For oil rig workers, risk comes with paychecks

Reporting from Atlanta — 

The Gulf of Mexico oil leak has reinvigorated a nationwide debate about the risks and rewards of offshore drilling. But for the crew and surviving families of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the calculations of risk and reward are much more intimate.

Survivors are asking themselves whether, given what they have seen, they can stomach going back out on the water, where the threat of a worst-case scenario — a blowout of combustible oil and natural gas — is no longer a dreaded theoretical possibility but an inescapable memory of fire and death.

The April 20 blowout and explosion on the Horizon killed 11 of their fellow workers. Kevin Eugene, a cook on the rig, called it “hell on the water.”

Yet for workers like Eugene, there remains the siren song of offshore work, the same one that lured them to the desolate waters of the Gulf of Mexico in the first place: a generous blue-collar salary that is tough to match. A roughneck, or general laborer on the drill deck, can make as much as $47,500, and salaries for more seasoned and skilled workers are higher.

“Man, I don’t know,” Eugene said recently from the safety of his home in Slidell, La. “I don’t want to put my family through that [again]. They thought I died.... But we’ve got to do what we do to support our families. We’ve got to take the risk.”

The acceptance of risk is at the heart of the distinctive culture of the offshore oil business. Much like the military, its workers are constantly reminded of the potentially fatal consequences of careless actions.

Like the military, there is a mix of pride and swagger that comes with the doing of dirty, dangerous and crucial work — and at home, there is often a worried spouse.

“I struggle every time he leaves with the question of will I ever see him again,” an offshore worker’s wife named Cathy Buchanan wrote recently on a Deepwater Horizon condolence website.

And like the military, there is a strong camaraderie borne of these shared burdens. The obituary for Jason Anderson, written by his widow, Shelley, referred to his co-workers as his “rig brothers.”

Matthew Davis, a catering company employee who cleaned rooms on the rig, is one of the workers suing its owner, Transocean Ltd., and its operator, the oil company BP. Yet he is still proud to have been part of the team last year, when the Horizon drilled a record 6-mile-deep hole elsewhere in the gulf.

“Research it yourself — we dug one of the deepest wells in history,” Davis said in a recent phone interview.

That loyalty, in some cases, extends to the companies themselves, a dynamic that factors into another crucial decision facing the victims’ families — whether to sue.

Nelda Winslette, 76, raised her grandson Adam Weise in her Yorktown, Texas, home. He had been employed by Transocean as a roughneck — a general laborer who worked on the drill floor. He died the night of the blast at age 24.

His grandmother said she “feels for” the company management, given all they are going through. Though a number of survivors and families of the dead have filed negligence suits against Transocean and BP, Winslette said she considered the possibility of something going wrong on a rig — and the possibility that it might be deadly — to be “part of the work.”

Matthew Davis was cleaning one of the rig’s hotel-like rooms that Tuesday evening. A little after 9, he heard a sound coming from the vicinity of the engine room that lasted a couple of seconds — “a real loud, funny noise I’d never heard before.” It was a humming and buzzing, like an amplified insect.

“I continued doing my job,” Davis recalled. “And then the lights went out.”

Davis, 36, had been working offshore for about four years, most recently with a challenging schedule — 28 days on, 14 off.

It was tough for the father of a 6-year-old girl. But there were few other jobs near his home in Tylertown, Miss. “You don’t have too many,” he said. “You could drive trucks or work at McDonald’s or Wal-Mart.”

Like other cooks and janitors employed by ART Catering Inc., Davis was well-versed in safety techniques. The company requires its employees to attend a five-day in-house training that covers, among other things, hydrogen sulfide risks and water survival. The rig held fire drills each week.

“If anyone thinks it’s not safe to work offshore, it’s safer than being on land, with hurricanes, tornadoes, fires and bombs being set off,” said ART Catering President Brenda J. Hingle.

So that night, when the lights went out, Davis listened for an alarm. But none sounded at first. He left the room he had been cleaning, following the glow-strip arrows up a stairwell that would lead him outside.

Elsewhere on the rig, veteran offshore welder Stephen Davis, no relation to Matthew Davis, had been trying to sleep.

There was a time when he had tried to work on land, mainly to spend more time with his family in San Antonio. But the lucrative offshore paycheck kept calling to him. On April 20, he found himself working on the Horizon. He had come there straight from a two-week stint on another Transocean rig.

After his 12-hour shift and dinner in the galley, he had called his son and fiancee in Texas. “I miss you,” she told him. “Come home.”

Lying in his bed, he heard a boom, but figured one of the cranes had dropped a casing. He knew it was something more serious when the lights went out. His heart began racing.

Then there was an announcement: “This is not a drill. This is not a drill.” He grabbed his tennis shoes and a lifejacket.

Then came the explosion — “like a missile through the rig,” Matthew Davis said.

Stephen Davis was in the hallway, trying to breathe through what felt like sand, when the explosion threw him against a wall.

“This thing was falling apart around us,” he said. He and a co-worker tried to go up a set of interior stairs to the level where the lifeboats are stored. But as they walked up, he said, “The whole upper-level living quarters just caved in on us.”

They turned back around, panicked, but made their way toward a door that led them outside, where they saw the extent of their trouble.

“There were 400-foot flames shooting from the deck,” said Stephen Davis, 36. “You could feel the heat. Mud, the synthetic mud that was being pumped down the hole, was everywhere. It was like a deer on a frozen pond. You couldn’t go anywhere without slipping or sliding.”

Matthew Davis had been headed up a set of stairs when the explosion hit.

“I’d taken three steps upstairs,” he recalled. “If I would have taken four more steps it would have been over. Nothing hit me but the air and the gas that came after. The stairwell collapsed in, and knocked me about 15 feet.”

Eventually, both Matthew and Stephen Davis made their separate ways to the lifeboats. So did Kevin Eugene and dozens of others.

At any given time, the Gulf of Mexico offshore industry employs about 35,000 workers. Since 2006, 41 of them have died on the job; in that same time, about 1,300 injuries have been recorded, according to the federal Minerals Management Service.

It is difficult to compare those numbers to other industries; the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics does not specifically track total hours worked in the offshore industry, and thus cannot calculate an injury and fatality rate as it can for other jobs.

Stephen Davis and Matthew Davis have filed lawsuits against Transocean and BP in Harris County, Texas. Both men claim they sustained injuries that will impair their ability to earn for their families.

“Most of these guys, the overwhelming majority, are guys with a high school education; there’s probably no other industry they can make this kind of money in,” said Texas attorney Tony Buzbee, who is representing the two men, as well as other survivors.

Neither Matthew nor Stephen Davis could say whether they would ever go back offshore. Each is seeking $5.5 million.

Adam Weise’s survivors have no such plans. “There’s not going to be no lawsuit from this family,” said Winslette, his grandmother.

She and other family members attended a memorial service for him May 1 at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Yorktown. He was remembered for his sense of humor and his love of fishing.

His Horizon co-worker Shane Turner, a roustabout, or general laborer, on the Horizon, was there in the packed pews. He happened to be with his family onshore when the rig blew.

Turner, 40, retired from the Army in 2008 as a sergeant first class. Despite the accident, he’s maintains there’s a lot more attention paid to safety offshore than in the service.

“Yes, sir, I’m going back out,” he said.

richard.fausset@latimes.com