The Guardian Weekly 14 January 2022
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four times higher per person-hours worked in US waters
than in European waters”. The report traced this disparity
back to the 1980s, when a series of deadly accidents took
place, including a blowout on the Piper Alpha, a platform
in the North Sea, that killed 167 people. In Norway and the
UK , the response was to enact stronger regulations that
put the burden of preventing future disasters on industry.
The US adopted a laxer approach, leaving safety to com-
panies like BP and Transocean, which, a few months after
the Deepwater blowout, announced that it was awarding
bonuses to several senior executives for overseeing the
“ best year in safety performance” in the company’s his-
tory. When Stephen learned about the bonuses, he was
still a Transocean employee. Afterward, he submitted an
angry resignation letter.
MILITARY PSYCHOLOGISTS
sometimes use the term “moral injury” to describe the suf-
fering that some soldiers endure after they carry out orders
that transgress the values at the core of their identity. Such
wounds can also occur when soldiers feel betrayed by their
commanders, violating their sense of “what’s right”. Some-
thing similar appeared to grip Stephen, who felt deeply
betrayed by an industry that upended not only his sense of
security but also his moral bearings and his trust. “I think
there’s the personal betrayal of the company-employee
relationship,” he said. “But there’s an even larger sense
of betrayal. I didn’t think the industry was this bad.” He
paused. “It just kind of takes some hope from humanity,
shatters your illusions a little bit.”
There was one other betrayal that appeared to weigh
on Stephen: the betrayal of himself, the part of him that
loved nature and, after the blowout, as the scale of the
disaster became clear, felt dirtied and implicated. He felt
this in particular on a road trip that Sara persuaded him
to take through some of the places in the Gulf where the
pollution from the spill had begun to wash up. Among their
destinations was Dauphin Island, on Alabama’s Gulf Coast.
During his childhood, Stephen had holidayed there with
his family. After the Deepwater spill, the sand was stained
with oil sludge, a sight that fi lled Stephen with shame and
sadness. “This great place from my childhood was getting
shit on,” he said, “and I was part of the group that shit on it.”
For Sara, too, seeing the impact of the spill dredged up
diffi cult feelings about the world she’d grown up in. When
she watched BP air ads on television burnishing its com-
mitment to the environment, she was furious. But she was
equally upset at environmental groups that, after the spill,
seemed to focus far more attention on the pelicans and
dolphins who’d been harmed than on the rig workers who’d
died. Every day on the news, it seemed, she would see
images of dead seabirds and marine mammals. The faces of
the rig workers never appeared. “It’s just weird,” she said.
But Stephen did not seem to fi nd it so weird. Most of
the people he worked with were “blue-collar guys” and
“country bumpkins” from backwoods towns like the one
he’d grown up in, he noted. The kinds of people “superior
persons” looked down on, in other words. Then he
mentioned another reason why the public might fi nd it
easier to sympathise with dead dolphins than with workers
like him.
“People see the environment as completely innocent,”
he said, “whereas we, just being in that industry, you know,
you kind of brought it on yourself.”Stephen did not seem to begrudge people for feeling this
way. He had, after all, collected a paycheck from Trans-
ocean, making upwards of $60,000 a year as a roustabout.
Were it not for the blowout, he probably would have contin-
ued working in the industry, he told me, for the same reason
most of the blue-collar guys on the Deepwater Horizon did:
the money was good. Some of Stephen’s co-workers on
the Deepwater Horizon earned six-fi gure salaries despite
having nothing more than a high school diploma.
“A path to a life otherwise out of reach” was the phrase
that a team of reporters from the New York Times used to
describe how the crew members on the Deepwater Horizon
viewed their jobs. If environmentalists had little sympathy
for the workers who took these jobs while ignoring the
“dirty facts” about the fossil fuel industry – water pollu-
tion, land degradation, the discharge of the majority of the
US’s carbon emissions – who, really, could blame them?
These dirty facts were real, Stephen acknowledged. On the
other hand, it was not lost on either him or Sara that a lot of
people who saw rig workers as complicit in these dirty facts
were happy enough to pump gasoline into their SUVs and
minivans without feeling the least bit sullied themselves.
“We like to forget that our everyday lives are what’s making
that the reality,” Stephen said.
Who ends up doing this kind of work is shaped by class
but also by geography. In a 1994 book, the sociologists
William Freudenburg and Robert Gramling compared the
status and prevalence of off shore drilling in two states with
large shorelines, Louisiana and California. It was in Califor-
nia that, in 1969, a blowout on an oil platform in the Santa
Barbara Channel fi rst drew attention to the environmental
risks of off shore drilling. The spill prompted then-secretary Rig economy
Offshore oil well
platforms in the
Gulf of Mexico off
Louisiana, a state
where residents
view the industry
favourably
LUKE SHARRETT/
BLOOMBERG/GETTYA dirty job