One of the most important jobs on an oil rig is that of ballast control operator. It is an arguably tedious task in good times. But in bad times, it becomes an extremely challenging exercise of keeping hundreds of men alive and tens of thousands of tonnes of steel, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, upright.
In December 2005, I had the chance the step into a simulator at Transocean’s training centre in Aberdeen, Scotland. The facility trains offshore workers heading to the rough, cold, medium-depth waters of the North Sea, rather than those working on the deep water rigs in the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico. On ultra deep water rigs, such as Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon, which exploded last week in the Gulf of Mexico, the ballast control operator’s job is done by dynamic positioning operators. There are other differences too, not least because the training I got was five years ago. But the scenarios I was put through ran the gamut, from Gulf Coast hurricanes to floating icebergs in Arctic waters.
The trip came shortly after Hurricane Katrina whipped through the rigs and platforms of the Gulf of Mexico and highlights the dangers and pressures of the life and death decisions made on a rig in trouble.
