Countdown to Disaster

21 Days Before the Blast

From the pasturelands outside a little Mississippi town called Liberty, Shane Roshto steers his pickup truck toward Houma, Louisiana, a bit more than four hours to the south. He'll sleep in his truck tonight, Tuesday, March 30, in the parking lot at the heliport off Highway 24, and get up at dawn to meet the chopper that will fly him out to the Deepwater Horizon, a drilling rig floating over a mile-deep canyon in the Gulf of Mexico.

Shane has been working on the Horizon for almost four years now, ever since he got Natalie pregnant. He fell in love with her the night they met, just before Christmas break in '04, when they were juniors in high school, and Natalie fell in love with him, too. Her daddy just about died when he found out she was pregnant, but Shane didn't flinch. "Well," he told Natalie, "I guess it's about time I grew up." He quit his classes at the community college and signed up with Transocean, a Swiss company that drills oil and gas wells in waters all over the planet.

His first hitch on the Horizon was in August '06, two weeks as a seaman, bottom of the pecking order. He marched up to the drilling manager, stuck out his hand, and said, "I'm Shane Roshto, and I've got my eye on one of your jobs." Ballsy. He left for two weeks—Transocean worked its crews fourteen days on and fourteen off back then—and returned as a roustabout, a common laborer but better than a seaman. He made roughneck a year later, and he figured another two, maybe three hitches, he might make the subsea crew, maintaining the blowout preventer and the pipes that run to the ocean floor, as well as almost everything else below the waterline. Backbreaking work, but it paid better than roughneck, and roughnecking wore a man out just as fast. "The oil field gave me life," he'd tease Natalie sometimes, "but it's gonna take my life, too."

And Shane's got a good life now. He married Natalie when she was eight months pregnant, in December '06, and their boy, Blaine, turned 3 back in February. His job puts a roof over their heads and food on the table and, when he pulled an extra two weeks at sea last year, a pile of presents under the Christmas tree. And it's good work, proud work. Shane calls himself oil-field trash, but he smiles when he says it. The rig he's on is a wondrous machine, a semisubmersible drill poking holes through seabeds at unfathomable depths, tapping oil and gas deposits thought to be unreachable only a few years back. When the Horizon hit a world record, 35,050 feet, in the Gulf last September, Natalie could practically see his head swell. The only downside is the schedule—all those long stretches away from his wife and son, especially after Transocean switched to three-week rotations last fall. "This paycheck better bring me home," he'd tell his buddies on the rig. And it always did.

At 6 a.m. on the last day of March, the helicopter ferries Shane out to sea. His shift on the drill floor will start at midnight and last until noon, and he'll work twelve hours every day until his hitch is up.

14 Days

Freddy Demolle is in his boat, a twentytwo-footer tethered to one of the platforms not too far out into the Gulf, his face shaded by a ball cap that has jesus is my boss stitched across the front. He's 63 years old, and he's been fishing or shrimping or crabbing for a living his whole life. Now he's after sheepshead, which have come into the shallower waters to spawn, and they're schooling around the rig pilings, feeding on barnacles and the shrimp Freddy's stabbing onto the hook of his cane pole. He's pulling them out as fast as he can set bait. If they keep biting, he'll motor back to Venice with a ton of fish, maybe more, and he'll sell them at the dock for forty cents a pound. If the fish quit taking his shrimp, Freddy will untie his boat and move to another rig and then another until he finds one where the sheepshead are biting. There are upwards of 4,000 platforms in the Gulf, some abandoned and most way farther out than Freddy's willing to take his little boat, and each is like a little reef that draws crustaceans and baitfish that draw the bigger fish. Oil rigs make for good fishing, and it's been that way ever since Freddy can remember.