Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

“STAY AWAY FROM PEOPLE!” she bellowed. “FLY OFF INTO THE BUSHES! STAY! AWAY! FROM PEOPLE!”

She caught her breath. “That’s the problem, is if he got used to people.”

“He’s gonna miss that heat lamp tonight,” someone said. The forecast was calling for cold weather. “He’s gonna wish he were back in that warm cage.”

“No,” said Rhonda. “He hated it in there.”

It heaved toward us: a mountainside of black steel. I was standing on a gangway, clutching the rail as our boat rocked and turned. I was facing port. That means left. It was hard to look anywhere else; the thing approaching to port had no end. It spread up and out from the water, an endless wall of rust-streaked metal, and we were falling toward it.

Duane was there, the trim Boy Scout of the sea, wearing a backpack.

“Don’t let go of the railing until you have a good grip on the ladder,” he said. I made a noise like a strangled fish.

The tanker was so tall and so wide that it seemed to outstrip my entire field of vision. Yet the distance between it and us was surprisingly nimble in the way it diminished. At this rate, I thought—

Then we were at the ladder, a wooden ladder hanging down the rain soaked hull. Wood? Its treads hung from thick ropes dark with sea scum. I grabbed it and found myself clinging to the outside of twenty million gallons of Mexican crude. We had boarded the Pink Sands.

When Port Arthur began its life as an oil town, ships came here to take the stuff away. But now, of course, they bring it in, by the half-million-barrel load. The question, especially pointed in the aftermath of a spill, is how to make sure these ships don’t crash, despite taking so much cargo up such a narrow waterway. Or perhaps the question is why they don’t crash more often. The answer, I was here to learn, is that any large tanker that enters the Sabine-Neches Waterway is required to carry a pair of Sabine pilots.

On the wide, linoleum-floored bridge, we met Captain Tweedel, Duane’s colleague and president of the Sabine Pilots. A tall, clean-cut man wearing chinos and a braided belt, Tweedel had grown up in Port Arthur. (Though he now lived in Beaumont. His wife had insisted on not living in sight of a refinery.)

The two captains got down to work, staring out the window with that look people get when they have just taken control of fifty-five thousand gross tons.

“Full ahead,” Tweedel ordered.

“Full ahead,” said the helmsman.

I was on my second visit to Port Arthur, several months after the Eagle Otome oil spill, and the channel had long since returned to normal operation. But questions still lingered; the government had yet to finish its investigation into the cause of the accident.

In the meantime, the Sabine Pilots had begun working with a public relations consultant, and were surprisingly willing to let me tag along. They wanted their story to get out.

The trick to keeping an oil tanker from crashing and spilling oil all over your ecosystem, it seems, is to have Charlie Tweedel and Duane Bennett standing on the bridge. They stand there, staring out the window, at a piece of water they have studied and navigated for years, and occasionally tell the nice Filipino man at the helm to adjust the rudder by ten degrees. It’s more complicated than that—but not by much.

“Port ten!” said Duane from the captain’s chair. He looked like a nicer, nerdier Captain Kirk.

“Port ten!” came the response. Nothing happened. The deck continued to vibrate with the power of the engine. Then, six hundred feet in front of us, the nose of the tanker began creeping to the left.

Hardly any major harbor or channel lets ships enter without a local pilot aboard. The stakes are simply too high—and the navigation too tricky—to leave it to some guy who doesn’t know the route’s every curve and shoal. The pilots meet their charges in open water, before the ships enter the channel, and clamber aboard—pirates by invitation. Tanker captains are more than happy to hand over the controls, as they must.

“We consider ourselves as the buffer, as protection to the environment,” said Tweedel, staying on message. “The government expects us to act to protect the waterway and the populace from some radical conflagration or pollution.”

“And the accident in January?” I asked.

“I don’t want to talk about that much,” he said. “It’s still under investigation.” He told me there was no single factor the accident could be hung on.

We slid forward through the cold, misty morning, passing from the outer harbor into the green mouth of the channel. Idle oil platforms lingered against the bank to our left, waiting for contracts or to be torn apart for scrap. On the navigation table, I had seen a map of the coast, marked with dozen upon dozen of offshore oil wells, punctuating the Gulf with surprising density. “They’re like fleas,” Tweedel had remarked.

Port Arthur’s ship channel is not only so narrow that two large tankers going in opposite directions would have no room to pass each other, but also so shallow that Tweedel described it as a “muddy ditch.” He told me that, at the moment, we were drawing thirty-nine feet. That meant the bottom of the hull was riding thirty-nine feet below the surface of the channel.

“What’s the maximum draft you can have in the channel?” I asked.

He smiled. “Forty.”

“Midship!” shouted Duane.

“Midship!”

The task of piloting a tanker requires continuous attention. “As a pilot, you’d really be taking a risk to leave the helm for more than a minute or two,” Tweedel said. He pointed at an oncoming barge. “If he ran aground, I’d have to immediately take action. And I’ve seen those guys run aground lots of times.”

“We’re compensated for the risk,” said Duane. Piloting paid well.

Tweedel peered out at the low, misty sky. It was also up to the pilots, he told me, to stop tanker traffic in the channel if visibility was too poor. Today’s conditions were just good enough.

“It gets foggy for three or four days, and people start screaming for their crude oil,” he said. If the supply of oil didn’t keep up, the refineries might have to lower their production—and that would cost them money. There was huge pressure on the pilots to keep traffic moving.

“We want to support the industry guys,” Tweedel said, “but we don’t answer to Motiva or Total.”

We slid forward, an impossibly great momentum, a floating machine literally as long as a skyscraper is tall. I looked over at the helmsman. He was holding a semicircular wheel not unlike the steering wheel of a go-cart. It seemed like it would be very easy, had I wanted, to shove him aside and twirl that wheel, and create a new round of honest work for nearly everyone I had met in Port Arthur.

“Starboard twenty,” said Duane.

“Starboard twenty,” said the helmsman.

Starboard? Earth to Duane! Starboard? I would have said we needed some port rudder, if anything.

“Midship,” said Duane.

“Midship,” said the helmsman.

And with that, subtly, our leviathan shifted its attitude and slid true, perfectly congruent to the grassy shores of the channel.

Duane handed the command off to Tweedel and walked over to the window. I told him I had been playing a game called Drive a Supertanker, and losing.

“It’s more art than science,” he said. “You have to know the science, but there’s a feel you get. If you can’t feel the vessel, you won’t be good as a pilot.”

He took my notebook and started drawing diagrams, explaining the hydrodynamics of a large ship moving through a narrow channel. The size of a ship affects how it handles in such a limited space. As the ship comes closer to the side of the channel, the water being displaced by the vessel creates pressures and suctions that interact with the narrowing space between the ship and the bank. The ship begins to handle differently, steering itself, resisting in ways it wouldn’t in open water. These effects not only constrain how the vessel can be piloted, and how quickly, but also allow the person in control to sense the ship’s position in relation to the channel, based on how it’s handling.