Hubris, Defined, At Sea: NYT Magazine On Shell And The Disastrous Voyage Of The Kulluk
Long, but fascinating.
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The troubles soon began. The Noble Discoverer, not the Kulluk, was at first the problem ship. On July 14, a storm brought 30-knot winds, which were nothing unusual for the Aleutians or crew members accustomed to Alaska but enough to cause the Noble Discoverer to drag its anchor and be blown south, where it grounded or appeared to ground on a sandy beach near town. More than a dozen people watched from shore as tugboats pulled the Discoverer back into the bay. Some of them posted snapshots on Facebook. The biggest danger was political. For drilling opponents following Shell’s every move — Greenpeace had dispatched a ship of its own to Alaska — a grounding incident would provide another chance to declare the company unfit to operate in the Arctic. Shell insisted, in a statement emailed to reporters, that there had been no grounding and that the drill ship had instead “drifted toward land and stopped very near the coast.” The Coast Guard sent divers to inspect the hull. They found no damage and cleared the ship to sail.
July turned to August and August to September. The ice in the Alaskan Arctic had melted weeks late — at least by the new standards of the warming north — and drilling had not begun. The hangup was the company’s new Arctic containment dome and the spill barge another contractor, Superior Energy Services, was building to carry the dome north. The dome and the barge weren’t ready, and without them, Shell would not be permitted to go for oil. Its plan to drill five exploratory wells — three in the Chukchi Sea, two in the Beaufort — began to crumble. In September, in a sea trial in the calm waters of Puget Sound, a faulty electrical connection caused the $400 million containment dome to shoot to the surface without warning, where it “breached like a whale,” a federal inspector wrote, before sinking 120 feet. When it was pulled to the surface again, it had been “crushed like a beer can.”
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The Discoverer departed the Chukchi for Dutch Harbor on Oct. 28. The voyage was uneventful, but two weeks later, in port, its revamped exhaust system emitted a loud blast that port officials felt hundreds of yards away. They called 911. The ship’s crew extinguished a small blaze minutes before the police and fire departments arrived. In an email to the local radio station, a Shell spokesman denied that the explosion had been anything other than “a common backfire.”
Ten days after that, near Seward, Alaska, the Discoverer’s propeller shaft began vibrating so badly that the crew shut down its engines and had it towed to port. Coast Guard safety inspectors boarded for a routine visit and found 16 violations, many of them serious. “As a result of backfires,” they wrote, “main propulsion machinery and all auxiliary machinery essential to the propulsion and safety of the unit may be compromised.” They temporarily impounded the ship so that it couldn’t leave port and called in a Coast Guard criminal unit from outside Alaska. Noble Drilling, Shell’s subcontractor, rushed to provide lawyers for the crew. When the criminal team arrived, the crew refused to talk. The case was passed on to the Justice Department. Eventually, with the help of a confidential informant, investigators would learn of the ship’s multiple unreported engine failures and makeshift hose-and-barrel system for bilge water that discharged oily waste into the ocean. (Two years later, on Dec. 19, 2014, Noble Drilling pleaded guilty to eight felony charges and agreed to $12.2 million in fines and in community-service payments.)
While the Discoverer was making its way south from the Chukchi, the Kulluk was still sitting in the Beaufort Sea. It couldn’t leave until it discharged most of its 83-person drilling crew. To shuttle workers to and from the Beaufort shore, Shell had hired PHI, a helicopter company that it had long used in the Gulf of Mexico. As the weather worsened, the helicopters were often unable to make the trip. They had no de-icing equipment, and their pilots were unfamiliar with the Arctic. Adding to the delays, rough seas made it difficult to refuel the Kulluk’s tugboat, the Aiviq. The rig remained at 70 degrees north well into November. Snowdrifts piled up on its deck, and ice the consistency of a Slurpee formed in the water around it.
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And we haven't even gotten to the grounding - the main event - yet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/magazine/the-wreck-of-the-kulluk.html
