This is the Ocean Ranger.
When it was launched, it was said to be the largest oil rig in the world, and it was truly impressive.
It was like a massive floating stadium built to withstand the worst weather conditions of the North Atlantic Ocean.
But on February 14th, 1981, something would happen on board that for the crew
would turn it into the worst place on Earth to be stranded.
This is the horrifying story of the Ocean Ranger, and as always, viewer discretion is advised.
[intro music]
By the 1960s, serious exploration had begun off Canada’s east coast
with exploratory oil drilling taking place around Newfoundland and Labrador.
Now, after beginning, the focus quickly zeroed in on this underwater plateau off the coast called the Grand Banks.
This area was once one of the richest fishing grounds in the world,
and the province depended on the fishing industry it supported.
However, unfortunately, over fishing was causing the collapse of several species towards the end of the 20th century,
forcing the province to look elsewhere to sustain itself.
Luckily, this area also happened to be rich in oil. And there, in 1979,
geologists struck oil at what would become known as the Hibernia oil field.
This discovery was extremely significant and may be the biggest the country had ever seen.
Striking oil, however, isn’t the same as pumping it, and finding it is only the beginning.
Afterward, the companies involved, which were led by Mobil Oil, need to figure out just how big the reserve was.
They needed data, and to get that data, they need to drill a series of wells
to map out the boundaries and capacity of the oil reserve.
This is where the Ocean Ranger came in.
This was a massive cutting-edge drilling rig, and it was stationed in the area by the winter of 1982
and began punching a hole in the seafloor.
Data then began flooding back though and began shaping the province’s economic future.
At first glance, the Ocean Ranger looks like something out of science fiction.
Built in 1976 by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the platform was a floating colossus.
It was 396 feet, or 121 meters long,
262 feet, or 80 meters wide, and 337 feet, or 103 meters high.
The rig’s full weight also topped 25,000 tons. And ODECO, the company that owned the Ocean Ranger,
called it the world’s largest semi-submersible oil rig at the time.
Interestingly, instead of standing on fixed legs anchored to the ocean floor, the Ocean Ranger floated.
Its deck, where the drilling happened, sat high above the water, supported by eight massive columns that rose
from two underwater pontoons.
These pontoons had ballast tanks, allowing seawater to be taken in or pumped out to adjust the platform’s position.
The whole system then worked through a network of valves and pumps controlled from a specialized room deep inside the rig.
And this system is ingenious.
By submerging the pontoons below the surface, the rig could avoid the worst of the ocean’s movement.
And unlike surface ships that rock with heavy wave, the Ocean Ranger sat mostly still no matter what the weather was like.
And this design also had another benefit— it made the rig mobile.
The Ocean Ranger could be towed into position and stabilized using 12 massive anchors, each weighing 45,000 pounds.
Once locked into place, it could operate in water depths of up to 1,500 feet, or 460 meters,
and drill down to more than 25,000 feet, or 7,600 meters.
On top of that, the rig was built to take on monster waves, hurricane-force winds, blinding snowstorms,
and whatever else the notorious North Atlantic could throw at it.
By the 1980s, since it was put into use in 1976,
the Ocean Ranger had worked in two oceans and made it through more than 50 storms.
By late November of 1981, the Ocean Ranger had settled into its assignment at the Hibernia oil field.
The well it was working on labeled J34, was its third at the site.
And given that it was winter, the Grand Banks were as cold and unforgiving as ever.
But for the 84 men living and working aboard the rig, this was just another job.
Nearby, two semi-submersible rigs were also operating—
one named Sedco 706 and the other, Zapata Ugland.
Together, the three platforms were creating exploratory wells in their respective sections of the ocean.
And although they weren’t within shouting distance, they were close enough to be aware of each other’s presence
and often shared radio traffic and weather reports.
The work at J34 continued as normal for months all the way until February 1982.
It was there when on Sunday, February 14th, forecasters sent word that a strong winter storm
was brewing that was tied to a major Atlantic hurricane,
and it was projected to pass directly over the rigs later that day.
The morning report called for winds up to 90 knots, and waves in excess of 37 feet, or 11 meters.
Obviously, these conditions weren’t ideal, but they also weren’t unheard of either.
The Ocean Ranger had handled worse before.
By mid-afternoon, the crew began the process of something known as hanging off.
This is a standard procedure where the drill pipe is disconnected and retracted to keep it from snapping in heavy seas.
By around 4:30 p.m. that afternoon, the rig was essentially batten down and ready to run at the storm.
What no one realized at the time, however, was that this wouldn’t be just another rough night at sea.
Around 7 p.m., the Sedco 706 rig took a direct hit from a rogue wave.
And this unusually large surge was strong enough that it damaged parts of its deck and tore away a life raft.
And this should have been a red flag, but on the Ocean Ranger just miles away, things still seemed under control.
Around 8:00 p.m., though, another massive wave struck the Ocean Ranger, and this time smashed a window
or what’s called a port light on the ballast control room.
