On the morning of Dec. 21, as the Aiviq and Kulluk crews prepared to depart on the three-week journey back to Seattle, Shell’s new warranty surveyor took careful note of the certificates for the steel shackles that would connect the two vessels and bear the dead weight of the giant Kulluk — without noticing that they had been replaced with theoretically sturdier shackles of unknown origin. He examined the shackles but had little means by which to test their strength. He did not ask the crew to rotate the shackles, as one might rotate tires on a car. He did not consider it part of his job, he would tell Coast Guard investigators, to examine whether Shell’s overall plan to cross the Gulf of Alaska made any sense.
The Aiviq pulled the Kulluk away just after lunchtime. The Aiviq’s usual captain was on vacation for the holidays, as were Slaiby and other members of Shell’s senior Alaska staff. The rest of the tug’s crew had limited experience in the operation of the new, complex vessel. Onboard the Kulluk was a skeleton crew of 18 men, along for the ride in large part because of an inconvenience of the rig’s flag of convenience. The Kulluk was registered in the Marshall Islands, the same country where BP’s contractors had registered the Deepwater Horizon, and the Marshall Islands required that the rig be manned, even when under tow. The new captain of the Aiviq, Jon Skoglund, proposed aiming straight for the Seattle area, a direct and faster “great circle” route that would leave the two ships alone in the middle of the North Pacific but would avoid the shoals, rocks and waves of the Alaskan coast. There would be no shore to crash into. They could lengthen the towline for better shock absorption and would have room to move if problems arose. The idea was dropped because the Kulluk’s 18 crew members would then be out of range of Coast Guard search-and-rescue helicopters. Perversely, a flag of convenience, seen as a way to avoid government regulation, had Shell seeking a government safety net — and a longer, more dangerous, near-shore route.
Skoglund was so concerned as he began his first Gulf of Alaska tow that he sent an email to the chief Kulluk mariner on the other side of the towline. “To be blunt,” he wrote, “I believe that this length of tow, at this time of year, in this location, with our current routing guarantees an ass kicking.”(...)
The Aiviq pulled the Kulluk away just after lunchtime. The Aiviq’s usual captain was on vacation for the holidays, as were Slaiby and other members of Shell’s senior Alaska staff. The rest of the tug’s crew had limited experience in the operation of the new, complex vessel. Onboard the Kulluk was a skeleton crew of 18 men, along for the ride in large part because of an inconvenience of the rig’s flag of convenience. The Kulluk was registered in the Marshall Islands, the same country where BP’s contractors had registered the Deepwater Horizon, and the Marshall Islands required that the rig be manned, even when under tow. The new captain of the Aiviq, Jon Skoglund, proposed aiming straight for the Seattle area, a direct and faster “great circle” route that would leave the two ships alone in the middle of the North Pacific but would avoid the shoals, rocks and waves of the Alaskan coast. There would be no shore to crash into. They could lengthen the towline for better shock absorption and would have room to move if problems arose. The idea was dropped because the Kulluk’s 18 crew members would then be out of range of Coast Guard search-and-rescue helicopters. Perversely, a flag of convenience, seen as a way to avoid government regulation, had Shell seeking a government safety net — and a longer, more dangerous, near-shore route.Skoglund was so concerned as he began his first Gulf of Alaska tow that he sent an email to the chief Kulluk mariner on the other side of the towline. “To be blunt,” he wrote, “I believe that this length of tow, at this time of year, in this location, with our current routing guarantees an ass kicking.”(...)
By the early, dark hours of Dec. 29, the unified command was convinced that lives were at risk, and it dispatched two Coast Guard Jayhawk helicopters to evacuate the 18 increasingly anxious men stuck aboard the Kulluk.
The rescuers had thought it would be a relatively easy job. The Coast Guard air base on Kodiak Island, the northernmost such facility in the country, is an outpost at the edge of a wilderness of water and mountains. Its search-and-rescue area spans four million square miles. To have a case “so close to home plate,” as one of them put it — 45 flight minutes and roughly a hundred miles away — seemed a stroke of incredible luck. Further, the Kulluk’s size suggested stability, a straightforward rescue.
When it appeared out of the night, “the Kulluk was wicked lit up,” said Jason Bunch, the Coast Guard rescue swimmer on the first of two helicopters. “It was like a city.” The pilots illuminated the rig further with hover lights and spotlights. They wore night-vision goggles, just in case the lights weren’t enough. They had no problems seeing the rig and the crippled Aiviq and the taut line between them, but the surrounding darkness still eroded the pilots’ depth perception. With no horizon to reference, it was harder to hover, and the goggles took away their peripheral vision.
There are two primary ways Jayhawk crews save people at sea: They lower a basket to the deck of the stricken vessel and hoist them up, or they pluck them out of the water by lowering a basket and a swimmer like Bunch, a 12-year Kodiak veteran, who in 50-foot swells and 35-degree water will drag them to the basket himself.
But now that the Kulluk was being towed from its “stern,” the point of attachment for the emergency towline, it and the Aiviq were oriented exactly the wrong way for an approach. In order to maintain control, the helicopters would ideally face the heavy winds head-on, but the derrick blocked their path. If they tried to hover above the flight deck, the only obvious place for a hoist, there was a perfect tail wind, which made steering unpredictable and dangerous.
