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.