The First Four Hundred Words: The Wreck of the Kulluk

On December 30, 2012, a tugboat engineer named Craig Matthews threw a grappling hook and caught a runaway drill rig in the middle of a severe storm in the Gulf of Alaska. Late on New Year’s Eve, he was ordered to save his own life and that of his tug’s crew by cutting it loose. The rig’s name was the Kulluk. It belonged to Royal Dutch Shell. Designed for the Arctic, it was the biggest piece in the biggest oil play by what in 2012 was the world’s biggest company, and it was about to run aground.

“The thing was like a Weeble,” Matthews says—one of those egg-shaped, roly-poly toys from the 1970s, when he was a teenager. “Weebles wobble,” the catchphrase went, “but they don’t fall down.”

It was “like a frickin’ bottle top,” said a Coast Guard rescue pilot—“like a Fisher-Price toy.” “Like a floating top,” another proposed. ”Just massive," said a third. Rimmed in 1.5-inch-thick steel, built with an unusual round hull to help prevent it from being crushed in sea ice, the Kulluk was 250 feet tall and weighed half as much as the Titanic. It had no propulsion of its own. Transporting it was “like towing a large saucer for a tea cup,” said the mariner Shell hired to drag it to Alaska. It was “like a buoy the size of a football field,” said one of the Coast Guard rescue swimmers who helped save its crew of eighteen men.

The storm was peaking when the order came. “It was night,” Matthews says. “Winds to fifty knots. Seas thirty-five feet.” Though his tugboat, the Alert, was straining to keep the Kulluk moving forward, "we were going backward”—pulled by the massive rig as it was pushed by gale-force winds—“at two knots.” The Kodiak Archipelago, including Kodiak Island and a smaller barrier island, Sitkalidak, was straight downwind.

In the beam of the Alert’s spotlight, Matthews and the other men on the tug could see 2,800 feet of tow wire jerking out of the water and vibrating under the tension between the two ships. They worried the wire would break and snap back at them. They were in danger of being dragged to shore. But Matthews didn’t feel particularly afraid. “A lot of the time something is scary when you consider it in perspective,” he says, “but there was no perspective.”

He knew he didn’t want to cut...

www.decastories.com/wreckofthekulluk The First 400 Words RSS 

Permalink