[BITList] The eleven men who died at the Deep-Water Horizon blowout.

[FS]

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    Esquire <http://www.esquire.com/>

    http://www.esquire.com/features/gulf-oil-spill-lives-0910


      Eleven Lives


        The oil will have stopped gushing into the Gulf. The shoreline
        and the estuaries and the beaches will have been scrubbed clean
        by man and nature. BP and Transocean will have resumed business
        as usual. But the original wound will never heal. This is the
        story of what's been lost.

    By Tom Junod

    Deepwater Horizon Accident

    Gerald Herbert/AP

    *The pelicans are damned.* They are damned in that they are doomed ?
    doomed, many of them, to wear viscous brown cowls of oil until they
    die. They are damned as individual creatures struggling to survive
    and reproduce, and they are damned as a species, their habitats
    befouled and destroyed. From television screens, from Internet slide
    shows and the pages of magazines, they look at us, their round eyes
    peering out of their grotesque vestments, until we can't look at
    them. Their dignity is both utterly violated and implacably intact.
    Entirely mute, they still manage to say,/You did this. You did this.
    You did this./

    But the pelicans are also damned in that they are damned pelicans.
    As in, "those damned pelicans." As in, "Every time they show that
    damned fire, they have to show those damned pelicans." As in, "I'm
    sorry, but eleven human beings died out there, not just a bunch of
    damned pelicans." As in, "My husband is more important than some
    damned pelican."

    The people who say these things are not lacking in sympathy or pity.
    They like pelicans. But they loved their husbands and they loved
    their sons and they loved their fathers and they loved their fiancés
    and they loved their friends, and they have suffered the experience
    of having them taken away. They were taken away when the oil rig
    they were working on fifty miles from shore in the Gulf of Mexico
    exploded on the night of April 20, and then they were taken away
    again when the tragedy of the environmental apocalypse ? the
    environmental /judgment/ ? unleashed by the explosion outstripped
    the tragedy of their loss. They were taken away when our loss, as a
    nation whose health is dependent on the health of our oceans, was
    deemed greater than the loss of those whose individual worlds were
    obliterated. They have been taken away every time the story has been
    told, and the story has been told endlessly. There were eleven of
    them who died on the Deepwater Horizon. They died on the black
    ocean, in the black night, far away from our eyes or our interest,
    in untrammeled obscurity. They died as privately as men working on a
    crew possibly can, and then they died again as publicly as the
    availability of videotape would allow. Many people knew they were
    dead before their families did; now their families have to
    /watch/ what killed them, have to watch the immediate aftermath of
    their deaths over and over, as every story about the damned spill
    leads with footage of the damning fire.

    "We've had to turn the TV off," says Tracy Kleppinger, whose
    husband, Karl, was one of the eleven. "They show it /all the
    time./ They call it the fire that started the oil spill. But that's
    not what it is to me and my son and to the other wives and families.
    To us, it's the fire that killed our husbands. And that rig is not
    just a rig. That ocean is not just an ocean. It's the graveyard
    where Karl is buried."

    It is their story. They are at the heart of it, just as all but one
    of the eleven men who died on the rig were at the heart of the rig,
    members of a drilling team charged with drilling a
    two-and-a-half-mile hole into the bottom of the ocean. And yet their
    story is not /the/ story. The story that begins with the men does
    not end with them, because the story is like the spill itself:
    Nobody knows how far it will go and nobody knows its final
    political, financial, ecological, or spiritual cost. It is the most
    open-ended American story since the Iranian hostage crisis thirty
    years ago, and it left the men behind as soon as it began. The
    footage of the fire doesn't lead /to/ recognition of the men whose
    lives it destroyed; it leads /away/ from them. It leads, instead, to
    those damned pelicans, whose eyes stare in double reproach. The
    pelicans have won by losing, and every time the families of the
    eleven see them, they feel that America's mourning is misplaced.
    Indeed, they feel that America is being told to mourn for nature
    instead of for man ? being told that nature is more important than
    man. They believe the opposite, fervently. They have /lived/ the
    opposite, each time the men they loved left home to go to work in
    the middle of the ocean. They have chosen the opposite, and so has
    an America that lives on the oil that their men took from the ground
    at unimaginable cost. Now their men are dead, and they feel that
    America has chosen to forget them. They would like them to be
    remembered. No, more than that: They would like us to know them and
    the lives they led and the choices they made, so that we can once
    and for all answer the question that they ask themselves every time
    they turn on the television:

    What's more important, the lives of eleven good men or a bunch of
    damned pelicans?

    Dead Men Gulf Oil Spill

    *They're all good men.*Let's start there. They're good men in that
    they are Christian men, family men, Southern men. Two live in Texas,
    four in Mississippi, five in Louisiana; except for one who lives in
    Baton Rouge, they all live in small towns. Most of them live where
    they were born and where they grew up. They didn't leave, and they
    work on the Deepwater Horizon so that they don't have to. By the
    iron rhythm of three weeks on, three weeks off, they spend half the
    year far from home so that they can spend the other half at home, in
    towns like Newellton, Louisiana; or Natchez, Mississippi; or
    Midfield, Texas. They leave so they can stay, and their story ? this
    story ? is the story of how the men who never left become the men
    who have never come back.

