The Glomar Java Sea - 9/7/25

Usually when I put one of these letters together, I list about twenty topics I find interesting, then edit those down to something manageable. However, in the chaotic environment in which we live today, there are almost too many things to try to elaborate on. So, I thought I'd change things up for this edition.

Next month will mark the forty-second anniversary of the Glomar Java Sea disaster, one of the worst tragedies in the history of the oil business. At the time, I lived in Singapore and commuted to the tiny country of Brunei, working a 14/14 schedule. I wrote about this event in my book, Into The Storm. My new book (in progress) is loosely based on aspects from this event. What follows is a condensed version of what I wrote prior:

During the time I worked in Brunei, just months prior to heading to the Jim Cunningham operation, one of the worst tragedies in oilfield history took place in the South China Sea off Hainan Island. The drillship, Glomar Java Sea sank during Typhoon Lex and the entire crew of eighty-one men was lost on October 25, 1983. At the time, the rig was eight years old and capable of working in water depths of up to 1,000 feet. The Java Sea was the first American rig to work in Chinese waters and was under contract to Arco at the time.

There are several reasons this particular tragedy has stuck with me over the years. First, I’ve always thought with just a couple of turns of fate I could have easily been on that rig. When I went to work for Reading & Bates, I had an offer from Global and seriously considered it. I also had wound up in Asia, partly because I had a long history there by then. And, as things would turn out, I would find myself working in that very same area just months later on the new semisubmersible, Jim Cunningham, the second rig there. Back during that time, the whole event was cloaked in secrecy, and finding any information around the actual cause or details of the hours leading up to its demise was nearly impossible.

Obviously, back then there was no Internet, and those with a specific understanding of what occurred weren’t very forthcoming with the findings at the time. All we knew was that we were about to follow one of our competitors as the second American drilling rig to operate in an area where everyone onboard had lost their lives due to a typhoon, weather we’d regularly see first-hand. Truth is, any of us working for R&B during that time could easily have wound up as part of the Java Sea crew. The fact that I’d spent so much time on the Indonesian island of Java, also resonated.

As I look back at it all with the benefit of hindsight, it seems fairly strange that nobody from Reading & Bates (the company I worked for) really addressed it with us prior to mobilizing to the location off Hainan Island in Chinese waters.

Apparently, the storm (Lex) had started out as a tropical disturbance in the vicinity of the Marshall Islands about eleven days before. As it approached the Philippines six days later, it was upgraded to a tropical cyclone. As of two days later (October 22), routine drilling operations continued with wind speeds around twelve knots and five-foot swells.

According to the National Transportation Safety Report dated March 3, 1987, the Assistant Rig Manager, who was normally based in the company’s Zianjhiang office, but happened to have been onboard the rig, made a MARISAT call to the drilling group Vice President in Houston just before the worst happened.

An examination of the clocks aboard the wreck during the diving survey in March 1984 indicates that the Glomar Java Sea sank about 2355 on October 25, 1983, or approximately nine minutes after the last transmission was cut off at 2346. The rig likely went down as the conversation was taking place.

The Java Sea sank upside down in about 315 feet of water about 1,650 feet southwest of its anchored position over the well, resting on the sea floor in an inverted position. Underwater videotapes of the sunken drillship were taken during November 1983 and March 1984. The videotapes showed a major structural failure amidships on the starboard side. The fracture ran from the main deck plating, down the starboard side shell plating, and into the bottom plating. The videotapes also showed a major deformation of the lower side shell plating for about fifteen feet forward and twenty-five feet aft of the fracture and some damage to the shell plating near the bow. The derrick was missing and the deckhouse was damaged.

During the March 1984 diving survey, many of the bodies were found in staterooms with lifejackets on, indicating that although the crew was prepared for an emergency, the capsizing occurred suddenly and unexpectedly perhaps before the crew were directed to abandon the drillship.

