Pacific 41
By Stephen Brandon
Copyright by Stephen Brandon
Cover art by Wendi Lemmons
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Author's Note
This short story is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, incidents, and dialogue are from the authors imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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They knew it was coming, but a Class III this far north! Winds were already above 90 knots with gust up to 120 and the eye of the hurricane was still 85 miles southwest of the rig.
Matt, the radar operator, sat staring into space. “Dan, I remember a movie I saw as a kid, it was called The Perfect Storm, and I think it's cousin will smash us.”
Then Matt called out with mild fear in his voice, “There is a ship headed this way! It's not responding to radio.”
Ten minutes later Dan, the rig boss, sounded the fire alarm, he knew that it would get faster reaction than the general alarm. He followed up with an announcement, “All personnel report to your emergency evacuation points.”
Twenty minutes later the ship hit the rig and ruptured the main underwater hull. The floater platform immediately started to take on water.
Dan keyed his computer and hit all the emergency shutdowns. Four thousand nine hundred and sixty three feet down, the blowout protectors reacted flawlessly. Their job was to stop the flow of oil coming out of the wells. As all the valves slammed shut at once, the immediate pressure surge cracked the casing of Pacific 41.
Crude started spurting into the Pacific.
Discovery of the field was a accident. The survey crew was off site because their GPS was out of calibration. The robot survey subs come back up with good data plus tar balls. It only took six months to locate the right area and rerun the survey. All the geologist claimed there could be no oil at the edge of a subduction zone, but there was.
The second survey estimated the field at a minimum of 110 Billion Barrels. They'd been pumping for 2 years and the well head pressure was still 7308 PSI above water pressure almost a mile down. There were 8 wells feeding oil to the central manifold and then up to the holding tanks. The last full tanker left less than 18 hours ago and another wasn't due for 3 days. With the flow rate limited to 285,000 barrels a day they could fill a tanker easily in a week.
As the last crew entered the evacuation boat they noticed a sheen beginning to form on the waves and the gas alarms started going off. The Dan ordered them to cast off, but not to start the motors until they were well away from the listing rig.
In the last covered boat men grabbed the 8 emergency oars and after extending them started to row. Dan got on the short wave radio and called the other nine evacuation boats and informed them of the situation. As he finished, without thinking, he flipped the power switch, and realized in an instant his mistake as he saw the radio explode in a fireball.
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Six minutes later NORAD went on alert when two separate satellites picked up a unusual heat source one hundred nautical miles off the coast of Oregon. The scrambled jets reported the ocean on fire. A coast guard cutter out of Seattle was diverted west when a faint distress signal was picked up. They found two emergency boats from the East Pacific deep-water rig. Eighteen men out of one hundred and nineteen survived.
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Tuesday the Seattle papers had a heyday of reports about the disaster. Unfortunately, a news chopper went down when it flew to close to the fire. The fire was smaller but was still burning Thursday.
The first robot subs showed one of the blowout protectors not even connected to the pipe spewing oil into the water. The other seven were good. Immediately the call went out for the containment pipe sections to be shipped, however there were only forty-two thirty foot sections on the west coast. These twenty food diameter pipe sections were designed to stack while quick-set was poured outside and inside of the pipe.
The geological report showed between seventy and one hundred and twenty feet of sediment. The oil executives were afraid that if they put out the fire the gas would build up to explosive levels. Tuesday afternoon five sections were bolted together and lowered from the transport ship. It took five of the small subs to guide the pipe at an angle toward the spewing well head pipe. As they neared the wellhead they encountered a current that was powerful enough to raise the pipe they were guiding. After six tries they were finally successful in positioning the pipe vertically over the wellhead. Then they started lowering it.
The seventy foot mark disappeared into the sediment, then the hundred foot mark, then the one hundred twenty foot mark, and then the one hundred forty foot mark. The five subs had trouble keeping station and preventing the last ten feet of pipe from sinking into the silt.
