Survivors tell a harrowing tale of lapses in sea disaster

‘It was a 15-hour battle between life and death in the raging sea. I confronted death several times’

When India's weather office sent out cyclone warnings on May 13 and most vessels moved to safety, one barge working on Oil and Natural Gas Corp's field off the Mumbai coast stayed put.

That decision would prove fatal when Tauktae, a storm with the intensity of a category 3 hurricane, struck on the evening of May 16. It tore apart the Papaa 305's anchors and slammed it into an offshore platform, taking down 261 people on board. Since May 17, 186 have been rescued, 70 bodies have been retrieved and five people remain missing. The storm left over 100 dead overall across several states.

India's oil ministry has ordered an investigation led by a group of senior government officials into the accident, and wants a report within a month. State-run ONGC, and its billionaire offshore engineering contractor are under growing pressure to explain their roles in one of the world's worst offshore oilfield disasters in recent memory.

Interviews with survivors, rescue officials and executives from ONGC suggest that a serious misreading of the weather, as well as human error and safety lapses led to the tragedy.

It was a busy time in the Arabian Sea on India's western coast when the cyclone hit the area.

Thousands of welders, painters and engineers had come from all over the country to work on renovating the giant metal structures ONGC used for pulling out oil from the seabed. They lived in the barges hired by Afcons Infrastructure, an engineering company owned by billionaire Pallonji Mistry's Shapoorji Pallonji Group. Afcons was the main contractor for the jobs of fixing decays and painting rusted pipes and metals in order to protect the structures from the corrosive of the sea.

The monsoon was closing in for arrival early next month, and the contractors were in a rush to complete as much work as they could on the platforms.

While most of the vessels returned to anchorages close to the coast, Papaa 305 anchored very near its original location, some 70 km from the coast. The weather deteriorated rapidly from the evening of May 16.

After the cyclone pushed the barge into a platform and caused it to sink on the evening of May 17, hundreds of the people on board clambered onto life rafts to escape. But almost all the rafts were in damaged condition, leaving them with no option but to jump into the sea, according to three survivors. Battling onslaught strong winds and high waves, the surviving crew drifted in their life jackets miles away from the barge.

"It was a 15-hour battle between life and death in the raging sea," said Agnel V. Varkey, a 25-year-old engineer from southern Kerala state who survived the disaster. "I confronted death several times. The waves would sweep me away every time I tried getting closer to the rescue ships."

Varkey and other survivors, who did not want to be identified fearing consequences to their jobs, pinpoint the decision by barge master Rakesh Ballav—who wasn't among those rescued—not to move Papaa 305 closer to the coast as the reason for the tragedy. Some of them said Ballav's decision was the result of pressure on the barge to complete pending work on the offshore platform before the monsoon rains.

M.R.H. Shaikh, a 49-year-old engineer working on Papaa 305, filed a police complaint against Ballav in Mumbai alleging that he ignored the cyclone warnings. The barge master told the workers that the storm would pass in a few hours and it would be safer if the barge stayed anchored where it was near the platform, according to the complaint.

As the investigation into the tragedy continues and the survivors await answers, Varkey, now recuperating at his parental home in Kozhikode, says he isn't sure he'll ever return to the sea.

"Everyone is telling me, don't go back there."