    They're all the same kind of men. Though they will die as seamen ?
    as mariners, in the eyes of the law, since the Deepwater Horizon,
    though called a rig, *is really a damned boat* ? they live on land
    and are very much of it. They want nothing more from the ocean than
    the opportunity to get paid punching holes in its floor, and one of
    them, when asked to go on a deep-sea fishing trip, answers, "Why
    would I want to do that for? I'm on vacation. I don't want to go to
    the office." Where they fish is where they hunt: In the woods near
    their homes or in camps and ranches set aside for the purpose, and
    if they have boats, they keep them in their backyards, near their
    trucks and four-wheelers. A couple of them are farmers who lost or
    left their farms and who first went to the rigs because they like
    working outside.

    They range in age from twenty-two to fifty-six. They are big old
    boys, most of them, beefy but strong as hell. They like country
    music and metal, Nascar and college football, and they mostly vote
    Republican, when they vote at all. They drink beer instead of
    whiskey and submit to random drug tests before they are allowed to
    step on the helicopters that bring them to work. The days when men
    used to go out on the rigs to hide or to run away ? the days of
    so-called oil-field trash ? have given way to weeks when the men
    take classes necessary for professional advancement, and bring along
    their wives. All but one are married or engaged to be so; all but
    one have children and devote themselves to them with the special
    ardor of men who know what it is to have someone missing from their
    life. The young ones are often the children of divorce; the older
    ones are as likely as not to be in their second marriage. Several
    have deaths in their families ? a brother, a sister, a sister's
    baby, all taken away ? and two of them, at least, found women in
    dire circumstances, in what the women called living hells, and
    succeeded in rescuing them, at least for a while. They are the kind
    of men who like being saviors. They are not the kind of men who like
    being saved, except by the Savior himself.

    What the men have in common most of all, however, is the central
    ritual of their lives and the lives of their families: the hitch. At
    the end of every two or three weeks at home, their moods change.
    They start visiting friends and family members and saying goodbye.
    They start grilling out for their children. They take their wives
    out to dinner. And then, late at night or early in the morning,
    they're gone. They get in their trucks and start making their way
    from land to air to sea. If they work for Transocean, as nine of the
    eleven do, they make their way either to Houma, Louisiana, or, along
    with workers for the drilling contractor M-I Swaco, to Port
    Fourchon. They get tested and hand in their paperwork, and then
    climb onto one of the helicopters chartered to take them out to the
    rig. Though 50 miles from the closest shoreline, the Deepwater
    Horizon is nearly 175 miles from Houma and 125 miles from Port
    Fourchon, and it would seem a long, long way from home for the men
    if it weren't already their home six months out of the year, and if
    the men they meet once they get out there weren't already their
    second families. There are 126 workers out on the rig, and some of
    them have known one another since the rig was commissioned in a
    South Korean shipyard ten years ago and a crew was sent to learn the
    thing as it was being built, and then to bring it through the Indian
    Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope and into the Gulf, at five
    knots an hour. Several members of that original crew are now the
    senior members of the Deepwater Horizon's drilling team, which is
    known as one of the most experienced in the business and which has
    recently gotten substantial bonuses for drilling the deepest well in
    the world and which, since February 2010, has been drilling in the
    underwater Mississippi Canyon an intransigent well officially known
    as Macondo but known to them as the Well from Hell.

    Jason Anderson is the tool pusher. At thirty-five, he is the leader
    of the drilling team and has considerable authority on the rig,
    which means that he is something of a prodigy. He is serious about
    work, ambitious as hell, but when the men say he'd give you the
    shirt off his back, they mean it literally. Back in Korea, there was
    a guy who must have skipped geography ? he didn't know that it snows
    there. Jason saw him shivering and gave him his heavy coveralls.
    That's why he's the tool pusher.

    Dewey Revette's the driller. From Mississippi. He's forty-eight.
    He's quiet, but he's always grinning. You can see him every day
    taking a walk around the deck of the rig before his shift starts ?
    before, in the language of the rig, he goes "on tour." Talks to
    people. Asks questions. Checks everything out. Careful. If Dewey
    says it's okay, it probably is. If he says it ain't, well then ...

    The two assistant drillers are Stephen Curtis and Don Clark.
    Stephen's the deer hunter, a slayer of beasts ? he got married in
    formal camo. He's forty and also an ex-marine, so if you're lazy
    he'll ride you like a mule. He's the coolest of cool, if he likes
    you, but if he doesn't, he's /hard./ Don's not like that. At
    forty-eight, he's the only black man on the drilling team, and he's
    extremely religious. His son has asked whether he could work on the
    rig, and he's said no. "Too dangerous."

    Karl Kleppinger is one of the floor hands. His nickname is Big
    Poppa. He's the biggest of the big old boys, thirty-eight, quiet but
    a prankster. And strong. A few years ago, the rig almost sank when
    someone up on the bridge opened a valve in the pontoon and it filled
    with water. The rig listed badly and was evacuated. They put out a
    call for volunteers to go into the pontoon ? into the water ? and
    turn the valve by hand. Karl is one of the guys who did it. Rig
    would've sunk otherwise. Big Poppa.

    There's some young guys, too. You know what's funny about the young
    guys? They worry more than the old guys. They worry about their
    kids, they worry about their wives. Shane Roshto, for example, is
    twenty-two, but every time you see him, he's in the smoke shack.
    Guys get on him about it a little ? Hey, Shane, what the hell? It's
    three in the morning, why ain't you sleeping? But Shane's got a
    young wife at home, and though she can change the oil in a truck and
    skin a deer, she's afraid of the dark. There's a crane operator
    named Dale Burkeen who's thirty-seven and has sort of taken Shane
    under his wing. Smoke shack's got a lot of wise men, and he's one of
    them.

    Roy Kemp is another young one. He's twenty-seven. A little brash but
    funny. He loves to give you a little shit, and what you think about
    him depends on what you think about getting it. Adam Weise is the
    only one of the drilling team who's not married. But he's got a
    girlfriend who's twenty years older than he is. Adam's twenty-four,
    but he's given his old truck to his girlfriend's son on the grounds
    that what every boy needs when he turns sixteen is a damned truck.
    He's endured his family's initial disapproval, and he's in love.

    The last two men on the rig floor are the two who don't work for
    Transocean. They work for M-I Swaco, the contractor that provides
    the drilling fluid for the well, the so-called mud that does
    everything from lubricating the drill bit to keeping the oil down in
    the ground with its weight. They're off to the side a little and
    kind of quiet, except when the conversation turns to LSU. Blair
    Manuel is Cajun and, at fifty-six, one of the oldest guys on the
    rig. "Poppa Bear" he's called. In a few months he's going to get
    married for the second time, to a woman who lost her husband and
    fell into a depression that Blair rescued her from. Gordon Jones is
    a golfer who brings a putter with him every time he comes out. He's
    twenty-eight, and in a few weeks, maybe even a few days, his wife
    back home in Baton Rouge will deliver him a second son.

    Yes, they are all the same kind of men in that they are all good
    men. To their families, however, they are all the same kind of men
    only in that they are all unique, all one of a kind, and all
    irreplaceable. "I could search the whole world over and never find
    another Stephen Curtis," his wife, Nancy, says, and in this
    insistence on singularity she speaks collectively. It is their final
    commonality. Not only are all eleven working at the very center of
    the Deepwater Horizon, around what is known as the "drill floor" or
    the "rig floor," on the night of April 20, they have all chosen to
    be there for reasons that defy any attempt to understand them as a
    group. They have all chosen to be there for reasons that only their
    families can understand. Or, put another way, they have all chosen
    to be there for reasons we can all understand, because they have
    chosen to be there out of love.

    Don Clark Bp Spill

    *They are leaving now.*One by one, they are making their way to the
    door, to the truck, to the helicopter, to the rig, to the drill
    floor. Don Clark is the first to go, because he always seems to be
    leaving anyway. He is both the most firmly rooted and the most
    restless. He lives in Newellton, Louisiana. He has always lived in
    Newellton, Louisiana. He will never leave Newellton, Louisiana. And
    yet he is always leaving. It happens all the time: His wife, Sheila,
    looks for him and he's gone. His daughter looks for him and he's
    gone. They ask each other, "Where Daddy at?" and then they look at
    the door. Daddy's gone for a walk, in Newellton.

    Now, you have to understand something about Newellton: It is small,
    and it's getting smaller. It is a dying town in what used to be
    cotton country, right off U. S. Highway 65. More than twenty years
    ago, it lost its sawmill, followed by its hospital. It lost the
    stores in its one-block downtown, and it lost the white students in
    its schools when its schools were consolidated by Tensas Parish.
    Over the past few years, it has even lost its nursing home.
    "Newellton was never rich," Sheila Clark says, "but Newellton used
    to be /happier./" And yet Don Clark was happy in Newellton. He was
    born there, one of eleven children who grew up on his parents' farm.
    They had ninety acres of soybeans. They had the land that their
    people had when there /were/ no black landowners in Newellton, and
    in case the children ever forgot it, they had their grandparents
    living on the property in a two-room house covered in asbestos
    shingles. Don didn't forget it. He wanted to farm. He went to school
    in Newellton. He played high school basketball in Newellton. He
    stayed in Newellton when half his brothers and sisters scattered.
    But you can't make a living off ninety acres of soybeans in
    Newellton. The land was leased out, and Don earned a living as a
    municipal worker. Then he met Sheila in Newellton, and she, who
    might have been another man's reason for leaving, became his reason
    to stay.

    She was twenty-five, and she was not from Newellton. She was from
    the city. She was from St. Louis. She was fleeing a bad marriage.
    She had a young son and she was five months pregnant. Her
    grandparents lived in Newellton, and she moved in with them. She met
    Don at a card game arranged by an aunt. She was tall and she was
    regal, with a face like the faces of the African art she and Don
    later collected and skin the color of something you had to go into a
    mine for, lustrous and nearly gold. As soon as she met Don, she
    called her mother and said, "There's a crazy man here. I think he's
    courting me." She was a woman on the run, but Don took them all in,
    and what her son remembered at Don's memorial service was the
    inexplicable surprise of his mother's smile. He was not used to his
    mother smiling. She never smiled in St. Louis. But she smiled in
    Newellton.

