The Worst Place on Earth to Be Stranded | Ocean Ranger

Ambient Songs:
By CoAg
https://www.youtube.com/@co.agmusic1823

Intro Theme by Swift Junai:
https://www.instagram.com/swiftjunai/?hl=en
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6hf5nMJ8s6LJJfFR4OQ3lg
https://open.spotify.com/artist/1PoG2b18MHocWZA8zQgWjO

Writers and researchers: Jay Adams
https://instagram.com/jayadamsdigital?igshid=MzMyNGUyNmU2YQ==

Jordan Gottschick https://www.youtube.com/@DerpsWithWolves/playlists

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 a stand the worst weather conditions
of the North Atlantic Ocean. But on February fourteenth, nineteen
eighty one, something would happen on board that for the
crew would turn it into the worst place on Earth

(00:21):
to be stranded. This is the horrifying story of the
Ocean Ranger, and as always, viewer discretion is advised. By
the nineteen sixties, serious exploration had begun off Canada's east coast,

(00:42):
with exploratory oil drilling taking place around Newfoundland and Labrador.
After beginning, the focus quickly zered 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. Ever, unfortunately,
overfishing was causing the collapse of several species towards the

(01:04):
end of the twentieth century, forcing the province to look
elsewhere to sustain itself. Luckily, this area also happened to
be rich in oil and there. In nineteen seventy nine,
geologists struck oil at what would become known as the
Hibernia Oil Field. This discovery was extremely significant and maybe
the biggest country I'd ever seen. Striking oil, however, isn't
the same as pumping it and finding it is only

(01:24):
the beginning. Afterward, the companies involved, which were led by
Mobile 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 wales to map
on 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 air by the winter of nineteen eighty two and

(01:46):
began punching a hole in the seafloor. Data then began
flooding back that would begin shape in the province's economic future.
Ye At first glance, the Ocean Ranger looks like something
out of science fiction. Built in nineteen seventy six by
Mitsubishi Industries, the platform was a floating CLASSUS. It was
three hundred ninety six feet or one hundred and twenty
one meters long, two hundred and sixty two feet or

(02:08):
eighty meters wide and three hundred and thirty seven feet
or one hundred and three meters high. The rig's full
weight also topped twenty five thousand tons, and o Deco,
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,

(02:29):
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.

(02:49):
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 every 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 in a position and
stabilized using twelve massive anchors, each weighing forty five thousand pounds.

(03:11):
Once locked into place, it could operate in water depths
of up to fifteen hundred feet or four hundred and
sixty meters, and drilled down to more than twenty five
thousand feet or seventy six hundred 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 nineteen eighty since
it was put into use in nineteen seventy six, the

(03:33):
Ocean Ranger had worked in two oceans in minutes through
more than fifty storms. By late November of nineteen eighty one,
the Ocean Ranger had settled into its assignment at the
Hibernia oil field. The well it was working on, Label
J thirty four, 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 eighty four
men living and working aboard the rig, this was just

(03:54):
another job. Nearby, two semi submersible rigs were also operating,
one named said Co seven oh six and the other
zapata ugland. Together, the three platforms were creating explorator wells
in the 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 j thirty four continued

(04:18):
as normal for months, all the way until February nineteen
eighty two. It was there when on Sunday, February fourteenth,
forecasts 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 ninety knots
and waves in excess of thirty seven feet or eleven meters. Obviously,

(04:39):
these conditions weren't ideal, but they also weren't unheard of either.
The Ocean Ranger had handled worse before. By midafternoon, 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 four thirty pm that afternoon, the rig was
essentially batened and ready to run at the storm. What

(05:02):
no one realized at the time, however, was that this
wouldn't be just another rough night at sea. Around seven pm,
the said Coast seven oh six 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 eight pm, though,

(05:24):
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 twenty eight feet or eight and a
half meters from the waterline, had suddenly turned into a
direct entryway for the storm. Seawater then rushed in the
control room, soaking the console that managed the rigs ballast system.

