With the flow of oil offshore increasing in previous days, with talk of a government take-over of the emergency effort, it's increasingly difficult to envision daily life as business as usual. It's also progressively easier to feel the frustration of those with lives and livlihoods in the balance.
Yet a morning run is essentially the same as it ever was, current and wind dictating our actions. When conditions cooperate, our job is primarily a pleasure, a boat ride on a sunny day, operations conducted in serene silence or with musical accompaniment from radio/cd. But enter elements: current, fog and traffic in the river, heavy seas offshore; and the coolest veteran will get white-knuckled at the wheel, avoiding close quarters situations in pilotage waters or back-loading cargo at sea beneath a platform crane under threat of a gale.
I'm hit with consecutive days pumping water offshore to other vessels, the larger, steel-hulled work-boats that standby for days or weeks at sea and travel 10 to 12 knots when underway, roughly half the speed we're doing in our aluminum-hulled crew-boat with four Caterpillar 3512 engines. They catch a line off their bow onto a sea buoy, remain tethered and drifting on a floating, polypropylene line, twisted yellow and black maybe 300 feet long. I back our boat from the stern controls until Alex catches a heaving line from the work-boat and they pass a hose. When it's dead calm, we can tie up to the boat, but not today: a steady, 15-knot wind, a 4 to 5-foot swell. I spend the next two hours pivoting and backing, chasing the work-boat back and forth along its constricted path. It's not terribly difficult with a little practice--until the mind wanders...
The story of the leak is preposterous, and it would require a daily summary of various news sources to keep abreast. On the national level, the NY Times has scooped competitors, locating a BP technician who is talking (unauthorized) and leaking company documents, which reveal a long history of trouble with a dubious well. To follow details of the clean up, the Coast Guard response, it takes local radio--someone like Garland Robinette, host of "The Think Tank" on 105.3FM, to stimulate conversation.
I make observations of my own regarding boat movements, and I can say it took weeks for the large clean-up (Responder) vessels to arrive, and when they did, they sat at anchor east of the channel opposite the Venice Jump. The well had been gushing about a month before these vessels left Venice. The dredge Newport, an unlimited tonnage, Army Corps of Engineer vessel, sat at anchor for more than a week upon its arrival in the river. Surely, it could have been dredging berms, not sitting on the hook, but the Coast Guard allegedly restricted their movements by not signing paperwork.
Done pumping water, we're back-loading in South Pass 62 under a yellow monster, a double platform where the Blake 210 drilling apparatus re-works a couple of old wells; depth 370 feet. We shuffle from platform D to platform C, switching cranes, following the comedy of operations that oft becomes the oil field. The current slacks, the wind dies. Alex and I have befriended a roust-about, a grunt worker sent down from a platform to "rig" lifts, hook up the platform crane cable to the cargo on our boat deck. His name is Eddie and he climbs to the bridge to hang out between lifts. With a stature suggesting youth, he's a certified crane operator, under-employed as roust-about in a tight economy, supporting a wife and two kids back in Leesville, La.
A third boat arrives on the scene, and we're standing by again. Eddie explains the drilling process when prompted, displays quite a knowledge of operations. He provides us a different perspective, that seen from his bird's-eye view atop the platform. He offers updates and insight on the slick and the movements of fish and birds, less and less each day. Today, he's most concerned with Tuesday morning's crew change, wants to make sure we'll be here to pick him up. Eddie exhibits a pensive calm, a thoughtful consideration, an acceptance of silence. Sitting with him on the bridge, his soot-covered face relaxes, exposing clean skin beneath wrinkles; he's older than I thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment