The Vegas of Commercial Diving??

February 19, 2009

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Imagine this…

You’re a commercial diver working on an oil rig assignment for months at a time. But the oil rig has been converted into a luxury hotel. Your ratty beds and old mattresses are now well-kept rooms in the hotel. The sludge that you call dinner is now a freshly caught fish prepared by the hotel chef. Your down time will consist of mingling with guests and relaxing by the pool…as opposed to playing Playstation and spending ridiculous amounts of time bored out of your mind. Your family can come visit you in the middle of a long shift to break up the time away. Once your assignment is done, stay a few extra days and enjoy some time relaxing, having a few drinks and partying with the guests.

And best of all, rather than losing jobs, this would probably create a ton more for you divers.

”][image courtesy of MorrisArchitects]

Morris Architects has a plan to take some of the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico (there are over 4,000 of them currently) that are in line to be decommissioned and turn them into luxury hotels. They’re thinking about it turning into the Dubai of the Gulf of Mexico.

Who knows, this could turn into a pretty cool place to go take a visit and maybe offer up some adventure by putting guests into commercial dive equipment and letting them test it out at shallow depths. I’m sure after 30 minutes in a dive hat they’ll have a whole new respect for the work you Commercial Divers do on a daily basis. And we all know that the sea-life you get concentrating around the rigs is a pretty cool thing to watch. You might even get some tourists snapping pictures of you working with their underwater cameras. Who would have thought commercial divers may turn into a tourist attraction at a luxury resort?? ”]Or even cooler would be to offer tours to the guests to watch you guys actually working on these rigs. That’s the BIG upside here fellas, turning these things into hotels may raise the safety requirements and create a ton of jobs in the Gulf. And now, rather than being a seedy platform full of guys…you’ll have a hotel room to relax in and a ton of guests to mingle with in between dives. Their theory is that it’s better for the environment to turn them into hotels than to blow them up. What I didn’t know is that before a rig is blown up, Marine Biologists fly around the rig for 30 minutes looking for Dolphins or Sea Turtles. If there aren’t any around…bombs away!! Yeah you kill a few fish, but not really any that people care about. The flip side to this is that a rig quickly turns into a reef-like habitat on the ocean floor and can harbor a ton of sealife. What’s cool about how they want to build these is that each of the rooms will be fabricated onshore, then transported as cargo containers and stacked onto the rigs. ”]