Offshore drilling life: cramped and dangerous

The 160 workers on Shell’s Perdido oil platform have access to a free restaurant, gym and movie theater. Their laundry and meals are taken care of and they get paid pretty well—about $60,000 a year for a young roughneck, $90,000 for a young engineer and $150,000 for a supervisor. Plus they get a two-week vacation every two weeks. The catch? They toil on this floating oil factory in 12-hour shifts for 14 days straight. Their rooms are tiny—just enough space for a pair of bunk beds, one desk and some lockers. And there is definitely no getting away from work: They are 200 miles from shore and there is nothing on the horizon in all directions. The clanking, buzzing machine they live on rises 30 stories out of the water and weighs 50 million tons. It uses new and unproven technologies to coax oil out of a tricky and important geologic formation in the Gulf of Mexico. One well is in the deepest water, 9,627 feet. If they can’t get Perdido to work right and have to stop the oil and natural gas from flowing, their company loses $5 million per day in revenue. If they lose control of it, their lives are at stake. The job drives some people crazy. “A lot of people have trouble,” says Louis Lemoine, a drilling foreman from Alexandria, who has been working offshore for 41 years. “You can’t go anywhere.” But the ones who stick to it say they love it. Read the complete story here.