    Don never went away until he got the job on the rig. Sheila did not
    want him to take it. She wanted him to stay where he meant to stay,
    in Newellton. But Don always had an answer for her: "You work in
    Newellton, you work for /people,/" he said. It was different on the
    rig. On the rig if you did your job, you could go as far as you
    wanted to. And they paid you. One day he told her about an old
    farmhouse he'd seen and took her out to visit it. Oh Lord, he was
    crazy. The house was so overgrown, it was invisible. /"This?"/ she
    said. But he persisted, as he always did, and when he found the
    original wood floor, it was like finding gold, because it was like
    finding Sheila. You could/stare/ at that floor. But the best part of
    the house was where it was and where it remains. It's in the middle
    of the fields. It has a cornfield for a side yard, a soybean field
    out back, and a pecan grove facing the front entrance. They own none
    of it; white people do, just as white people own all the rest of the
    big farms in Newellton. But Don loves living out in the waving
    green. It calls to him. He opens that front door facing the pecan
    grove and he's gone. He's taking a walk in Newellton, talking to
    everyone he meets. Sheila sometimes thinks he's holding Newellton
    together by walking in it. She sometimes even thinks that Donald
    Clark /is/ Newellton. Then one day he goes out the door and does not
    come back. She is used to him leaving. She is used to him being
    gone. But it's been months now. Don should be coming home.

    blair manuel
    *Blair Manuel*

    *Blair Manuel* loved the farm, and then he loved a woman. He worked
    on the farm with his daddy, L. D., in Eunice, Louisiana. They worked
    side by side. But he lost the farm at around the same time he lost
    his marriage, and he went to work on the rigs. "How else is a
    forty-year-old farmer going to reinvent himself?" asks Melinda
    Becnel, his fiancée. Blair met Melinda four years ago on the beach
    at Gulf Shores. She'd lost her husband four years earlier and was
    in, she says, "a bad place, a very bad place." Blair walked right up
    to her and said hello. He wound up moving in with her. They set a
    date: July 9. It's very important to set dates when you work
    offshore, because the company sets dates for you in the form of the
    hitch and you have to work around them. You want to get married? You
    better set a date. You want to be there when your baby is born? You
    better set a date. Your child is having a first-birthday party? Set
    a date. But the rig that Blair was working on was undergoing some
    changes and the company reassigned him to the Deepwater Horizon.

    karl kleppinger
    *Karl Kleppinger and his wife, Tracy, in a wedding photo.*

    *Karl Kleppinger* takes his truck to Houma. It's a loud truck, and
    he makes no apologies for it. He loves revving it loud, not only for
    himself but also for his son, Aaron. Aaron is seventeen. Karl has
    always known that Aaron loves that truck, wants that truck. But Karl
    doesn't know if Aaron is ready for that truck. He doesn't know if he
    ever will be. So he revs it up and he makes it roar, and he watches
    Aaron's big open face break into a smile.

    Karl lives in Natchez, Mississippi. He lives with Aaron and his
    wife, Tracy. He lives just a couple of doors down from Tracy's
    parents. He lives near Tracy's sisters. Tracy's family is his
    family, and has been his family for a long time. "Karl had
    abandonment issues," Tracy says. "His mother left him when he was a
    baby. For the rest of his life he went around thinking he wasn't a
    good enough man. There never was a better one."

    Tracy's mother, Kathleen Sills, picked Karl out before Tracy did. He
    was at a church meeting and after an early life of thinking he was
    nothing, he met a woman who thought he was something ? a woman who
    came home and told Tracy she'd met the man Tracy was going to marry
    and then invited him over for dinner. He came and he stayed. After
    high school he served in the first Gulf war. When he was over there,
    he wrote Tracy a letter that ended with a PS: "Will you marry me?"
    She played it cool in her response, until she ended with her answer:
    "By the way, yes." One day after he came home, he was wondering
    aloud how a veteran with no degree and no specialized training was
    ever going to make any money, and a friend said, "I know a job that
    pays good money and all you need is a pair of steel-toed boots."
    Karl had to borrow the boots, but he was working on land rigs within
    a year after Aaron was born.

    Was it the fever Aaron had when he was an infant? Karl and Tracy
    never knew. They just knew that he was out of step with the parade.
    He has special needs, and they feared that they were going to have
    to take care of him the rest of their lives. At the very least,
    Tracy needed to quit her job and stay home with Aaron, and when Karl
    began working offshore, she could afford to. It's not an easy life,
    and, in the beginning, Tracy says, "It wasn't easy and it wasn't
    great. But then something happened. Karl almost died out there. He
    never told me what it was but he never raised his voice again."

    He is so quiet around people he doesn't know that they often think
    they've offended him. In the manner of quiet men, however, he has
    shared his love for Aaron by sharing his likes with Aaron, and when
    you ask Aaron about his father, he provides an instant litany of
    what they are: "He liked World of Warcraft. He /hated/ Halo. He
    liked Marvel comics and especially the Mighty Thor. Thor was my
    favorite, too. He was going to get a tattoo of Thor on his shoulder
    but then he died on the rig. He liked Nascar. His driver was Tony
    Stewart. He liked Jesse James and took me to see him. I got his
    autograph. He liked cooking. Mmm, he made the best pork chops. He
    liked beating me in chiliburger-eating contests, but he always
    cheated. And Kiss. He loved Kiss."

    Karl doesn't like talking about the rig much. And Tracy doesn't like
    him talking about it, because the only time he does is when he's
    worried. It is a bad sign that before the hitch he is talking about
    it incessantly. He's losing sleep over it, because not only is it a
    "bad hole," his drilling team is getting pushed to drill it. They
    are way over budget and way behind schedule. The Well from Hell.

