Oilfield Survivor

The three month training school in 1977 finished with a 24 hour logging session in the test wells at BTC. Preparation time immediately beforehand of the equipment not counted…

I finished up my session with my crew and headed back to the flat to get some badly needed shut eye.
The rancid smell of burnt plastic met me as I started up the stairs to the shared second floor flat. The front door was broken open and the smell worse despite noticing the windows were thrown wide open.
Asmid, an Indian fellow trainee, met me at the door.

“Sorry John, sorry John”

“Are you OK, what happened?”

“Put the chip pan on the gas hob to make some chips before crashing out – fell asleep in my room – next thing I know bloody firemen burst in and were putting out the flames.”

The decor of the kitchen I had never previously noticed, but it certainly wasn’t the 100% black look which greeted me now.

“Bloody hell Asmid, you nearly burnt the whole place down.”

It crossed my mind that if I had finished logging before Asmid I would have been sleeping while he played chef. Would the firemen have turned up in time? I didn’t, they did, so it was all hypothetical. Stop hurting your brain John.

My nauseating tiredness was overcoming me.

I felt it was now safe, drama over – can be dealt with later. Closing my bedroom door I stripped off my ripe overalls lay down and instantly fell asleep.

Asmid can credit his survival to a Scottish Firemans´ Strike.

The Fire Station was across the road from our block of flats. The firemen were lazing around their brazier, placards put aside – not many passing cars or folk to lobby in this quiet suburb of Bathgate.
Noticing the smoke billowing out of our flat window their sense of duty kicked in and the fire was quashed before it could spread.

Asmid´s aspirations to become an oil field logging engineer were quashed too.

He was fired.

After all, the endurance test of working over 24 hours non stop was to be completed accurately, on time and safely.

Once out on the North Sea oil rigs it was only going to get tougher.

By luck I was onshore in the Stavanger office (I averaged 23 days offshore per month) when news circulated that an engineer transferred from Aberdeen was arriving by car at any moment. As we were each allocated a company car this meant he must have something interesting, to bring it all the way to Norway. Porsche, Mercedes, Ferrari?

In egalitarian, socialist Norway. Good one. 

The high revving wail got louder and louder then turned into our drive. Across the car park just stopping in time below our first floor office windows. A completely unnecessary high engine rev to clear the spark plugs and then silence.

A brand-new Ferrari 308 GTB in Ferrari red of course. Mega cool.

But what’s this at the front? A huge sticker covering the entire bonnet – Snoopy, no less. Us guys were very nonplussed but the secretaries, on the ground floor, loved it. A sports car does not impress girls but a sports car with an adorable dog, real or otherwise, oh yes.

Alan, the Scottish engineer, was married to one of the secretaries within the year and as far as I know still lives in Norway.

The prancing stallion met his match.

Being offshore on an exploration drilling rig rather than at sea in a ship has one obvious difference -the rig is stationary. Indeed it is held over a fixed location, the subsea well head, by anchor chains and gyroscopically controlled thruster propellers located at each corner of the structure.

During calm summer conditions when the North Sea is like a mirror with the setting sun on the unobstructed horizon it can be surreal.

Despite the constant dull drone of the diesel generators and the clanking of the rotating drill string being slowly driven down by it’s diamond tipped drill bit, through solid rock miles below the surface, looking out over the deep blue sea and sky all around felt like being in space.

A sense of calm and privilege would overcome me.

One hour and twenty minutes flight time from our company base in Stavanger, Norway. I, alone, was responsible for accurately running the wireline logs that would allow the geologist and company men aboard to decide to keep drilling or cement up the hole and seek a better location to explore.

In the mid 1970s no computers.

Analogue graphical results on photographic film would be enough for us to make those expensive decisions.

Every time I developed one of the rolls of exposed log film, which could be over six feet long, I always checked – Developer closest, Wash then Fixer.

Get that order wrong and the log would have to be rerun.

Tens of thousands of dollars worth of extra rig time plus the chance of getting our equipment stuck down hole in the now uncirculated thick drilling fluid and rock chippings.

I always prepared our unit’s little darkroom myself.

Developer tank closest then the Wash tank then furthest away the Fixer tank. D-W-F.

Some engineers left this preparation to their crew with sometimes tragic results.

“But my usual engineer prefers the tanks in this order….”

My work did not follow a regular pattern of 12 hours on and 12 hours off like most crew on the oil rigs.

