Heffernan - Rig: an oral history of the Ocean Ranger disaster

RIG

AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE
OCEAN RANGER
DISASTER

Mike Heffernans Rig is a moving elegy for the 84 men who died on the Ocean Ranger and an indictment of the horrendous labour conditions that made the disaster inevitable. Rig is a powerful and important book.

Lisa Moore, author of
Alligator and Open

AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE
OCEAN RANGER
DISASTER

MIKE HEFFERNAN

2009, Mike Heffernan

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing program.

All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any meansgraphic, electronic or mechanicalwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. Any requests for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, One Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.

Layout by Todd Manning

Printed on acid-free paper

Published by
CREATIVE PUBLISHERS
an imprint of CREATIVE BOOK PUBLISHING
a Transcontinental Inc. associated company
P.O. Box 8660, Station A
St. Johns, Newfoundland and Labrador A1B 3T7

Printed in Canada by:
TRANSCONTINENTAL INC.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Heffernan, Mike, 1978
Rig : an oral history of the Ocean Ranger disaster / Mike Heffernan.

ISBN 978-1-897174-41-8

1. Ocean Ranger (Drilling rig). 2. Drilling platforms--Accidents--Newfoundland and Labrador. 3. Offshore oil well drilling--Accidents--Newfoundland and Labrador. 4. Disaster victims--Family relationships--Newfoundland Labrador. 5. Marine accidents--Social aspects--Newfoundland and Labrador. 6. Oral history--Newfoundland and Labrador. I. Title.

TN871.3.H43 2009 363.1196223381909718 C2009-900268-X

To my mother, for keeping his memory alive and the 84 crewmen of the drill rig Ocean Ranger who lost their lives on February 15, 1982.

Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.

William Shakespeare,
Romeo and Juliet

Truth and oil always come to the surface.

Spanish proverb

When it was launched in 1976, the Ocean Ranger was the largest, self-propelled semi-submersible offshore drilling unit in the world. Designed by ODECO Engineers Incorporated for ODECO International of New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Norwegian firm of Fernley & Eger A/S, it was built at the Hiroshima yard of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The rigs maiden voyage in June of that year led from Japan to Alaska. After completing wells in the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, and the Lower Cook Inlet, it left that area in September 1977 and remained idle, moored at various locations on the west coast of North America until August 1979. The rig was then moved east via Cape Horn to drill a well in the Baltimore Canyon off New Jersey, thence to Ireland in May 1980 for another two wells, and finally back across the Atlantic to arrive on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland on November 6, 1980. The Ocean Ranger began drilling in the Hibernia Field on contract between Mobil Oil Canada Limited, the operator for the Hibernia Consortium, and ODECO Drilling of Canada Limited. This contract, signed in February 1980, was initially for thirteen months, but after its expiry a two-year agreement was negotiated and accepted by both parties. Under this contract, ODECO was responsible for the rig and the crew, and Mobil was responsible for the well.

Report One: The Loss of the
Semi-submersible Drill Rig Ocean Ranger and its Crew;
Royal Commission on the Ocean Ranger Maritime Disaster

Eighty-four men are missing and feared lost after one of the worlds biggest oil rigs, the Ocean Ranger, sank today in a howling North Atlantic gale in the Hibernia oil exploration area off Newfoundland.

Mobil Oil Canada, which operated the rig, said bodies were spotted in the water where the rig had been operating, 175 nautical miles east of St. Johns. In an official statement about nine hours after the rig crew was ordered to abandon ship, Mobil said the rig had gone down. It had been battered by overnight winds and was listing badly for hours.

Rescue planes and ships battled poor visibility in rain and snow, as well as icy conditions, in attempts to locate survivors.

If all hands have been lost, it will be the worst marine disaster in decades off the Canadian east coast and by far the worst in a string of ship disasters thiswinter. It would also mark the first multiple loss of life off an oil rig in Eastern Canadian waters.

Mobils brief statement said that Air-Sea Rescue has been unable to locate the Ocean Ranger, but the site has been identified by helicopter through the rigs anchor buoys and wave-rider buoys. This equipment would have been attached to the drill rig itself and would pinpoint the drill site.

Two lifeboats were sighted by search aircraft, one capsized and the other stern-down in the water. A partially inflated liferaft also was seen by search and rescue helicopters that are at the site along with a Buffalo aircraft.

Rig Goes Down; Bodies Sighted
in The Evening Telegram, February 15, 1982

By now the chain of events is a familiar one: a broken porthole window in the ballast control room, seawater on the ballast panel, an untrained crew unable to remedy the problem, a pump system that failed to help right the tilting rig, a failure to ensure watertight compartments in crucial areas, like the anchor chain lockers, and lifeboats that smashed like eggshells in the angry North Atlantic storm. The report confirms that all of this contributed to the loss of the rig and its 84-man crew.

Everyone gets some blame: the Federal and Provincial governments for having inadequate legislative control offshore, the oil companies, Mobil and ODECO, for not providing proper training and life-saving equipment for the rigs crew, and agencies like the US Coast Guard and Search and Rescue. Everyone gets some blame, largely for their lack of foresight that a marine tragedy of this magnitude could ever have occurred.

Marie Wadden, CBC News: Here & Now,
August 13, 1984

War and work cost a lot in Newfoundland. They always have. The Ocean Ranger disaster flashed through the circuits of these common memories connected with them, but with an additional irony. The offshore was not the seal hunt or the ancient fishery. Oil was modern. The rig was a splendour of engineering and technology. The jobs belonged to an industry that might walk us away from dependency and from those old, harsh patterns of hard times and inescapable perils. The offshore was for many Newfoundlanders all hope andfuture, but here we were on February 15, 1982, in the last quarter of the gleaming twentieth century about to veer into a new, more accommodating richer encounter with the sea and its resources, and that terrible bell rang once again. Families hurled into grief, communities lacerated, the whole province once again struggling to absorb an assault too large for anything but time or faith to carry. Twenty-five years on, it is, of course, still being felt