There was only one sub in reserve and it could not support and guide a section of pipe alone. Quickly five guide rods were brought down and the reserve sub placed them with their floats. They were each one hundred feet long. The pipe was lowered and disappeared into the silt along with almost half the length of the guide rods.
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Thursday the subs guided down one more section of pipe and guided it down the guide rods. Then another section and it settled with its lip above the sediment at an angle. They knew the pipes hadn't seated properly, yet they could not re-align them.
That afternoon the first tarballs started washing up on the Oregon and California beaches. Then the newspapers had disaster headlines rivaling the Gulf leak two decades before.
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Friday the giant suction pumps arrived. It took twenty hours to remove the first sixty feet of sediment from the pipe, not that it did much good. The camera they lowered into the pipe showed a rock between section six and seven.
The decision was made to put quick-set in first to stabilize the column of pipes, before any excavation was done to remove the rock. After two days of pumping quick-set Albert called for a halt, and another sonic survey of the area.
The survey showed that the well casing was at the narrow end of a sharply sloping valley and the pipe was right up against one the rock walls. That had prevented the pipe from falling over or seating.
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It took two weeks to build a quick-set damn across the underwater valley where it started to narrow a thousand yards down from the well casing. The powerful pumps on the cargo ship finished blowing the silt from around the pipe and they pumped the rest of the quick-set after getting the pipe seated. In shallow water the quick-set would form a cone around the base of the pipe and then up the sides. If the well was a good producer with a good future the pipe would be built up to the surface and a pumping station installed on top. There was already one in the shallow waters of the Gulf and two in the North Sea.
The manufacturer of the pipe sections guaranteed delivery of a section every other day. In the meantime they shipped a cap section that more pipe sections could be place on. Before installing the cap more quick-set was pumped into the pipe, almost to the top of the original wellhead. No one had ever attempted to built an artificial island in a mile deep section of the ocean. The cap was installed and they pumped heated seawater from the surface down to keep methane hydrates from forming inside the pipe and blocking the oil flow. Thirty seven hundred feet down, the cap separated the gas from the oil and the oil was drawn to the surface and loaded on tankers. For now, the gas was bled into the ocean.
The well complex had been producing enough oil to fill a tanker every week, now the single well produced enough that it took 38 days.
Albert, the executive in charge, called for a complete underwate
r sonic survey of the other seven wellheads and a complete map of the silt depth around each.
As he flew back to the east coast he was figuring how he was going to put his idea over to the board. Just controlling the flow from the one well had cost his division thirty-seven million in a mere 48 days. If they approved his plan he would need a half billion to bring all the wellheads to the surface and build a permanent installation. Four deep containment pipes coming to the surface with cross-bracing would be the foundation. More wells could even be drilled.
The only thing that really surprised him about the surveys were the large hydrate deposits. If only there was someway economic way to tap them.
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Notes from the Author
I thank-you for taking the time to read my short stories and e-books.
I've loved westerns and science fiction since I picked up my first book at the public library.
I've been writing on my computer for years. I never planned on any of my stories being published, just to be read by myself, family, and friends. The base journal is on forty spreadsheets with links to about a thousand files of short one day paragraphs plus other stories.
Now my nephew George is published and he encouraged me to publish also. I've to a lot of work to do. As you know family either loves or hates what you do, so any constructive criticism will be appreciated.
I wish to thank my wife for proof reading to find some of my grammatical errors.
I also thank Wendi Lemons for making the covers.
As I gain experience rewriting and reformatting my writings they should read better, and I hope you enjoy them all!
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Science Fiction:
SB Journal 1 - Edited version from Journal spreadsheets.
Scout Expedition - One from the journal series.
AZ (Mike's story) - One from the journal series.
Other Fiction:
Grandpa's Hot Sauce - My first short story published (free).
Pacific 41 - When an oil well catches fire a mile down ...
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Planned:
Journal of Alexis F. Warren - One from the journal series.
Journals & Logs - Excerpts from Journals and a couple of spacecraft logs. Any adventure in an unexplored area is just like a war zone, hours of boredom punctuated by minutes of pure terror.
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Connect with Me Online:
Email:
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