STEVE: Just opened up my book,
started reading the first
sentence in the paragraph when I heard what sounded like
a freight train coming
through my bedroom. I jumped out of the
bed and then there
was a thumping sound that consecutively
got much faster. And with each thump I felt
the rig actually shake. Then there was
an initial boom. The lights went out. MIKE: And there
was a huge explosion. <i> REPORTER (over TV): The
explosion rocked the rig
about 10:00 Central Time,</i> <i> spraying flames
in every direction.</i> STEVE: Well, I saw fire from
derrick leg to derrick leg. PROFESSOR: When you
have oil and gas under
pressure, underground, it erupts upwards. RIG WORKER: It
was extremely loud. It actually started
sounding like a living thing. <i> REPORTER (over TV):
It's the sound of escaping
gas feeding the fireball</i> <i> incinerating the
Deepwater Horizon.</i> RIG WORKER: It's like
you're almost waiting to die. There's people screaming. You feel the heat
from the fire. Scared to death,
I figured this is my
time, I'm gonna die. <i> REPORTER (over TV): 126
people were on board at
the time of the explosion.</i> <i> REPORTER (over TV):
Some jumped more than
75 feet into the ocean.</i> CURRY: The Coast Guard is
pressing its search today
for 11 workers still missing. JAMES: I started to have a bad
feeling when the sun came up. It got very
precarious at that time. Time was running out. (theme music plays). ♪ ♪ FRANK: Deepwater Horizon,
a state of the art,
semi-submersible, dynamically positioned
by satellite drilling rig. And Transocean rents
Deepwater Horizon to
the big oil companies at about a half-million
dollars a day. Now, what the oil companies
use Deepwater Horizon for
is to drill the wells. They come out, they drill in
really challenging environments,
they find the oil, sometimes they set up
the production well, then
they go to the next job. CHRIS: It is different
than any other job. A lot of people when they
first start out they try to
compare it to construction, and it's a completely
different thing. Being away from your family. You know, something happens
you can't just leave, it,
it's all weather permitting. RIG WORKER: These are
our charts, and this is our
tracking of hurricane Ivan. Put a mark on that piece
of paper where we's at. CHRIS: Everybody out
there gets kind of close, I mean as far as
friendships and
stuff like that. RIG WORKER: Are you
gonna do some work now? CHRIS: Really I'm with
them more than I am my
own family most of the time. RIG WORKER: All
right, there's Yancy. CHRIS: It's a little different
than being home because you
know it is dangerous. You never know
when the cables
are gonna break or, or the equipment's
gonna fail. RIG WORKER: This is our subsea
control panel, this is used to
shut down any blowouts that come from the subsea floor. CHRIS: The guys you work
with a lot of the time they do
have your life in their hands. -Busted! -We're workin'! -Yeah. ALWIN: That night was
an amazingly calm night. Very little wind, I
mean it was just ideal. I just noted, uh, mentally
that evening at sunset
how, how pretty it was. I was tending to paperwork. My mate, he noticed quite a
bit of mud falling through
the center of the rig. I stood up to see what,
see what he was talking
about and I turned around and that's when
I noticed the, uh,
mud raining down. So, I looked up
out the side window,
port side of the vessel, and I seen the mud come out. When the mud comes out the top
of the derrick, it's not good. RANDY: My room phone
rang and the person at
the other end of the, uh, line there opened up by
saying, "We have a situation." He said, "We have mud
going to the crown." I was just horrified.