    Still, he goes. He is one of the men who drives. It's three or four
    hours from Natchez to Houma and he takes his truck. He revs it up
    and then he leaves. A few weeks later, Tracy and Aaron have to go
    down and pick it up. Aaron opens it up and finds, in the cab, two
    Kiss CDs, /Destroyer/ and/Alive!/ His father used to bring a lot of
    CDs on the rig, and Aaron knew they were consumed in the fire that
    consumed him. But these were his favorites, and he left them behind
    as a message to his son: "I knew then that he wanted me to have the
    truck."

    gordon jones
    *Gordon Jones with his wife and first son in a photo kept in the
    delivery room during the birth of their second, weeks after the
    accident.*

    *Gordon Jones* loves his father, Keith, and he loves to play golf.
    Keith is the one who got him into golf. His brother was a baseball
    star and Gordon played in his shadow. Keith suggested that Gordon
    play golf instead. He did, and not only did he become a very good
    golfer, he was able to play with his father even after Keith
    divorced his mom and the rest of the family had hard feelings. One
    night Keith went to visit a fraternity buddy who worked for the
    drilling-services company M-I Swaco. The fraternity buddy was
    looking to hire someone who could play a little golf. See, that's
    how you make sales, when you're selling drilling mud to the oil
    companies ? you take an oilman out to the golf course and you
    flatter him by playing well but by letting him take your money.
    Keith mentioned Gordon, and Gordon became a mud engineer. Now ?
    still a few weeks before Keith will turn his grief into a
    family-unifying crusade to change archaic laws regarding death at
    sea ? he cannot stop weeping when he thinks of Gordon, because he
    got him the job: "Of all the people why did they have to take sweet
    Gordon? Why did they have to take the only one of my children who
    still loves me?"

    Jason Anderson Bp Spill

    *Jason Anderson* flies to New Orleans from Houston and then takes
    the Transocean shuttle to Port Fourchon. He does it for his wife,
    Shelley. It's one of the deals they have. She wants his miles. He
    gets plenty of them, because of how much he travels.

    He is a happy, heavyset man in a Hawaiian shirt, with a red goatee
    framing his face, and he likes his job. Oh, hell yes. He has always
    liked his job. It discovered him as much as he discovered it. His
    daddy, Billy Anderson, used to be a high school football coach down
    there in Matagorda County, Texas, that wide flat live-oak country
    feeding into the Gulf under great roiling skies, but back in those
    days football coach wasn't a year-round job even in Texas, and he
    worked summers to help make ends meet. One of those summers, he
    started working in the oil business, and that was it: He got out of
    the veer offense and made oil his life. He didn't work on the rigs,
    but he sold what the rigs needed and made enough money for his wife
    and his two kids and something else besides. They lived on a river
    between Bay City and Blessing, and they took their fishing and
    hunting so seriously that when Jason lost two of his fingers as a
    little boy ? he grabbed the chain of the bicycle his sister was
    riding and she kept pedaling ? they took the one stub they found
    from his middle finger and sewed it onto the finger next to it,
    because his granddaddy told the doctor: "The boy's going to need a
    trigger finger." And then, when he was ten, he learned what
    /never/ really means when his fourteen-year-old sister died in an
    automobile accident. She didn't come back, and neither did his
    parents' marriage. He stayed with his daddy in the divorce and
    started living as he would keep on living even when he was living on
    the rig: taking care of people. In high school the house burned down
    and Jason left all his valuables in the fire because he had to save
    the fireman who fell in the swimming pool. It was as if he had
    double copies of the responsibility gene, and Billy used to wonder
    if he gained what he got by what was taken away.

    Still, Jason was kind of kicking around at community college when
    Billy had a talk with a neighbor who was a human-resources executive
    for Transocean. Would Jason like to work on a rig? Both men figured
    that a couple of hitches chipping paint would put money in his
    pocket and make a student out of him. Instead, he took to it. He
    liked everything about it. You get on a rig, you don't have to
    wonder about what you're going to do ? you just have to do it. You
    just have to shut your mouth and listen and do your job and someone
    else's besides. The disparities of rank are ruthlessly observed but
    at the same time so is the idea that everybody eats in the same
    galley and has the same opportunity. And the galley is like a damned
    Golden Corral. One day the HR man who got Jason the job received a
    call from the rig. It was the tool pusher from Jason's crew. "You
    got any more like him?" he asked. "He's the best chipper I've had in
    fifteen years."

    People who don't know the rigs don't know the role of ambition on
    them. And people who don't know ambition don't know the role of love
    in /it./ But Jason knew both. He had already advanced to floor hand
    when his roommate Bubba picked him to marry his sister Shelley.
    Hell, Bubba /dressed/Jason for his first date with Shelley, because
    Bubba knew what Shelley liked, and he didn't want to take any
    chances. Of course, Shelley liked Jason; he was a likable guy. But
    she saw something different than just another country boy trying to
    impress her with a long-sleeved button-down shirt and a pair of 20X
    jeans and a big belt buckle. She saw a man who when he said he was
    going to do something, did it. And Jason was going to be OIM ? the
    offshore installation manager, who is the rig's ultimate authority.
    And Shelley said, early on, that wherever he went, she would go with
    him, as long as it was in Texas. Shelley /was/ Texas, the way that
    Don Clark was Newellton. She was Texas blond, with a handshake like
    a field hand's. She'd say things like, "I'm from Texas, I like being
    from Texas, I like saying I'm from Texas, I want my children to be
    from Texas." She had these amazing eyes, wide-open and unblinking
    and blue as paint, eyes you couldn't lie to. And Jason never did.
    Bubba moved out, Shelley moved in, and that's where they stayed, on
    a farm road in Midfield, and no matter how far Jason went, or how
    long he stayed, he always came back to Shelley and to Texas.

