Monday

Last night after being asleep for a whopping 90 minutes.  The fire alarm goes off.  This is panic city until you hear the Captain saying this is only a drill.  You go from high anxiety of a real fire to being hateful that you have to wake up and do a drill.  Trust the system is not valid during sleep time!  We drill to have a 160 people go from what they were doing to the the muster station by their assigned life boat.  The perfect world is 8 minutes to muster.  Last night we did it in 11 minutes.  Now the threat is to do another drill sometime during the day to get closer to 8 minutes.  In all the accidents on an oil rig of having a fire then blowing up is 16 minutes. So, they like for us to be at our life boats in 8 minutes 3 minutes to load and drop off the side and then 5 minutes to get away from the rig before it explodes.  Did I mention that gas is a bad thing on the rig.
When you are drilling for hydrocarbons (oil) you first hit gas pockets. If this gas enters the drill pipe and starts its journey to the surface it expands rapidly.  If we are drilling at 5000 feet and the gas bubble is the size of a tennis ball-by the time it rises to the surface, it has grown from the oxygen difference.  Typically, the gas bubble is now a cloud of gas and sparks from the equipment moving will set off the fire with a huge explosion.  When gas does enter the pipe, the drillers pour chemicals into the pipe to dilute or counter the gas. Just like we take anti acid pills for heartburn. These chemicals are dumped in seconds of the sensors going off. The next line of defense is shutting the section where the gas is. This allows the gas to escape into the ocean away from our rig.  Alot happens really fast.  When gas is in the zone we are drilling, all the hot work -welders, tools and moving parts stop working until the gas problem goes away.  In the meantime, we are mustering at our life boats preparing for evacuation.  And you thought road rage was bad!