I said, "Well, do
y'all have it shut in?" He said, "Jason is
shutting it in now." And he said, "Randy,
we need your help," and
I'll never forget that. And I said, "I'll
be right there." ALWIN: I contacted the
Horizon bridge on the VHF
radio and advised them of the mud coming
down and asked them
what the situation was. With tension in his voice,
he immediately advised me they was having
trouble with the well. ANDREA: I came
up to the bridge. At that time I felt a jolt. Yancy came over and
turned the CCTV over
to the starboard side, and that's when I
witnessed mud coming
from the starboard side. CHRIS: When I woke up, I
heard, like, a loud buzzing,
Uh, I wasn't sure what it was and I just thought somebody
was cleaning or something
like that outside my room, so I just fell back asleep. MIKE: I heard a hissing
noise, and, and a thump. Within seconds of that
I start hearing beeping. And I'm hearing the
beep, beep, beep, beep,
beep, beep, beep, beep, it's, it's continuous. And I'm thinking to myself,
"Okay, what, what's going on?" And I'm trying to put
all this together in my head
as to the thump, the hissing, and now the beeps. I hear the engines start
to rev, normal operating
RPMs to way above what I'd ever heard
it run before. And it's continuously,
steadily rising. And I knew then that we
were having a problem. As I start to push back from
my desk the computer monitor
exploded in front of me. All the lights
in my shop popped. The light bulbs themselves
physically popped. Now I know we're in trouble. I reached down to grab my door,
and at the, simultaneously of
grabbing the handle, the engine goes to
a level that is higher
than I can even describe it. It's spinning so fast that... it just, it stopped spinning, (explosion) and there was a huge explosion. That explosion blew the fire
door that was between me and
those spaces off the hinges. RANDY: It blew me
probably 20 feet against a
bulkhead, against a wall. And I remember then
that the lights went out. Power went out, I could
hear everything deathly calm. CHRIS: Then I started
trying to find my
clothes in the dark. I grabbed my
boots, put them on. MIKE: I couldn't see
anything, I couldn't
breathe, there was no oxygen. I crawled across
the floor, found the
opening, made my way out. Had a small pen flashlight
in my pocket that I put in
my mouth to try to, to see, I still couldn't see,
I, I didn't know why
I couldn't see, I just couldn't see anything. I made it to the
next door by feel. And as I reached the
next door I reached up and
grabbed the handle for it, it then exploded. RANDY: My next
recollection was... that I had a lot of
debris on top of me. I tried two different
times to get up. But whatever it was, it
was a substantial weight. And I told myself, "Either
you get up, or you're
gonna lay here and die." MIKE: Crawling through the
ECR, my arm wouldn't work,
my left leg wouldn't work, I couldn't breathe,
I couldn't see. I knew I had to get
outside to some fresh air. I crawl across the bodies
of, of at least two men. I don't know their condition. I'm trying to get them
to respond, they're not
responding, I assume they're dead and keep moving
because I know that I'm in
no condition to help them. I can barely help
myself at this point. So, I was tripping
and falling, trying to make my way to
the outside watertight door. I get about halfway across it
and I can actually start to
see light, a dim light so I, I'm, assume I'm headed
in the right direction and I
keep going towards the light. Eventually I make
my way outside. I've got my bearings,
got my eyes cleaned out. There was no walkway,
there were no handrails, and
there was no stairwell left. The wall, the handrail,
the walkway, all those
things were missing. They were completely blown
off the back of the rig. One more step and I
would've went in the water. RANDY: So I open my
cabin door, right leg
was hung on something, I don't know what still,
but I pulled it as hard as
I could and it came free. I attempted to stand up. That was the wrong thing
to do because I immediately
stuck my head into smoke. And with the, uh, training
that we've all had on the
rig I knew to stay low. I got on my hands and knees,
so I was totally disoriented. I'd lost orientation on
which way the doorway was. And I remember just
sitting there just trying
to think which way is it. And then I felt something
that felt like air, and
I said to myself, that's the direction I
need to go, that leads out. So, I had to crawl very
slowly because that end of the
living quarters was pretty well demolished, debris everywhere,
but I made it to the doorway, and what I thought was
air was actually methane. And I could actually feel
like droplets, it was moist
on the side of my face. I continued to crawl
down the hallway slowly and I put my hand on a body
and it was Wyman Wheeler. MIKE: There's two lifeboats
there on that lifeboat deck. And from what I saw, what
I heard, and what I felt, I
