform, lit up on the water like a Christmas tree perched on a lily pad.

Beneath the warmth of those lights, human beings wait for their shifts to end. Every day is pretty much like any other on Platform Ellen. Except Sunday nights, the “hump” in the middle of the week, after which it’s a snap until the crew change on Thursday.

“It seems like the seven days go really quick when you’re off,” Randall said. “But when you’re on, they tend to slow down. Everyone counts the days up to Sunday night, then it’s downhill.”

But there are rewards.

“I love it out here,” said Jones, expressing the paradox that many feel. “Last night I watched the moon coming up over Irvine. If a photographer came out here 12 times a year, he’d sell lots of calendars.”

Like almost everyone on the platform, he is both trapped and liberated by his work. “You don’t do this unless you love it,” Jones said, “because once you’re on here, it’s hard to get off.”

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Rig Dwellers

A bout 20 people at a time live and work on the oil platforms Ellen and Elly off Huntington Beach’s coast. Mechanics, cooks, rig crews and others rotate seven days on and seven days off this sea-bound mini-city.

ELLEN

Eight-legged pumping platform. It produces 2,000 barrels of oil a day using existing wells.

Function: Pumps oil, houses crew

Wells: Eighty 24-inch-diameter casings house 65 wells

Dimensions of upper rig: 140 by 69 feet

Height: 43-foot structure (excluding 147-foot-tall derrick); 277-foot steel underwater jacket

Weight: 13,400 tons

****

ELLY

Twelve-legged production platform is the “brain” of the two rigs, housing the power generator and controls.

Function: Power and production control. Handles oil flow from Ellen and Eureka

Dimensions of upper rig: 106 by 165 feet

Height: 43-foot structure; 269-foot steel underwater jacket

Weight: 10,600 tons

****

PLATFORM CREW

1. Process supervisor (1 person works a 12-house shift and is on call for the second 12-hour shift): Manages all three platforms from his office on Platform Ellen.

2. Process specialist (1): The process supervisor’s assistant. He is second in command on the platform.

3. Control room operator (1): Sits in the control room on Elly for 12-hour shift. Monitors all ongoing activities on the platform. The control room is the brain of the platform.

4. Facilities operator (1): Works directly with the control room operator, monitoring all outside activities on Platform Elly.

5. Well bay operator (1 on Ellen): Monitors oil coming out of the ground, monitors and operates the wells themselves.

6. Rig crew (6): Recondition and repair all oil producing wells and electrical pump at the bottom of the well. They work on Ellen.

Crane operators (2): On Ellen.

Roustabout (1): Works with the crane operators hooking cable to loads and unhooking loads on platform.

Mechanics (2): Maintain all mechanical equipment on both platforms.

Electricians (2): Work on both platforms.

Instrument technician (2): Maintains instrumentation, control valves, automated controls, gauges.

Cook (1): Cooks three meals a day for the crew on Ellen.

Galley hand (1): Maintains galley.

Bedroom man (1): Maintains crew quarters. All-around utility person.

Welder (1): Works on both platforms.

Sources: Shell Oil; Aera Energy; U.S. Minerals Management Service

Graphics reporting by DAVID HALDANE / Los Angeles Times