When storms and rigs tangle

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Nowadays there is a mass exodus out of the Gulf when tropical weather threatens, but that wasn’t always so. It took a little while, and a few bad experiences, for oilmen to begin to figure out how to handle hurricanes. They’re still working at it.
Thumbing through back issues of the Monthly Weather Review (of course you’ve kept your subscription current), it appears that 1948, when the offshore industry was in its infancy, was the first time storms and rigs tangled. A small hurricane at the beginning of September did relatively little damage inland, but, according to the storm experts of the day, “the heaviest damage occurred near Grand Isle, when immovable oil-drilling rigs and equipment in the Gulf of Mexico were demolished by heavy seas.”
A year later, in October 1949, 40-foot waves generated by another minor hurricane wrecked a drilling platform off the Texas coast.
Those two early storms demonstrated one of the big problems facing the engineers who designed the first platforms: They knew how hard hurricane winds blew and could design for that, but they could only guess how high hurricane waves might grow. The best guess was that they might get as big as 20 feet, which was way wrong.
For example, the platform on the Freeport rig was only 26 feet above the water, no match for a 40-foot wave. The engineers raised the platforms and made some other design changes, but their rigs were not really tested by a substantial storm until Flossy blew through the Gulf in 1956.
Flossy “battered 40 persons stranded on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico with 75 mile-an-hour winds,” according to a United Press International report. An oil industry study found that the storm “provided the ‘first real hurricane’ test for offshore operators since drilling ... began in 1947.” That storm changed thinking not only about design of the rigs, but also the safety of the people working on them.
As they had in 1948, many men “rode out” Flossy on rig tenders, but this time a Calco tender broke loose with 25 crewmen aboard. They fought high seas from one direction, then floated serenely in the eye of the storm before 100-mile-per-hour winds hit them from the opposite direction. They made it through, but it was touch-and-go for a while.
Until then, offshore operators took a calculated risk that their men would be safe. They were proud that there had been no storm-related deaths over the years, but a post-Flossy study suggested, that the safety record was “not exactly guaranteed by asking workers to ride out storms in clumsy converted LSTs.”
That insight probably saved lives when Hilda brought 150-mile-per-hour winds into the Gulf in October 1964 and did more damage to the offshore industry than any previous storm, and in 1956, when Betsy broke Hilda’s destructive record. By that time, designers were getting better at what they were doing, but still “Maverick,” a state-of-the-art jack-up rig owned by George H.W. Bush’s Zapata Corp., simply disappeared during Betsy. So did a Shell platform near the mouth of the Mississippi River.
This caught the eye of the rig owners, but also of the insurance companies. They demanded a complete review of platform design. That idea was reinforced in 1969 when Camille generated a 70-foot wave in the Gulf and some of the newest and most modern platforms were demolished.
Since then, huge platforms have moved into deeper and deeper waters, meaning that physical damage to them is enormously expensive. Even when there isn’t a lot of damage, the cost of shutting down operations and moving men to safety has grown to be almost as significant as what the winds and waves can do.
Federal regulators estimate, for example, that more than 3,000 of the 4,000 platforms in the Gulf in 2005 were in the direct paths of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. All 3,000 had to stop production for weeks. In addition, Katrina and Rita caused the largest number of destroyed and damaged platforms and pipelines in the history of Gulf of Mexico operations, and also set a record for the highest number of mobile rigs set adrift.
That cost the industry billions of dollars, but there was no loss of life. One lesson has been learned well. Nobody is asked any more to ride out even little storms aboard tenders made on the cheap from surplus World War II LSTs.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.