seriously considered launching a lifeboat by myself because
I knew that something really,
really bad had happened and that it wasn't gonna
get any better any time soon. I had an inclination
that this was way worse
than anyone could expect. And I thought about it for
a second and I remembered
that I had, you know, I have responsibilities. Yeah, I have a emergency
station to go to. The problem was my emergency
station no longer existed. So, I made a decision
to put my lifejacket on right
there, and try to make my way to the bridge,
which would be my
secondary muster station. I determined if I
couldn't make it there,
I was gonna come back and launch the
lifeboat by myself. CHRIS: I'm on the fire
team, so I was trying to
get to my, my fire station. My main fire station is the
one in the back of the rig. And I could see
it and I could see
that nobody was there, and there was a bunch
of smoke around it. I turned around to go back
to the front of the rig. And that's when I saw
the flames on the derrick. And soon as I saw that
I knew there was no way
we were gonna put it out. We were just gonna get
off of there, I was sure. That's when my
panic set in. I mean, that scared me
absolutely to death, right then. I've never had a
feeling like that. I mean, the lifeboats were
probably gone, and I didn't
know, I hadn't seen anybody until this point, I didn't
know if I was the only person
still on the rig or what. Uh, that's all I kept thinking
was, well, we're all dead. DUSTIN: I was
relieved for the night. On the way home, I
received a phone call. They said, "We just
had an oil rig explosion,
you need to come back here as soon as possible,
five minutes ago." So I said, "Okay. I'm
turning around right now." I said, "Just
throw my, all my
gear in the helicopter and I'll change en route." Just ran right to the
helicopter, hopped in,
and off we went. JOHN: As soon as we took
off I, I put my night vision
goggles down and I could see this immense glow
on the horizon. It looked like I was
flying to New York City. The glow was that
immense and normally you,
you might see a faint horizon or you see no horizon at all. And, uh, I, I told my crew,
I said, "You guys, you see
that light on the horizon? That's where we're going to." It sunk in right there
that this is, this is real,
this is the real thing. We don't know what
we're gonna see when we get
there but we know it's big. RANDY: The next thing
I recollect is I saw,
like, a beam of light, like a flashlight bouncing, and
I saw that to be Stan Carden. And about that time,
Jimmy Harrel came out
of his room. He told me he was in
the shower when the
explosion happened. He had managed to find a pair
of coveralls and put those on. And I said, "Jimmy, I've
got Wyman down right here." So, we asked him to go to
the bow and get a stretcher. We continued to remove
this debris off of Wyman. I helped him up and
I was gonna try to
help walk him out, thinking that that
might be quicker. He made a couple of
steps with his arm around my
shoulder and he was in pain, and then he said, "Set
me down, set me down." So we set him back
down and he said, "Y'all go on and save yourself."
You know, and I said, "No,
we're not gonna leave you, we're not gonna
leave you in here." MIKE: Once I got
on the bridge, I
reported immediately to the captain that we
have no propulsion, we
have no power, and I said, "You need to understand,
engine number three,
for sure, has blown up. We need to abandon ship now." STEVE: I turned around, I
didn't recognize who it was at the time because he
was covered in blood. It was Mike Williams,
Chief ET. And I asked him,
"What do you mean gone?" He said, "They've blown up. They're all gone,
they've blown up." Upon looking at the screen
there was still nothing. No engines starting, no
thrusters running, nothing. We were still a dead ship. Chris Pleasant, the
subsea supervisor was
standing at the BOP panel. I hollered out
to Chris Pleasant,
"Have you EDS'd?" He said he needed
permission to EDS. Somebody on the bridge
hollered out he cannot EDS
without the OIM's approval. I hollered out, "Can we EDS?" He said, "Yes, EDS, EDS." When
I turned back to Chris, he was
in the panel pushing a button. PLEASANT: You know, I hit the
EDS and I seen it go to close
and I was looking through that panel trying to see
what was going on. After I saw that I had no
hydraulics, I had no pressure
in the system that allowed those functions to work, I
knew it was time to leave. STEVE: I hollered to Chris,
"I need confirmation that
we have EDS'd." He said yes and he pointed
at a light in the panel. PLEASANT: Steve Bertone,
then he turns away and he said, "I'm going to the emergency
generator room," like that. And I said, "You
need me to go with you."
And he didn't say nothing, but I looked out that door
and I said, "I ain't going." STEVE: When I left the
bridge, I went to close
the watertight door and Mike Williams
pushed the door back
and he, he said, "You're not going alone, chief."
