14 January 2022 The Guardian Weekly37
BP’s motto, an ethos that pleased shareholders and drew
praise from business analysts. Safety experts were more
alarmed. In 2005, an explosion at a BP refi nery in Texas
City killed 15 workers. An investigation by the US Chemical
Safety Board faulted BP for pushing for 25% budget cuts
“even though much of the refi nery’s infrastructure and
process equipment were in disrepair”. Between 2007 and
2010, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration,
a regulatory body, cited BP for 760 safety violations, by far
the most of any major oil company.
Leasing the Deepwater Horizon cost BP $1m a day, and
the Macondo well had fallen behind schedule, increasing
the pressure to brush aside concerns that might have slowed
the pace of drilling. Some workers feared that raising such
concerns would get them fi red, which helps explain why
an array of ominous signs – problems with the cement-
ing, fl aws in the blowout preventer – were ignored. Hours
before the rig went up in fl ames, a BP executive on the rig
congratulated the crew for seven years without a “lost-time
incident”. After the blowout, BP scrambled to contain the
oil gushing out of the well, which leaked about 800m litres
of crude into the Gulf, devastating fi sheries and befouling
the coasts of multiple states.THERE WERE ALSO HUMAN COSTS, WHICH
Sara sought to capture in her art. She painted a portrait
of Chris Jones, whose brother, Gordon, was one of 11
workers killed in the disaster. In Sara’s portrait, Jones’s lips
are pursed and his face, painted ash blue, is creased with
anguish. Titled Survivors, Sara’s paintings were stark and
vivid, capturing the raw grief that fi lled the room at the con-
gressional hearing on the Deepwater spill in Washington.
But the portrait she drew of Stephen captured something
diff erent. Based on a photo that was taken during his testi-
mony at the congressional hearing, it shows a bearded fi gure
with a vacant, faraway expression in his eyes. He does notlook grief-stricken so much as bewildered and unmoored.
The bewilderment was still apparent when I met Stephen
several years later. Stephen was in his late 20s , with a shaggy
mop of hair and languid, downcast eyes. H e was taciturn,
nodding occasionally at something Sara said while strain-
ing to keep his gaze from drifting off. Unlike some of the
workers on the Deepwater Horizon, he had managed to
escape from the rig without sustaining any burns or physi-
cal injuries. But as I would come to learn, the absence of
visible wounds was a mixed blessing, prompting friends
to wonder what was wrong with him and exacerbating the
shame he felt for struggling to move on.
Since the explosion, he’d been unable to hold down a job.
He avoided social gatherings. He also had trouble sleeping.
The explosion on the rig had happened at night, collapsing
the stairwell above the room in which Stephen had fallen
asleep after completing a work shift. The blast startled him
awake and sent him racing into the change room, where he
slipped on a pair of fi re-retardant coveralls and fumbled his
way toward the deck, at which point he saw that the entire
rig was smouldering and heard the panicked screams of his
co-workers. It was an experience he now feared reliving
every time he shut his eyes, Sara had come to realise. “The
way I understand it is, he’s constantly preparing for that
wake-up,” she said.
In the days that followed, I visited Stephen and Sara
several times in their apartment, a two-storey dwelling in
a complex of look alike grey bungalows. Much of the time,
Stephen sat on a couch in the living room, sipping black
coff ee from a green mug and, every few minutes, taking
another toke of medical marijuana, which a psychiatrist
had prescribed to quell his anxiety. The same psychiatrist
had diagnosed him with PTSD.
Given what he’d been through – a near-death experience
that shattered his sense of security – this diagnosis made
sense. Stephen was sensitive to loud noises and given to
para noid fears and panic attacks. The rattle of ice in the
freezer was enough to set him off sometimes, Sara said. But
there was something else that seemed to affl ict Stephen :
not fear but anger and disillusionment. These feelings
percolated immediately after the blowout, he told me, when
the rig’s survivors arrived at the hotel in New Orleans. They
were exhausted and still reeling from the shock, yet before
getting to see their families, Stephen said, they were taken
to a meeting room where a Transocean manager delivered
a speech that sounded to him like an exercise in spin. The
experience left a bad taste in Stephen’s mouth. A few weeks
later, a Transocean representative contacted him and, over a
cup of coff ee at Denny’s, off ered him $5,000 for the personal
belongings he’d lost on the rig, which he accepted. Then
the representative asked him to sign a document affi rming
that he had not been injured. Stephen was dumbfounded.
“I’m not signing this,” he told the representative. “I don’t
know if I’m injured yet – this just happened.”
When he had applied for the job at Transocean, Stephen
assumed the industry followed strict safety protocols. After
the blowout, as he read about how many warning signs on
the Deepwater Horizon had been ignored, a wave of disil-
lusionment washed over him. To some extent, accidents on
off shore rigs were unavoidable. But the toll in lives was not
the same in all countries, noted a report on the Deepwater
spill that a bipartisan national commission submit-
ted to President Obama. Between 2004 and 2009,
fatalities in the off shore industry were “more than Aftermath
Sara Lattis
Stone listens to
her husband,
Stephen, testify
before the
House judiciary
committee; a
brown pelican,
Louisiana’s state
bird, is mired
in oil
CHIP SOMODEVILLA/
GETTY; CHARLIE RIEDEL/
AP