Early in the afternoon in late November 2003, as winter loomed on the North Sea, Oberon Houston sat in his office below the helicopter landing pad of the oldest of BP’s five platforms in the Forties field, the Forties Alpha. The Deepwater Horizon was a rig, a mobile piece of equipment that drilled exploratory wells. The Forties Alpha was a platform, fixed in place, to pump oil from under the sea. The Alpha, far smaller than the Horizon, represented the cutting-edge technology of a past era, the oil-drilling equivalent of a Betamax videotape player. Houston was the sort of hotshot young engineer that BP cultivated under Browne. He’d joined the company in 1999, and was placed in the fast-track leadership program. Four years later, he found himself in training as an offshore installations manager, the second in command of an aging platform with a crew of almost 200. He was working on maintenance plans for a major overhaul of the platform in the weeks ahead, a process referred to on the rig as the “scrap-heap challenge” because of the magnitude of the maintenance and the limited resources available to complete it.
As he pored over maintenance schedules, a call came across the rig’s loudspeaker for a technician to fix a compressor that had tripped offline. On an old platform like the Forties Alpha, such maintenance problems were annoyingly routine — another glitch that would chip away at the falling revenue from the declining field. Suddenly, Houston’s office was shaken by what felt like “an artillery shell (that) had just hit the platform.” He staggered to remain upright in his office as debris crashed around him.
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