I said, "Well, come on." Paul
Meinhardt, the motorman, also fell in line
and we ran towards the,
uh, standby generator. As I was running I looked up
at the derrick, and I could
see nothing but flames, because I could see no
equipment, whatsoever. It was solid flames. When we walked into the, uh,
standby generator room, my
thinking at that point was, what remaining fuel would be
in the riser would burn away, and we were gonna need
power as well as fire pumps. I hit the start button. There was absolutely no
turning over of the engine. At that point I said,
"That's it, let's go
back to the bridge. Uh, it's not gonna crank." MIKE: On our way back to
the bridge is when I noticed, I believe it was lifeboat
number one, had descended,
and was motoring away. They had descended and
disconnected from the rig. CHRIS: We went down to
the life capsule deck. Everybody was panicking. Some people were
trying to stay calm and
do what needed to be done, like the Chief Mate, Captain. So, they were trying to get
the stuff handled the
way they were trained and knew how to handle it. Some people
were jumping off, some people were holding
people back from jumping
off, they wouldn't let 'em. And then other people
were screaming we've
got to get out of here, we've got to get out of here. So I mean, there was a
certain level of panic
that everybody was in that made things a
little more difficult
in getting off the rig. I got in the number two
lifeboat, everybody was in
there hollering and screaming, you know, "We gotta
go. The derrick is
fixin' to fall on us." They finally got
everybody in there
and shut the door. Then they released
the lifeboat to,
down to the water. MIKE: As we were making
our way down the ladder
way to get to the lifeboats, lifeboat number two descended. So now there
are, the two forward
lifeboats are both gone, they're both unavailable. Once they go down
there's no coming back up
because we had no power. There was several minor
explosions occurring,
things are falling, you can hear stuff popping. RANDY: It seemed like
an eternity, they came
back with a stretcher. We were able to get
Wyman on that stretcher. When we got outside
of the living quarters the first thing
I observed was both of the main lifeboats
had already been deployed
and had left. I also looked to my left
and I saw Captain Curt
and a few of his crew starting to deploy a life raft. And we continued
down the walkway until we got to that life
raft and we were able to catch the head part of the
stretcher and assist getting
Wyman into the life raft, and I think we actually
fell, trying to, you know,
get him into the life raft. But the main thing
is Wyman was there. You know, he didn't
get left behind. STEVE: There was a lot
of explosions still going
on and immense heat. All the flames and heat from
the rig floor were coming down
the forward part of that deck as well as all the flames and
the heat from under the rig
that were meeting I guess in like a vortex or something
right there at the life raft. But I can remember feeling the
intense heat on my knees, and
I also heard screaming "We're gonna die,
we're gonna die." And I honestly
thought that we were
gonna cook right there. MIKE: I wasn't sure that the
life raft was gonna survive. There was a crowd of
folks there trying to get
into this small opening. There was so much heat coming
up I thought for sure the life
raft was gonna pop or melt and the people inside
were gonna cook. <i> REPORTER (over TV): Moments
after the rig first exploded
you can hear the roar.</i> <i> It's the sound of escaping
gas, feeding the fireball,</i> <i> incinerating the
Deepwater Horizon.</i> ALWIN: We was
approximately
100 meters out. I gave the command to
launch shortly after we've seen the first three guys
jump off the rig. AL: I knew this was big,
I've never seen flames that
gigantic before, that huge. This was like seeing
hell on earth. STEVE: The next thing I knew
the life raft was descending. When we touched the water
I heard somebody holler
out, where are the paddles? I jumped out of the life
raft, Chad Murray jumped
out, was right behind me, and grabbed hold of the
rope on the side of that
life raft and started swimming, trying to pull
the life raft away. I was swimming on my side,
looking up at the rig. I would say 25, 30 feet above