In an instant, that one point of vulnerability located 28 feet, or 8.5 meters from the water line,
had suddenly turned into a direct entryway for the storm.
Sea water then rushed in the control room, soaking the console that managed the rig’s ballast system.
With that one chance blow, the Ocean Rangers’ most critical internal system was compromised.
The ballast control room was essentially the brain behind the entire rig’s balance.
From that room, a single operator on a 12-hour shift could open and close valves,
shift ballast water between compartments, and fine-tune the platform’s position to keep it stable even in rough seas.
It did, however, have one fatal flaw— it wasn’t built to get wet.
After the wave crashed through the port light and soaked the ballast control console,
the crew couldn’t be sure what damage had been done, but they acted fast.
Power to the control system was then either cut off by the water itself or deliberately shut off to prevent electrical shock.
And soon after, a cleanup team entered the room to assess the situation and noticed something strange.
Lights on the ballast control panel were flashing between red and green.
That meant that the valves were open and closing by themselves.
If those lights were accurate, the ballast tanks on the port side were filling with sea water,
which would cause the rig to lean in that direction, something especially dangerous given the weather.
The crew then had to act quickly. There was a kill switch that could cut all power to the system
and shut the valves automatically. But it wasn’t located in the control room itself.
They would end up having to call the rig’s electrician to find it.
And by the time the switch was finally thrown, almost an hour later, it was just after 9:00 p.m.
The Ocean Ranger then radioed the other rigs nearby and confirmed that a port light had been broken,
and the control room had flooded.
But almost as if in relief, the message was calm, and the crew said the situation had been handled.
For the next couple hours, everything seemed stable.
The Ocean Ranger continued normal radio communications with its neighbors and with support vessels in the area.
Weather reports still mentioned brutal wind and towering waves, some as high as 65 feet, or about 20 meters,
but there were no signs of panic aboard.
From the outside, the rig looked like it had taken the hit and shaken it off.
By all appearances, cutting power to the ballast control system had stabilized the situation.
And with the valve shut and the storm raging outside, the Ocean Ranger seemed to be riding things out.
But at some point close to midnight, the crew made a decision that sealed the rig’s fate.
For some reason, they turned the power back on.
Why exactly they did this is still unclear.
They may have wanted to raise the rig slightly to stay higher above the waves.
Or maybe they were just checking to see if the system was working in after drying out the panel.
Whatever the reasoning, restoring power allowed the damaged system to come alive, and it no longer behaved predictably.
Some of the valves in the forward ballast tanks began opening again.
But whether these were triggered by short circuits or operator input, the result was the same.
Seawater then rushed into the bow of the rig and slowly, the Ocean Ranger began to tip forward.
Around this time, nearby rigs and vessels picked up bits of radio chatter from the Ocean Ranger,
including reports of the rig listing and repeated attempts to shut the ballast system back down.
But the damage was already done.
Each time the crew tried to cut power and stop the water flow, the few seconds it took for the valves to close
allowed even more water to pour into the ballast tanks.
Now, normally, the way to fix a forward list would be to pump the water back out using the pumps at the rear of the rig.
But now, the angle of the rig made that impossible.
The pump simply didn’t have enough power to push the water that far uphill.
There was another solution, which was transferring water from the bow to the middle tanks,
but no one on board seems to have known how to do this.
So, in desperation, someone in the control room came up with a backup plan.
There was a set of brass rods designed to manually operate the valves if the system failed.
The crew then shut the power off again and began threading the rods into the panel, but they immediately discovered a problem.
The rods could only open the valves, not close them.
And without power, the control room’s indicators were dead, so the crew had no way of knowing which valves were open,
which were closed, or where the water was going.
This meant they were working blind, and with every move, the situation was getting worse.
As more valves opened, more water flooded the forward tanks.
The rig’s listing then grew steeper, and soon, it crossed a line it couldn’t come back from.
All the while, the churning sea below was just 5° Celsius, or 41 Fahrenheit.
Any splashing inside would have been brutally cold.
And as the bow dipped lower, the top of the rig’s corner columns, which normally sit safely at more than 80 feet,
or 24 meters above the sea, were suddenly within reach of the storm surges.
This is where another design flaw came into play.
At the top of each of these corner columns were wide, uncovered openings,
which were access points for the massive chains and cables that helped to anchor the rig.
These storage areas weren’t protected by hatches or lids.
And under normal conditions, this wasn’t a problem, but the Ocean Ranger was no longer sitting level.
So one by one, the waves began crashing into those open chain lockers, flooding them with seawater.
And because there were no alarms or sensors in place to warn the crew, they had no idea this was happening.
As far as they knew, the rig was still reacting to whatever was happening inside the ballast tanks.
So the ballast control team, unaware of the floating in the lockers, continued trying to fix the problem
by threading more brass rods into the console.
And with no functional indicators, they were unintentionally opening more valves and allowing more water to pour in.
Finally, the situation became undeniable.
At around 1:00 a.m., the Ocean Ranger began transmitting mayday signals.
