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By Root 1112 0

got to be the hallway. So, that’s the direction I need to go. That leads out.” Crawling over debris, he makes it to the doorway. But then he realizes, “What I thought was air was actually methane and I could feel, like, droplets; it was moist on the side of my face. So he continues crawling down the dark hallway. Suddenly he puts his hand on a body. He hears a groan. In the dark, Ezell can’t see who it is. (It’s Wyman Wheeler.) Next, he sees a wavering beam of light. Someone is coming down the hallway, their light going up and down as they duck debris hanging from the ceiling and make their way around jutting walls and over a buckled floor. As the approaching person rounds the corner, Ezell recognizes Stan Carden. While they are pulling debris off of Wyman Wheeler, another flashlight arrives, wielded by Chad Murray. Ezell and Carden ask Murray to find a stretcher while they continue removing debris from Wheeler. Thinking it might be quicker to try to help Wheeler walk out, Ezell helps him to his feet, but, after just a couple of steps with his arm around Ezell’s shoulder Wheeler, overcome by pain, says, “Set me down. Set me down.” So Ezell lets him back down. Wheeler says, “Y’all go on. Save yourself.” To which Ezell replies, “No, we’re not going to leave you.”

Suddenly Ezell hears another voice saying, “God help me. Somebody please help me.” He looks. Where their maintenance office had been, all he sees is a pile of wreckage over a pair of feet. Removing that debris requires the efforts of all three: Ezell, Carden, and Murray. When they get the debris off, they realize it’s Buddy Trahan, one of Transocean’s visiting dignitaries. Trahan’s injuries are worse than Wheeler’s, so he gets the first stretcher.

Stan Carden and Chad Murray convey Trahan all the way to the lifeboat station. Ezell stays back. “I stayed right there with Wyman Wheeler because I told him I wasn’t going to leave him, and I didn’t,” he recalled later. “And it seemed like an eternity, but it was only a couple of minutes before they came back with the second stretcher.”

Carrying Wheeler outside of the living quarters, Ezell notices that the main lifeboats are gone. Then he notices a few people starting to deploy a raft. The men carrying Wheeler continue down the walkway to the raft and set the stretcher down. “And after several minutes,” Ezell will recall, “we had everything deployed and got in the life raft. But the main thing is, Wyman was there, you know—he didn’t get left behind.”

But unbeknownst to those in the boats, others are left behind.

Mike Williams, who minutes earlier could have had both now-departed lifeboats to himself, watches eight other survivors drop an inflatable raft from a crane.

In weekly lifeboat drills they’d practiced accounting for everyone. There is no longer such a thing as “everyone.”

Now left watching are Williams, another man, and twenty-three-year-old Andrea Fleytas. Williams experiences several more blasts that he’ll later describe as “Take-your-breath-away explosions. Shake-your-body-to-the-core explosions. Take-your-vision-away explosions.”

Fire spreads from the derrick to the deck itself.

Williams sees in Andrea’s eyes that she seems resigned to death. He says, “It’s okay to be scared. I’m scared, too.” She says, “What are we gonna do?” Williams outlines the choice: Burn up or jump down.

From where they are, it’s ten stories to a black ocean. Bloodied, backlit by raging fire, Williams takes three steps and jumps feet-first. “And I fell for what seemed like forever,” he later recalled. He thinks of his wife, their little girl. “A lotta things go through your mind.”

Love conquers all. But only sometimes.

He crashes into the sea and the momentum takes him way, way beneath the surface. He pops up thinking, “Okay, I’ve made it.” But he feels like he’s burning all over. He’s thinking, “Am I on fire?” He just doesn’t know.

He realizes he’s floating in oil and grease and diesel fuel. The smell and the feel of it. He sees that the oil that has become the sea’s surface beneath the rig is already on fire.

Says to