In the North Sea, due to the deep nature of the drilling, each of our surveys would take about 6 hours. So five surveys would take about 30 hours continuous work. That’s if one or two didn’t have to be repeated due to equipment failures.

Once on board the rig, with all our equipment checked and calibrated, it was a waiting game until told to start surveying or ‘wire line logging’. I have sometimes literally waited weeks before getting the clear sign of the drill pipe being totally retrieved to the surface for us to start work.

Besides eating in the superbly catered canteen with for example cornflakes and strawberries and sirloin steak and chips available 24 hours a day to cover day and nightshift workers what else was there to occupy your time?

Sleep was No1 for my crew, we knew when we started it could be a long time before we saw our beds again.

Cards, table tennis and the inevitable VHS videos of an adult nature.

In the early days fishing was allowed and exciting. The size of some of the cod being hauled up 100 feet to the rig floor was enormous. But what to do with all this tasty catch?

Most Norwegian crew worked two weeks on and three weeks off.

A few Kroner to the mainly Portuguese catering staff (three months on and one months off) secured the bountiful catch frozen in the canteen freezers until the helicopter ride home…

I was travelling back on one Sikorsky 61 helicopter and always sat in the rearmost seat beside the small emergency exit. I watched the other 18 seats fill up with men hauling their two sports holdalls of ‘clothes’ on board.

With the door shut the pilots wound up the turbines and the rotor carved its flashing cone in an attempt to lift us from the helideck.

Tottering about a bit, the chopper wasn’t going anywhere.

Bumping back down on the wheels one of the pilots came back into the cabin and I heard the word ‘Fisk’ amongst his loud Norwegian.

Many kilos of beautiful frozen cod were thrown off the helideck into the sea far below. Probably a strange sight to the off duty men fishing from the lower decks!

Now within maximum takeoff weight (MTOW) we elevated, dipped forward past the static cranes, turned and started the one hour 20 minutes journey back to Stavanger.

Soon after, fishing was banned due to this and also the problems 120 lbs breaking strain, tangled, lost fishing line and hooks were causing the maintenance divers deep down on the oil rig legs.

Before an oil or gas well can produce steel tubing or ‘casing’ is cemented in the entire length of the well, typically 14,000 feet. Within the casing is the drilling fluid or ‘mud’ which is weighted to balance the formation pressure opposite the potential production zone, which is typically 50 to 100ft in depth near the bottom of the well.

Too much weight and the mud will push the oil or gas away from the well, too little and the well could ‘blow out’. Of course this necessary balance disappears with the cemented casing. A solid barrier of cement and steel between the oil or gas and the route to the surface inside the casing.

So how does that oil or gas get out?

Well, that’s where we come in, shooting holes into the formation using shape charges of high explosives typically every 3 inches. So for a 100 ft zone that would be 400 shaped charges. These cleverly create very high speed and molten copper bullets which will go through the steel casing, cement and several inches into the porous oil producing formation, usually limestone or sandstone.

Reduce the drilling mud weight and the well starts to produce. Simple.

There is a more dramatic way to bring the well ‘in’ and that’s to remove all the drilling mud before we blast the holes. Now there is only surface pressure in the casing and typically 5000 pounds per square inch (psi) in the formation!

Extreme but favoured by some company men, including mine.

Our guns have to be lowered through pressure control equipment at the  drill floor to contain the sudden pressure when the shot is taken. This particular well was a gas one with the gas being compressed to a liquid down at the formation level.

After a very early morning start, having positioned the guns accurately opposite the production zone I double checked our equipment. The company man confirmed all their preparations were in order. All the crew was alerted and the rig floor cleared.

I cranked up the electric current, the detonator fired and 400 charges went off nearly 3 miles below the seabed. Our surface pressure control equipment which had been hanging limply to the side instantly shot vertically rigid, 5000 psi gas suddenly all the way to the deck.

If there was any weakness it would manifest now. A poor seal, a weak joint, not enough grease sealing our cable. All quiet.

“Okay, Big Blue, get your kit out of the hole so we can start prepping this well for production.”

After a slow retrieval and dismantling our gear with the well closed off below the drill floor with hydraulic valves I and my crew headed for bed. It was after all about 3 am.

In those days my crew of three and myself shared a windowless accommodation room. Two bunk beds with me preferring ‘up top’ to escape most of the smoke from my nicotine addicted crew. We all crashed out into deep sleep.

The rig alarm bell woke us all up with a start.

