by Tina Erwin
I
had never been to Brazil but since my husband is captain of the Cajun Express,
an oil rig 150 miles off the coast of Brazil he flies down there literally every
month. Google Cajun Express and you get some idea of how complicated oil drilling
can be. He works for Transocean and they have oil rigs all over the world. They
provide the oil platform for the customer, such as Petrobrass, Chevron, BP,
Exxon, Shell Oil etc. His ‘hitch’ is 28 days on and 28 days off the rig. It is
a grueling schedule. When you’re ‘off rig’ you are also expected to attend
training and conferences. However, this particular time he had to go to a
conference a week after his hitch ended, so to my delight, he invited me to
join him in Rio for a week while he waited for the conference to begin. Since
his company lets him keep his frequent flier miles, my flight was free. The
company also paid for all hotel and food bills. Transocean is one of the most
generous companies I have ever known. But back to Brazil, I thought I would
share my impressions of this huge country.
Brazil
is an enormous country. Fully half of your flight you are crossing the vastness
of the rain forest and the plains of the Amazon. You can’t see it because these
flights are always at night but you can track it on the plane’s televisions.
When you awake, you can see that as you near the coast, there is rugged,
sometimes hilly but always green, land that stretches for miles in a westerly
direction.
For
a city of 12 million people, the Rio de Janeiro airport is quite small. It’s
confusing, very warm and humid because it is not air conditioned, and eternally
under some type of construction. The airport is your first clue to the sagging
and tired infrastructure that is trying unsuccessfully to support this gigantic
city.
Driving
from the airport to the Copacabana Beach where the hotels line the beach, is an
eye opener. The traffic is grid locked on narrow lanes that clog the arteries
that are the heart of the city.
However,
what immediately strikes you, are the encroaching and sad Favelas that seem to
line every road. Like a choking vine that strangles a tree, so are these
Favelas literally choking off the life in the city. A tremendous percentage of
Brazilians live in these red, cinder block, ramshackle, structures called
Favelas.
You try to get a sense of the city as you drive along the roads in
your jet lagged stupor. What wakes you up from that sleepiness, are the eerie
flocks of great vultures that glide and swoop overhead. These are ugly birds
with shabby black feathers and a ten-foot wingspan. Their scanning territory is
the hopeless feeling Favelas. The birds patiently circle overhead waiting and
watching. The symbol of their presence is brought up close and personal as
these birds perch on the streetlights that line the streets of the city. They
sit there with their mottled, saggy, hideous faces and watch and wait. The
symbol was so intense it sent shivers down my spine.
Our
hotel was quiet, well run and ideal for its view of Copacabana beach. From the
16th floor the view out to sea is amazing. All the amenities are
here, generous amenities yet it still feels as if I walked onto the set of a 19th
century play. Life is slower here, less hectic, more comfortable offering
welcoming smiles and simple courtesies. You feel yourself relaxing, letting go
of the unrelenting tension of life in the United States. Here, really, what’s
the hurry?
Everything
on an oil rig is flown there by helicopter. When your rig is 150 miles at sea,
you have to plan ahead and schedule everything around when those helos fly.
They bring in all supplies and they fly all personnel on and off the rig. If
the helos don’t fly or are cancelled, you don’t go anywhere. And so on the day
I arrived, all helos for my husband’s rig were cancelled. However he made all
the arrangements to get me to the hotel and to an amazing party that night in
honor of his division’s outstanding safety record. So I went to the party
without him.
I’m
always amazed at who I get to meet when I travel. This particular evening I met
a company man from Transocean, who gave me his view of Brazilian life and
culture. He obviously loved these people, loved the country and appreciated
what an amazing opportunity a guy from Omaha, Nebraska was given. He even enjoyed
learning Portuguese.
He
pointed out that Brazilians seem to him, for the most part, quite happy. There
wasn’t the sense of depression or anxiety you find in large cities like New
York or the hectic frustration you feel in Los Angeles. Americans somehow think
that to be happy you have to have that uniquely American lifestyle. But that’s
not true. Not everyone wants or needs that experience. Each of us ends up where
we end up for that particular experience.
As
I watched Americans and Brazilians partying it up that first night I marveled
at how productive people can be when they choose to work together. And on a rig
not working together is deadly. Oil rigs, when run correctly are fine. The issue
is that everything has to work perfectly to stay safe. Sometimes life on an oil rig
is profoundly dangerous. Until my husband got this job, I had no idea how much
effort went into each gallon of gasoline. Even if we never need gas/diesel for
cars again, we will still need oil for the sheer volume of plastics and other
oil/lubricant products that we use without a thought.
Imagine
being off the coast of Brazil and drilling in 7,000 feet of ocean to the sea
floor and then drilling another mile underground – through what amounts to one
pipe – or a string of pipes. It’s like sipping oil up through a 10,000-foot
long straw and hoping the platform that enables you to do that stays absolutely
stable. ≈≈SHUDDER≈≈
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