Tugboat pilot Barry Meredith hauls barges of oil as big as football fields for a living. He calls his route “the loop,” which starts with him guiding his boat and two empty 300-foot barges into the Port of Catoosa, outside Tulsa, Okla. Meredith steers toward a cluster of seven storage tanks brimming with crude that’s been trucked in from wells in Oklahoma and Kansas.
Moving 43,000 barrels of oil from the tanks into the barges is a 12-hour process, and one mistake can mean disaster. “You get 4,000 barrels going through that hose every hour, and you let something ass up. … Man, it makes a big mess,” Meredith says in his Florida drawl, his face deeply tanned from 19 years on a tugboat. At dawn the next day he’ll leave for Mobile, Ala. The route of winding rivers is more than 1,300 miles long and takes about a week.