Light on – 5 o’clock on my watch, but 5 pm already for a practice drill?  Couldn’t be 5 am that would mean ‘abandon rig’ for real. But we couldn’t have been sleeping for over 12 hours…

My God, this was for real.

Throwing on our overalls, (should we be putting on the clumsy cork life preservers?) we opened our cabin door. The increased din from the alarm made communication only possible by shouting. Everyone in the accommodation block seemed unsure what to do. I went to the airlock double doors and looked outside. A high pressure screaming wail filled the night air and vast clouds of gas drifted downwind from the rig. White limestone mud from the well covered the decks.

A spark would turn the rig into a fireball.

Returning inside I found several men lighting roll ups to calm their nerves.

“Royking forbudt!” I yelled “Blase ut!”

Everyone was reluctant to accept we should be abandoning the platform. The circular enclosed life rafts were the stuff of nightmares with two handles in the roof. One to lower the boat the 100ft down to the water. The other to release the boat from its cable. Get that order wrong…

We also heard rescue helicopters wouldn’t come near us incase they ingested the gas causing its ignition.

I decided to go to the Company office on the top deck to let them know the whereabouts of several guns I had prepared for the next well to be perforated in case of fire. Racing up the metal stairs I knew time was running out.

“Any ideas, Big Blue?” Greeted me as I took in the reality that these bosses had no clue what to do. I conveyed my equipment information and exited.

With my legs like jelly I calmly retraced my steps down towards the accommodation block. What was the point of rushing? Our fate would soon be decided. After all this well could blowout for another 20 years…

And then the screaming stopped. The gas cloud drifted away from the platform leaving clear air behind. The danger was receding moment by moment. Feelings of relief yet anger as if somebody had played a big joke on us. Yet we knew we had a very lucky escape.

A workman down on the lower decks that the well head comes up through saw that the casing had split open. The torrent of gas and limestone formation was blasting horizontally out towards the side of the platform.

Calm as a cucumber he wound closed a manual well valve a deck below the blowout. The well, and us, were saved.

The Irish legend that hearing the female Banshee’s Wail is the precursor to death did not, on this occasion, come to pass.

One summer I was reassigned to the Bergen base to better service an exploration oil rig operating in more northerly waters.

The regular transport was a smaller Bell 212 helicopter which carried a maximum of 10 passengers just behind the two pilots. I liked to sit immediately behind the pilots. Though my seat faced rearwards I could twist around and observe the crew at work. I had and still have a passion for flying.

One warm, sunny afternoon, with a full load, the large sliding passenger door of the Bell 212 was thumped shut by the ground crew man who gave thumbs up. All clear for takeoff.
The old, crusty, military moustached senior pilot in the left seat, the handling pilot was the newbie in the right seat.

I watched him watching his every move.

The turbines slowly fired up with that intoxicating smell of kerosene. The two long, thick blades started chopping the air while the gearbox gave off its always alarming whine just above our heads.

A normal helicopter takeoff involves the handling pilot slowly raising the machine a few feet, checking all controls are operating in the correct sense, tipping forward slightly, gaining speed to achieve transitional lift and then sweeping upwards along the runway. Any engine failure is eased by the speed achieved which can be converted into extra lift to cushion the emergency return ahead onto the runway.

Takeoff from an oil rig helideck is another matter. Barely bigger than the helicopter itself and on an exploration rig pitching up and down with the swell of the sea it’s a matter of clearing up and away – using a towering takeoff.

This towering technique is often practised onshore with a lovely, long, solid runway as a safety blanket…

The newbie, having checked his controls, started raising the heavily laden machine into a towering hover above the runway. 100, 200, 300 feet vertically up. I watched the vibrating gauges and dials on their instrument panel. No red warning lights. Good.

With a sudden forward push on the joystick newbie tipped forward too much. We were nearly pointing down at the tarmac. Moustache got on the controls with him, hauling the joystick back and raising the collective to get more lift.

The accelerating ship shuddered earthwards getting level just above the runway. With excess speed and powerful thumping from the straining two rotor blades we shot forwards and upwards. Stabilizing at 1000 feet we turned offshore. With just the exploration rig helideck landing to look forward to, we settled down for the long trip…

The withering look from the senior pilot at his new charge said it all.

Neither pilot looked back into the passenger area. 10 sets of popped eye balls and gritting teeth would have been too much.

My transfer in 1980 from Stavanger, Norway to Burgos, Spain was at short notice.