The wind blew the tops off some of the massive swells, but otherwise they weren’t breaking. The swells came in close sets, one right after another, interrupted by long sets of “monster waves” more than twice as high. The Kulluk tipped severely but somewhat rhythmically until the monsters arrived. “As the bigger and bigger ones came, they made it go around in a circle,” Bunch told me in Kodiak. His eyes went buggy. His right hand gyrated wildly. The deck, normally 70 feet above the water, “was dipping so deep that the water was surging on it.”
“You know when you have a bobber on a fishing pole,” he asked, “and then you throw it out there and reel in really fast, and it makes a wake over the bobber? That’s what it looked like.” If the Kulluk’s deck was pitching that badly, he said, you could imagine what the derrick was doing. It looked as if it were trying to bat the helicopters out of the sky.
The two helicopters took turns circling the drill rig, looking for a way in, for any place to lower the basket. They radioed back and forth with the Kulluk’s crew — “Very, very professional, very squared away,” Bunch said, “considering the environment” — and briefly wondered if there was a way to get them in the water to be picked up by the swimmers. It was impossible. The jump from the deck to the sea could kill a man if he timed it wrong. If it didn’t, the Kulluk could kill him on the next swing of the bat. They flew back to Kodiak, refueled, brainstormed some more at the base, then went back out.
Six hours had passed from the moment Bunch and his crew first flew over the Kulluk. It was still night. Bunch took out his watch and began timing the gaps between big sets of swells. “We started coming up with some harebrained schemes,” he said. They looked for “maybe doable” spots for the hoist. “We’d have 90 seconds to be in and out, which is just impossible, but we were actually talking about it.” Reality — what their commander called “the courage not to do it” — slowly set in. The two helicopters returned to base. “We were experienced,” Bunch said, “so eventually we were like, ‘This is stupid.' ”
The rescuers had thought it would be a relatively easy job. The Coast Guard air base on Kodiak Island, the northernmost such facility in the country, is an outpost at the edge of a wilderness of water and mountains. Its search-and-rescue area spans four million square miles. To have a case “so close to home plate,” as one of them put it — 45 flight minutes and roughly a hundred miles away — seemed a stroke of incredible luck. Further, the Kulluk’s size suggested stability, a straightforward rescue.
When it appeared out of the night, “the Kulluk was wicked lit up,” said Jason Bunch, the Coast Guard rescue swimmer on the first of two helicopters. “It was like a city.” The pilots illuminated the rig further with hover lights and spotlights. They wore night-vision goggles, just in case the lights weren’t enough. They had no problems seeing the rig and the crippled Aiviq and the taut line between them, but the surrounding darkness still eroded the pilots’ depth perception. With no horizon to reference, it was harder to hover, and the goggles took away their peripheral vision.There are two primary ways Jayhawk crews save people at sea: They lower a basket to the deck of the stricken vessel and hoist them up, or they pluck them out of the water by lowering a basket and a swimmer like Bunch, a 12-year Kodiak veteran, who in 50-foot swells and 35-degree water will drag them to the basket himself.
But now that the Kulluk was being towed from its “stern,” the point of attachment for the emergency towline, it and the Aiviq were oriented exactly the wrong way for an approach. In order to maintain control, the helicopters would ideally face the heavy winds head-on, but the derrick blocked their path. If they tried to hover above the flight deck, the only obvious place for a hoist, there was a perfect tail wind, which made steering unpredictable and dangerous.
The wind blew the tops off some of the massive swells, but otherwise they weren’t breaking. The swells came in close sets, one right after another, interrupted by long sets of “monster waves” more than twice as high. The Kulluk tipped severely but somewhat rhythmically until the monsters arrived. “As the bigger and bigger ones came, they made it go around in a circle,” Bunch told me in Kodiak. His eyes went buggy. His right hand gyrated wildly. The deck, normally 70 feet above the water, “was dipping so deep that the water was surging on it.”
“You know when you have a bobber on a fishing pole,” he asked, “and then you throw it out there and reel in really fast, and it makes a wake over the bobber? That’s what it looked like.” If the Kulluk’s deck was pitching that badly, he said, you could imagine what the derrick was doing. It looked as if it were trying to bat the helicopters out of the sky.
The two helicopters took turns circling the drill rig, looking for a way in, for any place to lower the basket. They radioed back and forth with the Kulluk’s crew — “Very, very professional, very squared away,” Bunch said, “considering the environment” — and briefly wondered if there was a way to get them in the water to be picked up by the swimmers. It was impossible. The jump from the deck to the sea could kill a man if he timed it wrong. If it didn’t, the Kulluk could kill him on the next swing of the bat. They flew back to Kodiak, refueled, brainstormed some more at the base, then went back out.
Six hours had passed from the moment Bunch and his crew first flew over the Kulluk. It was still night. Bunch took out his watch and began timing the gaps between big sets of swells. “We started coming up with some harebrained schemes,” he said. They looked for “maybe doable” spots for the hoist. “We’d have 90 seconds to be in and out, which is just impossible, but we were actually talking about it.” Reality — what their commander called “the courage not to do it” — slowly set in. The two helicopters returned to base. “We were experienced,” Bunch said, “so eventually we were like, ‘This is stupid.' ”
by McKenzie Funk, NY Times | Read more:
Image: James Mason,Toni Greaves/Getty Images
