It's Never Been This Hard

Hell, Grant Gillespie mused. Hell. Maybe it was time to bail. It was August 30, a day after Hurricane Katrina had slammed into the Louisiana coast. He was crashing at a buddy's place in Lafayette, west of the storm's fury, with his wife, Colleen, and their two kids. The winds had died down, and the rain had passed. Everyone watched as apocalyptic images of New Orleans flooded across the TV.

Gillespie, 30, feared the worst. His house, after all, was in Westwego, just across the river from the besieged city. Was it gone? How would Colleen cope in someone else's home? What about school for the children? He couldn't help but wonder about two prized possessions: a rare 1977 Scout pickup he had been piecing together and his Fender bass guitar. Shoot, just losing that guitar would be like losing an arm.

Gillespie, a former iron worker, had been a commercial diver for five years, during which he had missed more time with his wife and family than he cared to think about. The pay, $80,000 a year and up, was great, Lord knows. But every job meant heading out to sea for grinding, dangerous work without knowing when he'd return--a couple of weeks at a stretch, a month, perhaps longer. It was a high price, the reason many divers were single, divorced, or perpetually ambivalent about their careers.

And now, this.

So, yeah, maybe he would hang up the wet suit. Find new work in a new town--on dry land this time, someplace far from the Gulf, the rigs, the hurricanes.

And yet. He needed that big paycheck. House or no house. And because of Katrina, there would be plenty of paychecks for a while. Plenty. So three days later, Gillespie was back aboard the Epic Seahorse, a 210-foot workboat, watching the shoreline recede as he headed back to the oil patch--back, as divers put it, to "blowing bubbles."

Gillespie works for Epic Divers & Marine, a Harvey, Louisiana-based company with 240 employees and $28 million in revenue. Normally, Epic's bread and butter is installing underwater oil and gas pipelines. But a big storm changes the game. Even before Katrina's winds had ebbed, Epic's customers, the big energy companies, were calling: They could assess damage to their rigs above the water by helicopter, but they had little idea what lay beneath. Powerful currents can bend and break oil and gas lines, flip 'em over like Tinkertoys. Divers were needed to go hundreds of feet beneath the surface, looking for damage and, eventually, making repairs.

It's an enormous opportunity for Epic, one of two dozen diving operations servicing the Gulf rigs that account for a third of the nation's oil production and a fifth of its natural gas. If this work is done well, it could lead to years of follow-on contracts. Before Katrina hit, after all, Epic's divers were still patching pipelines damaged by Hurricane Ivan a year earlier. And Ivan, he was a baby storm next to this mother.

But here's the problem: Katrina pummeled Epic and its people, too. The hurricane tossed bricks from the second floor of the company's headquarters just outside New Orleans and snaked under the roof, flooding carpets and leaving freckles of black mold on sheetrock. It left dozens of employees homeless, rebuilding, or taking in desperate relatives for who knows how long. A few lost everything.

"Our job is to look under the surface," says Julie Rodriguez, Epic's CEO. But even as divers look at (or sometimes, for) pipes on the Gulf floor, Epic's employees are doing damage assessment of their own, reckoning with their futures. What will become of their homes, their families, their communities? How will they rebuild their company--and how will they manage their upended lives in the meantime?

Everyone says they're fine. But they're not, not really. Not even the divers, the ultimate tough guys who are expert at compartmentalizing their lives onshore and off. When you're working 200 feet underwater with little visibility, operating heavy machinery while connected to the surface by a single air hose, you sort of have to focus on your work. "Normally it's okay," says Gillespie. "The rent's paid, you got money in the bank, and you call home every few days to make sure things are on the up and up. Now it's 'Aw, shit, what a mess.' "

The Friday before had been business as usual. Katrina was just another hurricane, one of many the divers monitor through the season. It looked bad, but not a sure cataclysm. "We said we'd watch it," says John Herren, director of diving operations.

Overnight, though, Katrina was upgraded to a category-three storm, bound for New Orleans. Saturday morning, Rodriguez raced to the Harvey office with her husband, Roger, Epic's chief operating officer. Nearly two dozen employees and relatives sealed computers in garbage bags with twist ties. Sharon Estopinal, director of business services, grabbed the "black beauty books," which contained corporation papers, and every ledger and checkbook she could find. IT manager Mike Simoneaux forwarded incoming calls to Epic's satellite office in Houston. Finally, they boarded up the windows.