The crew knew they were in serious trouble.
The Seaforth Highlander, which was the rig’s standby vessel, then got a call and headed in as fast as it could,
but the weather was just relentless with winds in excess of 115 miles per hour,
waves taller than buildings, and visibility close to zero.
Just getting near the rig would take more than an hour, and even that was optimistic.
And half an hour later, at 1:30 a.m., the Ocean Ranger sent its final radio transmission,
stating that the crew was heading to the lifeboat stations to abandon the rig.
By the time the Ocean Ranger’s final message crackled over the radio, the situation had already passed the point of recovery.
The rig was listing badly, somewhere between 10 and 15°, and the sea was hammering it from every direction.
The crew then began to lower the lifeboats, but even that was a gamble.
They were dealing with what was essentially a skyscraper in the middle of the ocean.
And in hurricane-force winds, those lifeboats had to swing down from those great heights.
As you might imagine, some never made it.
Violent gusts slammed them against the side of the rig, crushing the lifeboat’s hulls before they even reached the water.
Others were even flipped or torn away before they could even be boarded.
And it’s likely, although not entirely certain, that many of the men simply jumped or were thrown into the frozen Atlantic.
In water that cold, even strong summers could only last minutes before hypothermia took over.
And that’s not to mention the massive violent swells they were in.
The Seaforth Highlander arrived at the site just after 2 a.m. and fired an emergency flare to let up the chaos,
but what they saw was grim.
The Ocean Ranger was still afloat, but badly listing, and waves were continuously washing over the deck.
There were also no sign of people on board, and the lifeboats appeared to all be gone.
Debris was also scattered across the water, but they managed to spot one battered lifeboat
with survivors actually alive inside.
The Highlander then managed to get close and threw a line to secure it.
And for a brief moment, it looked like at least a few men would make it out alive.
But just then, a massive swell rose and rolled the lifeboat over, tossing everyone into the sea.
The crew of the Highlander tried desperately to pull them out, but the waves kept beating them back.
One of the ship’s officers even got within feet of a man in the water before another wave slammed in and snapped the line.
The lifeboat, by then upside down, drifted off into the night, and it was never seen again.
Nearby support vessels also arrived shortly after, but the conditions were brutal.
Visibility was poor, the sea was still raging, and the Ocean Ranger was rapidly disappearing.
By 2:45 a.m., the rig was just barely above the water, and by 3:10, it had vanished from the radar completely.
The entire crew of 84 men, including 46 Mobil employees and 38 contractors, were dead.
Search and rescue efforts continued throughout the night and into the following days, but they were met with mostly silence.
Two more lifeboats were found empty.
Several life rafts were also located, but were badly damaged and without survivors.
And in total, only 22 bodies were ever recovered.
Autopsies later confirmed that the men had drowned, mostly in a hypothermic state.
In the days and weeks after the Ocean Ranger disappeared beneath the North Atlantic,
investigators were left with a complicated puzzle of trying to figure out how the most advanced semi-submersible rig of its time
ended up at the bottom of the ocean.
The answer, as it turned out, wasn’t one single failure.
The ending began with a broken port hole, and things only got messier from there.
The control panel, soaked with ocean water, malfunctioned, creating chaos among a crew that was desperately trying
to get a handle on what exactly was happening with the rig’s ballast system.
And making matters worse, the crew apparently didn’t really know how to fix it.
The ballast control operators had no formal training; just a few weeks of shattering more experienced operators.
In place of classroom instruction and certification, they were given on-the-job training under normal conditions.
They weren’t put through a single simulated emergency.
In fact, one of the operators had only been on the job for 12 weeks before being assigned to manage the brake stability.
There were also no written emergency procedures for a ballast system failure.
The team went for the brass rods, but they didn’t know how they worked, and their blind adjustments only made things worse.
And the flooding chain lockers, like the port hole, were another design flaw that led to the disaster.
By the time the mayday call was sent out, the list was too steep to overcome, and the water was too high.
The rig’s pumps couldn’t move water back to where it needed to go.
Rescue crews couldn’t get close enough in time, and lifeboats and rafts weren’t equipped to handle conditions that extreme.
Official reports from both the US Coast Guard and the Canadian Royal Commission listed multiple causes for the disaster,
including poor crew training, a lack of clear safety procedures, serious flaws in the rig’s design,
and inadequate regulation and oversight from government agencies.
In short, it seemed the Ocean Ranger was a disaster waiting to happen.
In 1983, the Ocean Ranger was raised by a Dutch salvage company and resunk in deeper waters
to eliminate the navigational hazard it posed to shipping lanes in the North Atlantic.
However, even that operation turned into a tragedy.
Three divers were killed in two separate accidents during the recovery effort.
In the end, the findings of the commission led to sweeping changes in offshore regulations.
Crew training standards were overhauled, survival suits became mandatory.
Lifeboat designs were revisited, safety drills were required.
And no longer would critical control systems rely on a single point of failure.
To this day, the disaster remains the deadliest offshore drilling accident in Canadian history.
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