    Jason went through every job on the drilling team and made tool
    pusher at an age when most men are still floor hands. This year
    Jason got offered a "land job" in Houston: well control instructor
    for Transocean, specializing in blowout prevention. A land job is a
    good job to get if you want to be rig manager ? if you want to be
    the man who sits in an office building in Houston and tells the OIM
    what to do. And Jason does. He wants to be rig manager. But he
    hasn't been senior tool pusher yet, and he wants to be senior tool
    pusher. He wants to be OIM. He wants every job there is to get on a
    rig. That way nobody can say boo if one day he has to go to work
    wearing loafers.

    He doesn't take the land job. He doesn't want to live in Houston,
    and neither does Shelley. They want to stay in the country, in the
    real Texas, in the house they started in and had two kids in and are
    now expanding with some of Jason's bonus money, with a kitchen
    island as big as Cowboys Stadium. He takes the job as senior tool
    pusher instead, on the /Discoverer Spirit, /a drill ship. He's
    supposed to start on April 14. Then he gets a call from the
    Horizon's rig manager, asking him to stay on as the Horizon's tool
    pusher for one more week. It's in the interest of a smooth
    transition, the rig manager says, though Jason wonders if he just
    wants an experienced hand to help complete the Well from Hell. He
    says yes, because he always has. He tells Shelley that it'll work
    out fine, that he'll get a chance to unpack his own locker and say
    goodbye to guys like Karl Kleppinger. Then, as they're pulling out
    of the driveway on the way to the airport, he asks, "If anything
    happens to me, will you and the kids stay in the house?" She looks
    at him with those unblinking eyes and says yes. Because she can see
    by the look on his face that it's important to him. And because she
    always has.

    *It's an unnatural thing,* the Deepwater Horizon. It is, indeed, the
    very embodiment of the needs it's supposed to serve, a monster
    continually bestirred. It is a boat, a ship, that floats on top of
    an ocean drilling an oil well a mile below the surface, and it does
    not move, despite currents and waves and weather. It does not move,
    very simply, by always moving: by never stopping. It has eight
    engines called thrusters, two to a corner, that interact through
    computers with global-positioning satellites, and they can never
    stop firing, adjusting, thrusting. As a result, the monster has its
    own needs, too. To drill for oil, it needs frequent and massive
    deliveries of diesel fuel, a hundred thousand to two hundred
    thousand gallons at a time. It needs supply ships to continually
    circle it and make deliveries not only of fuel and drilling mud but
    also of food and especially water, because in order to keep the
    crews in clean coveralls and clean sheets it has four enormous
    washing machines that wash clothes twenty-four hours a day. And
    mostly, it needs to justify its own expense ? BP pays Transocean a
    half million dollars a day for the privilege of leasing it ? and so
    the need it serves by never stopping is the need never to stop: to
    keep working. It is never dark, and it is never silent. Its lights
    are always burning, and though often compared to a city unto itself,
    it is more like a casino in the middle of the ocean.

    It comes as no surprise, then, that there is pressure to produce ?
    to strike oil. The Deepwater Horizon is the second Transocean rig to
    drill the well known to the Minerals Management Service as
    Mississippi Canyon block 252, to BP as Macondo, and to the drilling
    team as the Well from Hell. The first rig, the Marianas, tried
    drilling it in the fall of 2009, until it was damaged in a hurricane
    and had to be repaired. The Deepwater Horizon resumed drilling in
    February and promptly had to "cut pipe" in March, when the drill bit
    got stuck and a few thousand feet of drill pipe had to be left in
    the hole, and the well was attacked from a different direction. The
    Well from Hell is as gassy as a colicky baby. Men get used to
    feeling "kickbacks" ? the burps of methane gas that are sometimes
    strong enough to force the drill pipe back up the well ? and to
    seeing the warning lights on deck that prohibit chipping and other
    deck work that might cause sparks and also lighting a damned
    cigarette. The Well from Hell has cost BP weeks of added rig time
    and is at least $20 million over budget. By April 20, however,
    drilling has been completed. All that is required is for the well to
    be plugged with cement and for seawater to displace the drilling mud
    that BP is paying M-I Swaco millions of dollars for. It is not an
    uncomplicated process, but once it is done, the Deepwater Horizon
    can move on to new holes, and a production rig can begin tapping the
    vast and strangely vehement reservoir of oil and gas secreted two
    and a half miles beneath Macondo's wellhead.

    No, it is no surprise that BP pushes for the completion of the well,
    nor that the push comes from one of the BP managers assigned to the
    rig ? one of its so-called company men. It is the company man's job
    to push. It is not his job to be part of the so-called Transocean
    family of crew members. The company man eats in the same galley as
    the crew members but not at the same tables. The company man does
    not have the same quarters as the crew members, and he does not wear
    the same clothes. The crew members wear Transocean-issued magenta
    coveralls when they're on tour, blue coveralls when they're off. The
    company man wears, in the words of one Deepwater Horizon survivor,
    "jeans, a BP shirt, and a nice shiny white hard hat." There is no
    surprise when a company man proposes changes in certain procedures
    and objectives because the company man is, in another survivor's
    words, "always trying to change things." There is not even any
    surprise when, at a preshift meeting on April 20, the company man
    challenges the authority of Transocean's OIM. What does surprise the
    crew members of Deepwater Horizon, however, is how the OIM responds.