me there was a tremendous
amount of smoke billowing out from under the rig. YANCY: I asked the
captain what about us. And he said I don't know about
you, but I'm going to jump. So he actually jumped first. I waited for a minute
because when I looked over the life raft was basically
right underneath me. So I waited for a minute so it could actually
move out the way and, uh, I jumped. When I resurfaced
I had the life raft was like 10 or 15
feet away from me. So I swam to the
life raft, and I seen the captain and a few
other guys that were on
the outside of the life raft. STEVE: As we're swimming
trying to pull this life raft
away from the rig I got to a point where I could
see the helideck. I witnessed an individual
running at full speed across
the helideck, when he jumped off the end of the helideck
he was still running. Just before he splashed
into the water he was
actually looking over at us. MIKE: In our training,
they teach you to reach your
hand around your life jacket, take one step off,
look straight ahead,
cross your legs, and fall. The problem with that is
there's now a life raft
down there at the bottom. Maybe 90 feet, 100 feet. It's a long ways. So I took off
running and I jumped. I cleared the life raft
by a pretty good ways. Once I hit the water,
when I came back up I
couldn't see anything again, because now I've got
a new set of problems. Oil, hydraulic fluid,
gasoline, diesel, whatever
it is that's floating on the water is now burning
my entire body. I'm now covered
in this sludge. I don't know what it is,
it's burning I can't
hardly breathe, but I could feel
the heat from the fire
underneath the vessel. At that point I started back
stroking with the one arm
and one leg that would work. Until I remember
feeling no pain, I
remember feeling no heat, and thinking that
that was it, I had died. Sometime later, something
apparently woke me back up, a pop, or explosion,
something. And I remember feeling
the heat again, starting
to feel the pain come back, thinking I've gotta swim,
I've gotta swim and I
started swimming again. Then I heard something
in the distance, I heard
"Over here, over here." I was thinking to myself what
in the world can that be? Whatever it is I'm gonna go to
it and just started swimming as hard as I could
to get to it. And then I felt
something start lifting
me out of the water. A small orange rescue craft
had grabbed me, and flipped
me over into the boat. At that point the guy said
there's a raft in the water. We proceeded to go
towards the rig. Now we're close enough that I
can feel the heat, I'm starting
to feel the heat again, and I see the life
raft and it's literally
still under the rig. And I can see
people outside of it. We get up to 'em, throw 'em
a line, they get tied on. YANCY: Then the fast
rescue boat pulled us
to the starboard side of the Bankston. The Bankston crew was
throwing down Jacobs
ladders to the lifeboats, to where people inside
can get up on deck. I seen Carl, the rig operator,
he was taking muster. I asked him how many
people we were missing. Come to find out it was 11. JOHN: We're flying as close
as a half mile, to a quarter
of a mile, circling the rig, looking for
survivors in the water. We smelled the smoke, we
smelled the oil, the fumes. We felt the heat
through the cockpit, we
felt it in the helicopters, you know, through
the windshields. It really hits home and
strikes you that hey, we're
flying at 300 feet and the flames are higher than we
are, probably up to 500 feet. AL: I was looking into
this burning hulk of metal
and it was like looking into the face of the devil. It was, it was
like a living thing. YANCY: They already had
boats that were putting
water on the rig. I don't know where
they came from. They came out the wood work.
They were there in no time. The Coast Guard helicopters
were flying around. AL: We were hovering
about half a mile to the
East of the burning rig. Initially we got the word
that we were to pick up a
critically wounded victim so then we lowered our rescue
swimmer to the Damon Bankston. COAST GUARD:
Moving out swimmer,
moving out swimmer. JOHN: The rescue swimmer,
he's basically our paramedic,
he's our assigned EMT, so he's the guy who
knows the first aid. COAST GUARD: Roger, hold
position I'mma bring him down.