(05:45):
With that one chance blowed, the ocean range's most critical
internal system was compromised. The ballast control room was essentially
the brain behind the entire riggs balance. From that room,
a single operator and a twelve hour shift could open
and close valves. Shift ballast water between compared garment and
fine tune the platform's position to keep a stable even
in rough seas. It did, however, have one fatal flat

(06:06):
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
notice something strange. Lights on the ballast control panel were

(06:29):
flashing between red and green. That meant that the valves
were opening 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

(06:50):
room itself. They would end up having a call to
rig's electrician to find it, and by the time the
switch was finally thrown almost an hour later. It was
just after nine pm. 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

(07:11):
couple hours, everything seemed stable. The Ocean Ranger continued normal
radio communications with its neighbors and with support vessels in
the area. Whether reports still mentioned brutal wind and towering waves,
some as highs sixty five feet or about twenty meters,
but there were no signse 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

(07:32):
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 rigs slightly to
stay higher above the waves, or maybe they were just

(07:54):
checking to see if the system was working in after
drying out the panel. Whatever the reasoning, restoring power allowed
the damage to come alive, and it no longer behaved predictably.
Some of the valves and the forward ballast tanks began
opening again, but whether these were triggered by short circuits
or operator input, the result was the same. Sea water
then rushed into the bow with the rig, and slowly
the ocean Ranger began to tip forward. Around this time,

(08:17):
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 ballot system back down,
but the damage was already done. Each time the crew
tried to cut power and stop the water float, a
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

(08:38):
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 pumps 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.

(09:00):
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 threadning 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 rooms 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

(09:22):
working blind, and with every move the situation was getting worse.
As more valves opened, more water flooded the four tanks.
The rigs listing, then grew steeper, and soon it crossed
the line it couldn't come back from. All the while
the churning sea below, which is five degrees celsius or
forty one fahrenheit. Any splashing inside would have been brutally cold,

(09:42):
and as the bow dipped lower, the top of the
rig's corner columns, which normally sit safely at more than
eighty feet or twenty four meters above the sea, were
suddenly within reach of the storm surges. This is where
another design flock came into play. At the top of
each of these corner columns were wide, uncovered openings, which
were access points for the mass of chains and cables
that helped to anchor the rig. These storageris weren't protected

(10:04):
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 sea water, 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

(10:27):
control team, unaware of the flooding and 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 one am, the Ocean
Ranger began transmitting may day signals. The crew knew they
were in serious trouble. The sea fourth Highlander, which was

(10:49):
the rig's stand by a vessel, then got a call
and headed in as fast as it could, but the
weather was just relentless, with winds and excess of one
hundred and fifteen 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 one thirty am, the
Ocean Ranger sent its final radio transmission, stating that the

(11:10):
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 ten and fifteen
degrees and the sea was hammering it from every direction.
The crew then began to lower the lifeboats, but even
that was a gambol. They were dealing with what was

(11:31):
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

(11:52):
entirely certain, that many of the men simply jumped or
were thrown into the frozen Atlantic in water that cold,
even strong so 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 two am and fired an emergency flare to let
up the chaos, but what they saw was grim. The

(12:14):
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

(12:35):
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,
drifts off into the night, and it was never seen again.

(12:58):
Nearby support vessels all arrived shortly after, but the conditions
were brutal. Visibility was poor, the sea was still raging,
and the Ocean Ranger was rapidly disappearing. By two forty
five am, the rig was just barely above the water,
and by three ten it had vanished from the radar completely.
The entire crew of eighty four men, including forty six
mobile employees and thirty eight contractors were dead. Search and

(13:21):
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
twenty two bodies were ever recovered. Autop seats later confirmed
that the men had drowned, mostly in a hypothermic state.
In the days and weeks after the Ocean Ranger disappeared

(13:42):
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 porthole,
and things only got messier from there. The control pans,
all soaked with ocean water, malfunctioned, creating chaos among a
crew that was desperately trying to get handled on what

(14:04):
exactly was happening with the rigs ballot 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 similated emergency. In fact, one of the operators

(14:27):
had only been on the job for twelve weeks before
being assigned to manage the rig stability. There were also
no written emergency procedures for a ballot system failure. The
team went for the brass rons, but they didn't know
how they worked, and their blind adjustments only made things
worse and the flooding. Chain lockers like the porthole were
another design flood that led to the disaster. By the
time the media call was sent out, the list was

(14:48):
too steep to overcome and the water was too high.
The rigs 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, seious

(15:09):
flaws in the rigs design, and inadequate regulation. In oversight
from government agencies in shore, it seemed the Ocean Ranger
was a disaster waiting to happen. In nineteen eighty three,
the ocean Ranger was raised by a Dutch salvage company
and resunk in deeper waters to eliminate the navigational hazard
imposed two shipping lanes in the North Atlantic. However, even

(15:29):
that operation turned into a tragedy. Three divers were killed
in two separate accidents during the recovery efforts. 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

(15:52):
of failure. To this day, the disaster remains the deadliest
offshore drilling accident in Canadian history.