14 January 2022 The Guardian WeeklyA dirty job
hotel where she and other family members had gathered to
wait. “Are you OK?” she asked him. “Yeah, I’m fi ne,” he said.
Later, when she saw him shuffl e through the hall that had
been cordoned off for surviving crew members, she knew
immediately that he wasn’t fi ne. His expression was blank
and, like the other survivors, he looked shell shocked and
traumatised. “When he walked in, from the look in his eyes,
it was obvious that something horrible had happened,”
she recalled.In 1937, a year after he visited the British coalfi elds of
Yorkshire and Lancashire, George Orwell refl ected on
society’s dependence on the people who extracted these
resources from beneath the earth. What Orwell found after
descending into the pits – “heat, noise, confusion, darkness,
foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space” – struck
him as a “picture of hell”, teeming with miners whose exer-
tions were as invisible as they were essential to society.
“In the metabolism of the western world the coalminer
is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the
soil,” Orwell wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier. “He is a sort
of grimy caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything
that is not grimy is supported.”
He went on: “ Practically everything we do, from eating an
ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing
a novel, involves the use of coal, directly or indirectly. It
is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior
persons can remain superior .”
In Orwell’s day, the griminess of coal mining – the ash and
dust, the foul air – was physical, staining the clothing, as
well as the faces and bodies, of the workers who ventured
underground. By the time Stephen Stone was on the Deep-
water Horizon, the taint of working in the fossil fuel
extraction industry was less physical than moral.
People who cared about the environment associatedBy Eyal Press
When Deepwater Horizon exploded in 2010, Stephen Stone was
fortunate to escape with his life. He and his wife Sara have spent the
years since fi ghting for justice from the oil industry they once trusted
O
N THE MORNING OF 21 APRIL 2010,
Sara Lattis Stone began frantically
calling the burn units of various
hospitals in Alabama and Louisiana.
She was searching for news about her husband, Stephen,
who worked on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico
where a massive explosion had occurred. The blast took
place the day before Stephen was scheduled to return home
from his latest three-week hitch on the rig, a semi-
submersible floating unit called the Deepwater Horizon.
In the hours after a spokesperson from Transocean, the
company that owned the Deepwater Horizon, called to tell
her that an “incident” had required the rig to be evacuated,
Sara veered between panic and denial. One minute, she was
telling herself that Stephen was fi ne. The next, she was con-
vinced that she would never see him again. On Facebook,
she came across frightening messages – “the water’s on
fi re!”, “the rig is burning” – posted by the spouses of other
workers. At one point, Sara got on the phone with one of
them, a woman who had her TV tuned to the same channel
that she was watching, which was airing live coverage of the
blowout. As they peered at the screen, they heard the same
update, describing the blast as a catastrophic accident and
raising the possibility that no one on the rig had survived.
The news made them drop their phones and scream.
Eventually, Sara received another call from Transocean,
informing her that although the blowout had caused multi-
ple fatalities, Stephen was among those who had managed
to escape from the burning rig. The survivors were now
being transported by ferry to a hotel in New Orleans, she
was told. After consulting her mother, Sara , who lived in
Katy, Texas, tossed some belongings into a suitcase, drove
to Houston airport and boarded the next available fl ight to
the Gulf. The following morning, at about 3.30am, she got
a call from Stephen, who told her he was on his way to the