    The OIM's name is Jimmy Wayne Harrell. The company man's name is
    Robert Kaluza. The meeting is the standard "pre-tour" meeting held
    twice a day, at 11:00 A.M. and 11:00 P.M., before the start of each
    twelve-hour shift at noon and midnight. At most pre-tours, the lines
    of authority are clear, if contested: The BP company man tells the
    OIM and the driller what he wants accomplished, and the driller
    tells the various crews how they're going to accomplish it. At the
    11:00 A.M. meeting on April 20, however, Robert Kaluza tells the
    drilling team how they're going to displace the mud from the well
    and replace it with seawater. When he proposes a procedure that runs
    counter to the procedures the drilling team has in place, Dewey
    Revette, the driller, fresh from his circuit around the deck, begins
    to argue with him. Revette thinks that what Kaluza is proposing is
    reckless and premature, and when the argument grows heated, what the
    various crew members witnessing it remember is the passion and anger
    of an inherently careful man. "Dewey got pretty hot," one says.
    Finally, the company man invokes his own sense of authority and
    says, "Well, that's how it's going to be." And now it is up to Jimmy
    Wayne Harrell. BP leases the rig, but Transocean owns it and employs
    the workers gathered at the pre-tour meeting. They have always
    understood the Transocean OIM to be the ultimate authority on the
    rig, the one man who has the power to override the interests of the
    company man in favor of the interests of the Transocean workers and
    their safety. And what Jimmy Wayne Harrell says, in response to
    Robert Kaluza's dictum, is, according to sworn testimony offered in
    the Coast Guard investigation of the Deepwater Horizon disaster:
    "Well, I guess that's what we have those pinchers for."

    Those pinchers: the blowout preventer.

    Those pinchers: the massive mechanical shears that are supposed to
    cut the pipe and seal the well in the event of catastrophe.

    Those pinchers: what you rely on when you're already dead but just
    haven't gotten to heaven yet.

    Now, it should be understood that probably neither Jimmy Wayne
    Harrell nor Robert Kaluza is a bad man. Indeed, they're probably
    good men, in the same way that the eleven men who died less than
    twelve hours after the pre-tour are good men, in the same way that
    most of us can claim to be good men: They probably love their
    families and have families that love them.

    They probably have reasons for being on the Deepwater Horizon that
    are a complicated calculus of human need and human want and terrible
    human vulnerability, just like virtually every single member of
    Deepwater Horizon's doomed drilling team. But the tragedy of the
    Deepwater Horizon and the Well from Hell is not a human tragedy; it
    is a tragedy set in motion by humans. There has been, from the
    beginning, the possibility of criminal charges being filed in
    connection with what happened on the rig, and Kaluza pleaded the
    Fifth during the Coast Guard investigation while Harrell's testimony
    was at variance with the sworn testimony of several survivors. But
    what is the crime, exactly, and who or what is it against? Is it
    against the men? Are they innocent victims of something like
    negligent homicide? Or is it against something larger ? the ocean,
    creation, God ? in which case the men's role is far more
    complicated? The stories that each family tells about each man are
    stories of innocence, even blamelessness. But the story about the
    Deepwater Horizon is not about innocence or anything even close. It
    is about culpability. It is about everyone's role as an accomplice,
    from Robert Kaluza to Tony Hayward to the soccer mom filling up the
    SUV ? to us. Why should the eleven men who died so close to the
    tragedy be the only ones spared?

    "The way I look at it," Tracy Kleppinger says, "the only reason that
    115 men got off that rig alive is because Karl and everybody else on
    that rig floor were doing their jobs. They died doing their jobs.
    They died fighting that well. They were the first to fight that
    well. The way I look at them ? the only way I can look at them ? is
    as American heroes."

    But of course, if they died doing their jobs, they died drilling and
    completing the well, not fighting it. Does that make them any less
    heroic? Any less sympathetic? Any less tragic? It does not. It makes
    them men who died because they were willing to do dirty work ? our
    dirty work. It makes them men who need to be forgiven as well as
    mourned. And it makes them the only men involved in this whole
    gruesome tale who deserve not just our anger, not just our judgment,
    but our apologies.

    Deepwater Horizon Accident

    Gerald Herbert/AP

    *Sheila goes to the door* of the white house in the green fields and
    walks outside. Don is still not home. She walks to the field across
    the street, a sea of corn seven feet tall. It moves in the hot
    breeze like water and she touches it. "Did Don like his job?" she
    asks. "I don't know. Does anyone like that job? I don't think I'd
    like that job."

    She gets in the car and drives to the Dixie Dandy. Don would have
    walked. The Dixie Dandy is a grocery store combined with a gas
    station and a barbecue shack. It is the last big business in
    Newellton, and Don went there ? wound up there ? every day. Sheila
    drives, and when she gets there, she meets one of Don's brothers. He
    looks just like him, trim and contained, one of the remaining Clarks
    of Newellton. He explains that the Dixie Dandy is the last skin on
    Newellton's bones, the last thing that permits Newellton to call
    itself a town. "When it goes, it's all gone," he says, and when
    Sheila backs out of the parking lot, he calls to her: "Don't forget
    us."