Swimmer's just below the rail. Halfway down, 40 right, 40. Okay swimmers on deck. STEVE: When the
Coast Guard arrived,
the rescue swimmer, he came in and he asked
who's the critical. Buddy Trahan was the worst. And at that point they
brought in a gurney. I stepped to the backside
of the bed to assist in
getting Buddy on the gurney. As I rolled him he was
screaming and hollering that
his leg was hurt real bad, he had a severe
laceration on his leg. He also had a twisted
and mangled lower-calf,
his fingernails were gone, he had a hole in
the side of his neck. And I looked back and
Buddy's back was burnt
from belt to head. Once we got him on the
gurney they took him out. DUSTIN: We went to carry him
out after we strapped him in
and the supply boat was full of big containers, so you
really had no clear path
to the back of the boat. So we were like, "How are
we gonna get this guy out?" We actually had to lift him
up over these containers and got him hoisted
up to the helicopter. AL: It's hard when you're
departing a scene like that, to know that there's
still 11 people missing. Our mission was to
return to base with a
critically injured victim, but it still felt bad
to leave the scene. But that was the
task we were given. JESSICA: It began with
a powerful explosion, a
column of flames shooting into the night sky over
the Gulf of Mexico. The oil rig still burning
and could topple into
the water at any moment. MARY: The source of that
fire is predominantly coming
from the well head itself. It's crude oil that is
leeching from this wellhead. And as long as that crude
is leeching we're gonna
continue to see that fire. YANCY: After the helicopter
left, and it was like,
with the wounded, it was like everything just
kind of like fell in place. Finally able to
start calming down. CHRIS: And we sat there
pretty much watched the rig
burn for six or seven hours. That's something
I'll never forget. The images just burned in
my head, I'll never forget. Knowing that, after we took the
muster and stuff we figured out, you know, we were
missing 11 guys. And, most of us, we assumed
they were, they were on the
rig, we didn't know, and that was pretty
tough not knowing. DUSTIN: I went home that
morning and turned on the
news and then you find out well there's still
11 people missing,
it's like "Oh." It's like, "Man, I
hope they made, I just
hope they made it off." CURRY: In the news, the Coast
Guard is pressing its search
today for 11 workers still missing on a burning oil
drilling platform off
the coast of Louisiana. Fireboats are struggling
to put out flames triggered by the explosion
on Tuesday night. CHRIS: When we left
from the rig, we rode
for probably a good four hours to
another platform. The guys on that platform,
they sent down a bag with some
cigarettes, and some snuff, and stuff, and some clothes. JEFFREY: The survivors who
were not injured are now
making their way to shore. They will be arriving here
in port later this evening. The search for the
missing will continue
through the night. RON: A pair of Coast Guard
cutters stayed out in the
gulf all night looking for these missing workers. They will be joined
a little bit later by
one of these choppers, which is set to leave
at first light here. And as you can imagine,
the longer this search
and rescue mission goes without
resolution, the more
fear and concern grow. CHRIS: When we got off the
boat they brought around three
or four pre-paid cellphones. They were passing those around,
everybody was passing them,
talking to their families for about 30 seconds
just letting them know
they were off the boat. That was the first time
I got to talk to my wife. From there we rode
to New Orleans to
the Crowne Plaza. We went in the back of
it, because they told us there
were so many lawyers and media out front, they were making
us go in the back, and all
our families were waiting, and that was the first
time I got to see my wife. And she ran up smiling, and
then by the time she got her
arms around my neck she just burst out in tears,
both of us did. JAMES: We were on
site about midnight, so we were only on site in a
relatively short period of time. I started to have a bad
feeling when the sun came
up and we could get a more accurate assessment of
the extent of the damage
onboard the oil rig. You could see the derrick
leaning over on the crane
and you could actually see what used to be
incredibly stout steel
sagging like a clothesline. It got very precarious
at that time and we were
all very, very concerned that time was running out. But at around 10:00, we
could see the starboard corner starting to slowly
drop into the sea. The loud groans
coming out of this
vessel, as she broke up, was becoming much
more pronounced. We started to back off, a thick sheen of
brown emulsified oil
still on fire behind. I think unfortunately
for us we were fighting a
losing battle from the start. But you still feel
a tremendous loss, you still feel a
tremendous sense
of failure. My thinking
immediately shifted to that of the
people onboard. You're there to help
the loved ones of those
people that may be missing come to some
sense of closure. It was quite a silence on
the bridge, and I know we were
all thinking the same thing. You feel the loss, you feel
the failure, you feel it deep. And it settles in more and
more as time goes by and
as the adrenaline subsides. You know, I'm still going
over things in my mind. <i> REPORTER (over TV): There
were 126 crewmembers on
board the rig.</i> <i> Eleven of the workers
never had a chance, they
were killed in the explosion,</i> <i> their bodies never recovered.</i> KEITH: These guys on the
Deepwater are the fighter
pilots of our profession. They are the rock stars. Only the very best of the
best work on the Deepwater. And they don't
accept anything less. RANDY: The Horizon
was an exemplary rig
with excellent personnel. They paid the ultimate price,
they gave their life, to try
to minimize the damage that was done to people,
property, environment. And I hope at least that
message is clear, that they
paid the ultimate price. Captioned by Cotter
Captioning Services.