Burgos is on a dry plateau in the middle of Spain where work starts at 8am stops for lunch at 1pm until 4pm, then back to work until 8pm. A most unsatisfactory way to get through the working day, especially when the siesta involves generous wine and beer.

It was over one of these prolonged liquid lunches in an out of town restaurant that I learned from my boss of my assignment. A French drilling ship was to explore along the northern coast of Spain all the way from France to north of Portugal. As the city of Gijon, Asturias was halfway along this coast I would be based there, flying out to the drillship by helicopter as required. Two Irish crew would be assigned to me in my ‘one man base’.

All our equipment was already onboard. A quick trip out to test it all and then back to Gijon to await the call to action.

My duty was to call in with the Gijon office based drilling manager every day to hear if we were needed. His staff consisted of Melchior, his radio operator, and Ana his secretary. The manager inhabited an opaque glass fronted, small office. I would chat with Melchior while Ana used the intercom to see if I could have an audience.

By the time I was shown through I had all the information about progress on the drill ship from Melchior and Ana. Usually very little progress. The boss was stressed out with this lack of progress, let alone success.

Exploration drilling is speculative at the best of times and very expensive. Literally throwing money down a hole.

Any time I suggested I could take a few days away to explore northern Spain he reminded me that my company was charging them by the day, every day, so I better be available at short notice and continue to report in. What a drag. Waiting to go to work is more exhausting than actually doing some.

Each time I visited I couldn’t help but notice Ana’s rings and necklaces. Amazing large diamond costume jewellery flashing in the Spanish sunshine. A bit over the top for a humble secretary. I passed no comments.

I enjoyed meeting my only three contacts with the drill ship. Several weeks along we invited Ana and Melchior, not the boss, to come along to a barbecue at our rented bungalow on a farm, just outside Gijon.

Melchior and I were chatting over the grill when Ana arrived in a rather large new Mercedes. Melchior, seeing my jaw drop, casually mentioned that her parents, who owned a chain of hotels in Puerto Rico had built a retirement villa back home near Gijon. They became too frail to return to Spain so Ana was the sole occupant, not counting her six staff.

She had taken the secretarial job to ‘get out of la casa’ and ‘meet some people’.

“So those diamond rings and jewellery are the real deal?”, I queried Melchior.

“Si, Si, John. You are so quick on the uptake. Now, shall we ask whether Ana prefers your sausages or burgers?”

The Dauphin helicopter lifted off from Gijon airport to take us eastwards to the French drill ship “Pelican”.

The pilot amused himself (and us) by zooming at low-level around the headlands and coves along the beautiful Asturias coast. Occasionally, in a secluded cove an embracing couple would be disturbed by the sudden beat of our rotors as we shot past. Bigger beaches found families relaxing and waving at us before we turned off shore towards our waiting work.

Now, out of sight of land, the drill ship loomed on the horizon. I had only worked on dedicated oil rigs so this vessel, with the drilling derreck midships, was a strange sight.

Delicately settling on the helideck the pilot shut down the turbines and braked the rotors to a halt. Relax.

A fellow engineer, back in Norway, was the sole survivor of a crash on a heli deck on a Middle Eastern oil rig a few years back. Coming in too quickly the pilot had reared the craft back to slow down. The tail hit the helideck and it broke off causing the machine to spin onto it’s side – bursting into flames. Mike, beaten back by the flames, fell out of the torn fuselage – to his salvation. No one else got out.

The Pelican was unusual as in the canteen waiters served our meals to table – accompanied by wine. Takes the French.

Our wireline logging programme was proceeding well. As my two trusted operators winched the latest sonde up the well to the drill floor I made my way there to remove the radioactive source from it.

Engineers’ job.

A six-foot remote handling tool is used. Radiation reduces by the square of the distance so four feet from a source rather than 2 feet means a quarter exposure not half et cetera.

Up she came steaming hot from the deep. I signalled the winchman to stop the cable just as the joint below the little door on the side of the sonde appeared above the drill floor. Sliding a cover plate around this joint so that any mishandled radioactive source could not fall back into the well or into the crashing ocean below.

That would not be a good thing.

Quickly I used a long handled socket to unlock the door. There was the little beauty. Innocent looking – but deadly. Rotating the end of the handling tool I secured the claw grip onto the top of the source. I verified the location of the waiting yellow protection barrel lying on it’s side. In one smooth move I withdrew the source from the sonde, turned, lined it up with the hole in the top of the barrel – and my world gave way under me.

