In 1982 Canada's Biggest Oil Rig Sank With All 84 Hands. Nobody Was Regulating It.

Eighty-four men went to work on it. The Ocean Ranger was the largest semi-submersible drilling rig in the world, two hundred miles east of St John's on the Grand Banks, and it was sold as unsinkable. On the night of the fourteenth of February, nineteen eighty-two, a wave broke one piece of glass. Here is the ground this covers. What broke, and why one broken portlight was enough to finish the biggest rig afloat. Who was actually responsible for the safety of that platform, which turns out to be the hardest question in the whole story. Why the answer is nobody, and what that had to do with an argument about royalties between St John's and Ottawa. And the Accord signed three years later, which is the reason Newfoundland is a wealthy province today. The men aboard knew none of that. They were drillers, roughnecks, welders, cooks, radio operators and two Mobil employees, working three-week rotations out of a heliport in St John's, on what everybody in the industry regarded as the safest structure in the North Atlantic. There is a new piece of Canadian financial history on this channel every day. Subscribe and the next one finds you. Start with what the rig actually was, because the design is the reason the loss looks impossible until you understand it. A semi-submersible is not a ship and it is not a platform standing on the seabed. It is a structure that floats on two enormous submerged pontoons, held below the surface, with the working deck carried high above the water on hollow columns. The point of the arrangement is stability. Waves do most of their work at the surface. If the buoyancy is down in the still water forty or fifty feet below, the deck barely notices what the sea is doing, and a crew can keep drilling in weather that would stop a drillship dead. The Ocean Ranger was built for the Ocean Drilling and Exploration Company of New Orleans, by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan, and delivered in nineteen seventy-six. It was the biggest one anybody had built. It was rated to drill in water fifteen hundred feet deep, and it was specified to survive the worst weather anybody expected the North Atlantic to produce. It had worked Alaska, it had worked Ireland, it had worked New Jersey, and in nineteen eighty it came to the Grand Banks under charter to Mobil Oil Canada, to drill the Hibernia field. Now the part that matters. A semi-submersible has to be able to change how deep it sits. It goes down into drilling trim and comes up into transit trim, and it has to stay level when the weight on deck shifts, which on a drilling rig it does constantly. So the pontoons and the lower columns are divided into ballast tanks, and seawater is pumped in and out of them to trim the rig. On the Ocean Ranger that was done from a single room. ⏱ CHAPTERS 0:00 Eighty-Four 1:21 What the Rig Was 2:43 The Ballast Control Room 4:54 Brass Rods 7:20 The Night 8:56 The Lifeboat That Reached Help 10:44 Who Was In Charge 12:48 The Prize 14:11 The National Energy Program 15:47 The Gap 18:04 The Commission 20:20 The Courts 21:27 The Accord 25:43 One Body, Two Jobs 27:34 Britain 🔎 IN THIS VIDEO BRITAIN ❓ QUICK ANSWERS • What the Rig Was — A semi-submersible is not a ship and it is not a platform standing on the seabed. • The Ballast Control Room — It goes down into drilling trim and comes up into transit trim, and it has to stay level when the weight on deck shifts, which on a drill… • Brass Rods — The immediate response was correct. The crew shut the panel down and switched to manual control of the valves. • The Night — At about half past midnight on the fifteenth of February the rig reported a severe list. At ten minutes to one in the morning it sent a m… • Who Was In Charge — The honest answer is that there was not one, and the reason there was not one is money. • The Prize — The stakes were enormous and everybody understood them. Whoever owned the seabed collected the royalties, set the terms, and decided how … Canadian Wealth Architect tells the stories behind Canada’s money — the booms, the frauds and the fortunes that built the country. Subscribe:    / @thecanadianwealtharchitect   ▶ WATCH NEXT: Canada Spent $100 Million on the Canadarm in 1981, Then Gave It to NASA for Nothing. —    • Canada Spent $100 Million on the Canadarm ...   🔗 MORE FROM US British Wealth Architect:    / @thebritishwealtharchitect   American Wealth Architect:    / @theamericanwealtharchitect   Australian Wealth Architect:    / @theaustralianwealtharchitect   🖼 Original illustration, including AI-assisted artwork. #History #Finance #Economics