Nine Men Were Trapped on a Burning Oil Platform 60 Miles Out in the Gulf. The Helicopter Couldn’t Land, and I Was the Only One Who Knew Another Way In
The boat landing on Delta-7 sits just above the waterline, a steel cage at the bottom of one of the legs, with a ladder that goes straight up eighty feet to the lower deck.
Four years ago, I was the last man to climb it.
That night, a young roughneck named Danny Ochoa slipped on the spider deck during a storm. I went down the ladder after him. I got to the landing in time to see the wave take him.
The company’s investigation said it wasn’t my fault. The insurance company paid his mother. The lawyers settled the lawsuit in eight months.
None of that helped me sleep.
I quit the next week.
Now the *Lady Carmen* was pushing through four-foot swells toward that same leg, and I was pulling on a borrowed fire suit two sizes too small.
“You don’t have to do this,” said Marisol, the boat’s captain. She’s fifty-two, she’s been running supply boats since she was twenty, and she has never once told anyone they didn’t have to do something.
“Get me close,” I said. “Then back off. If I don’t call in twenty minutes, don’t come back for me. Wait for the cutter.”
She looked at me for a long second.
“You always were too good-looking to be this stupid,” she said.
It’s the nicest thing she’s ever said to me.
She brought the boat in on the swell, the steel leg rising and falling beside us like a building in an earthquake. I waited for the top of the wave.
And jumped.
The landing was slick with oil and seaweed. I hit it hard on my shoulder, grabbed the ladder, and started climbing.
Eighty feet.
Halfway up, I could feel the heat through the steel.
At the top, I pushed open the hatch to the lower deck.
Nine men were there, packed against the railing on the far side, coughing, eyes red. Between them and me, a wall of smoke and a burning pump skid.
One of them was very young. Twenty-two, twenty-three. Thin. A face I knew.
I had seen that face in a photo on a coffin four years ago.