As in all accidents everything seems to go into slow motion.

I had not noticed that one of the temporary wooden covers which replace sections of the steel drill floor to facilitate our logging operation had not been put in place.

I had stepped back into the void.

I instinctively put out my arms. My forearms and elbows smashed down on the mud covered drill floor. I was dangling up to my shoulders over the midship chasm which is open all the way, past numerous cables and pipes, to the boiling sea, 100 feet below.

Nothing to grip onto or with – I was slipping to my gruesome end.

Suddenly, grabbed by the lapels of my overalls, I was extracted from my tomb so fast my rig boots nearly fell off. The driller had bolted from his cabin at the edge of the drill floor and saved me.

Exclaiming something in French which probably translated as:

“Where the f*** do you think you’re going, Irish?”

He strolled back to his post wiping his gloved hands together.

Lying crumpled on the gloriously solid, muddy, steel drill floor I looked around. There was the radioactive source still firmly attached to the handling tool.

Thank God.

Securing it in the protection barrel, I took a moment to gather myself. The gesticulations of my operators from the distant winch unit were saying:

“Get that sonde out and laid down and the next one into the well. We don’t want to be here all day.”

Obviously they were having a ciggy while I was on the drill floor and hadn’t noticed anything.

I didn’t disillusion them on my return. Neither did they question me trembling in the warm Spanish sunshine.

On board the Pelican, being served breakfast with the wall mounted speaker conveying music and news in French. My French was sufficient to understand the breaking news. 27th March 1980. An oil rig had totally capsized in the North Sea. Disaster, but there were many oil rigs in the North Sea.

Then the oil rig was named – the Alexander Kielland. My rig.

The one I was based on only three weeks ago just before my transfer to Spain. If I was still in Norway I would have been on it. A chill came over me as I remembered the five-storey high accommodation units stacked on the deck of the exploration rig to turn it into a ‘flotel’ – a floating hotel. Now that was marketing poetic license.

The tall drilling derrek hadn’t even been removed, making the Kielland top heavy and slow to right itself in a big sea. I hated sleeping on it.

Everyone had to cross a bridge with a sliding gangway to get to the actual oil platform where we worked. Okay in a calm sea but with wind and a swell it was scary.

I imagined the crowds of men trying to get into lifeboats or just get outside during the 14 minutes before the Kielland went from a 30 degree list to full capsize. You had to step into a room to let someone else pass by, the corridors were so narrow. Our company had a crew on board (it would’ve been me and my operators) and I knew at least one who was plucked out of the sea.

In total 123 men died that night.

I know I felt survivors’ guilt for weeks after the tragedy. The newspapers covered the aftermath and eventual towing the rig into a fjord to recover the bodies. I was the only one on the French drilling ship directly connected to the awful tragedy. It was just another distant event to all the other men getting on with their work.

I will not describe now any further this disaster, but with present day internet search it is possible to fully research the sacrifice these men made to help give us the energy source we still all depend on. Recent 2019 YouTube video produced by the Norwegian Safety Authority https://youtu.be/KmbLvzPMuRI

Perhaps even though I was still in my 20s I was becoming more aware of my own mortality. Expose yourself endlessly to a dangerous environment and one day it could bite you.

It was time to move on in my engineering career – something more stable and safe.

I thought over the possibilities. I realised there was only one thing to do- it was time to resign.

I telephoned headquarters in London UK, explained the situation and offered my resignation.

“Give us a couple of days and we’ll get back to you.”

I assumed they would be scrambling to line up my replacement but when the call came it was to offer me a post anywhere in the world!

They valued me after all.

It was such a generous offer. USA, Africa, Far East, Australia, we operated anywhere there was oil or gas.

But it was too late – overloaded, overstressed and tired of the unpredictable hours I thanked them for the suggestion but held to my resignation.

“What about running logs for the National Coal Board in the UK until you decide what’s next? No more helicopters, all daytime work. Home every night.”

“Yes okay that sounds a good idea, I’ll go for that.”

“Leave it with us,John. We will be in touch.”

Recounting this episode to a French engineer he decided he wanted a more exotic foreign posting too.

“I shall call and offer my resignation, as you did.”

“Look, it’s not automatic to get a better posting. Make sure you mean what you say.”

He did phone London to resign. When their call came back a few days later it was to request he put his resignation in writing.

As for me- the company base in Walsall, Birmingham, England was soon my new exotic location.