Platform for Excellence

Life On the Platform

The helicopters leave every Tuesday from Venice, Louisiana for the 45-minute trip to Ursa, carrying out the new workers who are starting a shift, bringing back those who've completed one. At any given time, there are roughly 120 workers out on the platform. Most of them work a 14-day shift on Ursa, then take 14 days off. When they're on, they work for 12 to 14 hours each day. The day shift and the night shift start their 14-day hitches on alternating weeks. "That way, there's always someone out there who has been on the platform for at least one week and is aware of any problems," says Fox.

While few of the platform workers have formal training in engineering, most of them have self-taught, learned-on-the-job mechanical skills, in addition to expertise in certain drilling or production machinery. On the platform, any one of those skills can turn out to be vital. "I learned an incredible amount from those guys when I spent a year offshore in 1987," says Verlon Kiel, 42, an engineer himself, who works onshore monitoring production on Ursa. "When problems happen out there, if the weather is bad or the seas are rough, it may be days before help can come out. So the people who are working out there become the repairmen who fix things."

During the few waking hours when they're not working, platform workers' lives revolve mostly around food. Shell uses a catering company to run its galley, and the staff of six people produces a bounty of comfort food for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a midnight meal. "It's not a job to us," says Dawn Best, 66, a perpetually smiling member of the catering crew who is affectionately known as "Miss Dawn." "We're more like family out here. I have three sons who work offshore for other companies, so I treat all of the workers here the way I'd want people to treat my boys."

For those who visit it a bit too often, the buffet line creates its own requirement: the need to exercise. Several world-class Ping-Pong players work on Ursa, and foosball is also a popular sport. Thanks to Ursa's satellite hookup, cable TV is in every room, and Internet access is available in the offices and in the library. While there is no hardship pay for working offshore, entry-level roustabouts on the drilling rig still begin at about $30,000 per year. Since there's nowhere to spend that money on the platform, many workers gravitate to Internet investing. "A lot of these guys will retire as millionaires if they're smart," says John Guyett, 49, a drilling foreman on Ursa.

Life Off the Platform

Working 14 days on, 14 days off and feeling the pressure to perform under exacting conditions can make life on the platform grueling. But for many workers, the schedule offers substantial benefits -- off the platform. "Before I came offshore to work a 14/14, I was working a job that was labeled '5/2,' " says Marvin Blanchard, 39, an operations foreman. "But really, it was a 6/1 job. I'd leave home before daylight and get back after dark. Now I have built-in balance. But it took me a while to get used to it."

Because they have to make only one round-trip each month for the 45-minute flight out of the heliport at the tip of Louisiana, many of Ursa's workers buy land and build their dream houses all over the south, from east Texas to the Florida panhandle. One worker even flies in from Montana each month in his own plane. But, ultimately, every platform worker has to come to terms with the reality of family life when the job means being away from home for six months of the year. "It's always difficult to leave home and come back out here," says Blanchard. Adds McAlpin: "Choosing to work this way is not a decision that you make lightly, or by yourself."

For some people, work-life balance is a math problem: Royce Thomason, 45, an associate technician on Ursa, calculates his odds of being at home with his family at 50-50. That said, he recently missed his daughter's 16th birthday. "We threw a big birthday party before I left," he says. Others take a more qualitative approach. "Most people who work on the production or the drilling side of this business move around a lot, and that's very difficult for young children," says Guyett. "So I actually tried to get offshore, because it was the easiest way for my family to establish roots in one place."

While several workers on Ursa are divorced and are unable to have full custody of their children because of their schedules, the percentage of single parents on Ursa doesn't appear to be especially high. Male workers (only a handful of women work on Ursa) chalk that up in part to their dutiful completion of the "honey do's" that pile up while they're gone: "When we get home, what we hear is 'Honey, now that you're back, could you please do the windows!' or 'Honey, please do the lawn!' " jokes Tommy Chreene, 45, a systems mechanic.

In fact, the workers on Ursa don't leave their families behind when they're on the platform: They bring their families with them, and they share their concerns with their fellow workers. "We're all aware of one another's family interests and concerns, and we're able to talk about them quite openly," says Blanchard. "People who don't eat and sleep with their coworkers for 14 days have no idea how close we are."

Ron Lieber (rlieber@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior writer. Visit Ursa on the Web (www.offshore-technology.com/projects/ursa).