To this day, there are pages of information all over the Internet offered by proponents for the sabotage theory and a lot of it is not attributed to any one source. But it’s fairly obvious there was a large sector of the public that believed there was much more to the story than what had been reported at the time. Adding fuel to this is the fact that the Hughes (as in Howard Hughes) Glomar Explorer had been built in 1972, ostensibly to “extract manganese modules” from the ocean floor, as described by Howard Hughes himself. Later, the Los Angeles Times broke the story that the Explorer was being used by the CIA to recover the Soviet diesel-electric submarine K-129 that sunk 1,500 miles northwest of Hawaii in 1969. The water depth where the sub rested was 16,500 feet and required a large ship to handle. The CIA had decided a conventional ship would be too obvious, so they came up with an elaborate ruse to use the Explorer instead.

In 1974, the ship recovered a portion of K-129, but as the section was being lifted to the surface, a mechanical failure in the grapple caused two-thirds of the recovered section to break off. This lost section is said to have held many of the most-sought items, including the code book and nuclear missiles. The recovered section held two nuclear-tipped torpedoes and some cryptographic machines, along with the bodies of six Soviet submariners, who were given a formal, filmed burial at sea.

The main point being, to a paranoid communist government, the precedent of an American drilling company having cooperated with the CIA on a top-secret project of that magnitude would no doubt have raised some level of suspicion. Also, there was apparently tension between China and Vietnam due to the area’s close proximity to the border.

In addition to these sabotage theories were rumors about survivors having been taken hostage and locked up in Vietnamese prison camps. Most of what I’m including here came from the Internet, and I’m unable to attribute the information to its source because I can’t find it listed anywhere.

When the American diving expedition took place, it was determined that one of the ship's large lifeboats was launched and that an attempt had been made to launch another. Their film was seen by the mother of one of the lost crewmen. She reported that the crack in the hull of the ship at one point was a hole forty-eight inches across, which was punctured inward, “as though the rig had been hit by something that exploded." This fueled additional speculation that the vessel had, in fact, been attacked rather than simply mortally damaged by the typhoon.

Officials believed it was possible that survivors may have been able to abandon the ship before it sank. And that leads to some interesting developments regarding a crew member named John Pierce. Sometime around 1985, reports started surfacing from Southeast Asia that as many as twelve crew members were being held in Vietnamese prison camps. One of the survivors was identified by a Vietnamese refugee as American crewman John Pierce.

Douglas F. Pierce, father of John Pierce, reported that the refugee had seen his son, five other Americans, and eight Chinese when they were brought into a prison in Da Nang, where the refugee was being held. John Pierce gave the refugee his father’s business card and two sticks of gum. Mr. Pierce gave the information to the Defense Intelligence Agency who determined that the refugee had not been in the camp at all, but had received the business card by mail from a friend, not directly from Pierce. DIA further determined that the incident had occurred in late October 1983, shortly after the Java Sea went down.

In 1989 a Japanese monk named Yoshida was released from a Vietnamese prison after being held for years. Yoshida was shown a photograph of John Pierce and stated that he looked very familiar, but nothing was ever provided.

Now, as I walk through the sequence of events the Java Sea experienced over the days leading up to October 25, 1983, I’m reminded of a couple of things that I’ve seen repeatedly. First, is the speed at which things offshore can deteriorate. Obviously with the advantage of hindsight, it’s clear the Java Sea should have headed for a location offering more protection from the storm. According to the reports they had two contingency escape routes, but elected to ride it out based on the assumption that the storm’s threat level didn’t justify the lost time drilling. And, as the NTSB noted, at the very minimum, non-essential personnel should have been evacuated.

But the takeaway for me here is that there was that same false sense of security that many of us tended to have, particularly back then. The rig was clearly much more vulnerable to weather than perceived.  The other is just how unaware people can be when catastrophe is staring them straight in the eyes. The assistant rig manager was inside, on the phone. He simply had to be unaware of the fact that everyone onboard would die in a matter of minutes. It happened that fast.