    "I wonder if Alonzo is home," Sheila says once she's back on the
    road. "I think I'll go see Alonzo." Alonzo is Alonzo Petty. He and
    his brother were the first Newellton men to work on the rigs and
    gave Don his application. He was on the Deepwater Horizon when Don
    died. After Don's memorial service in the gymnasium of Newellton's
    elementary school ? the bodiless service of a cremated man ? he came
    over to talk to Sheila, but he couldn't get the words out. He wanted
    to tell Sheila what happened, and Sheila wanted to know, because no
    one had told her. Transocean has never told any of the families what
    happened to their men. And BP has never contacted them to offer
    explanation or sympathy or apology. Sheila was desperate to know.
    But when Alonzo opened his mouth, no words came out.

    Alonzo is home when Sheila gets there. He should be out on the rig,
    but his rig was the Deepwater Horizon. He went to Korea to see it
    being built. Now he is rigless, and he is mowing his lawn on a
    riding mower. He is wearing faded red Halliburton coveralls, the
    name NICK stitched on the breast, and a black skullcap. He is a wiry
    man with hollows in his face and a jet-black goatee. He gets off the
    mower and takes a seat against the garage, bringing his knees up and
    shooing his grandkids inside. "How you been doing, Sheila?" he asks.

    She sits across from him, hunched over, hands folded between her
    knees, fingertips pointed to the ground. She's very quiet, and he
    looks at her now, slowly, his body untangling itself in his seat. "I
    hate it to death what happened to Don," he finally says. "I still
    hate it, because it could have been avoided. It was a bad hole. But
    it wasn't the worst hole. Anybody who says it was the worst hole
    just ain't been working offshore long enough. And it was finished.
    We were displacing it. Ain't no big deal, what we were doing. We
    displace holes in hurricanes. We had procedures for displacing
    holes. But they changed the procedures. They cut corners. Ain't no
    mystery what happened. They put everything on the cement job and it
    was a bad cement job. They started getting mud back out of the hole.
    That ain't supposed to happen. You ain't supposed to get nothing
    back. They should have shut down that hole then." He's looking at
    her now, with a transfixed and transfixing glare. "The first thing I
    asked the fellas when we got to the lifeboat was 'Where Don at?
    Where Don at?' I /knew/ Don. I talked to Don /every night/ out
    there. Nothing going to bring him back, Sheila. But you need to know
    it didn't have to happen. Now you got to look out for Number One.
    You know what I'm saying? You got to make them remember your name.
    You got to make them remember Don's name. You know what I'm saying,
    Sheila?"

    "I know what you're saying," Sheila says quietly. "But why didn't
    you tell me this before?"

    His face changes, as if he's been slapped. But he holds her eye.
    "Because after what happened out there," he says, "I couldn't even
    look at you."

    *The ocean is always there.* They can smell it. During the day, it's
    blue, it's green, depending on its mood, and it shimmers with
    wonders: pods of dolphins and whales. Flashing schools of barracuda.
    Flying fish. Pelicans. At night, it's different: It's black, and its
    annihilating prospect merges with a sky robbed of stars by the rig's
    frantic light. The men don't look at the ocean at night, because
    there's nothing to see.

    Still, even if they're working at the heart of the rig ? the complex
    of workstations and machines surrounding and servicing the drill ?
    they can't get away from it. At the bottom of the complex is the
    moon pool, and the moon pool is the ocean, the hole through which
    the drill leaves the rig. Up one floor is the floor containing the
    pump room and the pit room, where the drilling mud is pumped in and
    out of the well. Up another floor is the shaker shack, where the
    circulating mud is shaken through filters, and the mud hut where
    it's analyzed. At the top is the drill floor, where the driller and
    the two assistant drillers control the drill from the drill shack.
    The drill floor is cramped, loud, and bright, and it's where the
    drilling team works.

    The drilling team that's working the night of April 20 is on the
    last shift of its hitch. Each man working is hours away from getting
    on a helicopter and getting off the rig. But they've been too busy
    to think about it. Though the well has been sealed by Halliburton
    with a cement plug, it's been returning mud all shift, and the mud's
    been gassy and impure. They're not wearing the usual Transocean
    coveralls but rather white ones meant to be worn around the mud.
    Here is where they all are:

    At around 8:30, Karl Kleppinger is in the shaker shack. It's been a
    tough day but there's no sense of emergency, because when a floor
    hand comes to see Karl, he finds Big Poppa about to nod off. He
    nudges him alert. That's the last time the floor hand remembers
    seeing him. It's also the last time he remembers seeing Gordon Jones
    and Blair Manuel in the mud hut. Gordon Jones does not have to be
    there for another three hours, but he relieves another mud engineer
    who looks tired. Get some sleep, he says.

    Adam Weise and Shane Roshto are standing at a workbench in the pump
    room, trying to fix a valve. They're giving each other shit, as
    always. At around 8:45, though, Adam calls two floor hands into the
    pump room and asks them to clean two pollution pans that have filled
    up with sludge. This is the second time during the shift the
    pollution pans have required cleaning. This has never happened
    before. It's never even happened once. "This is weird," Adam says.
    "I wonder what's going on."

    Upstairs, on the drill floor, there are three men in the drill
    shack: Jason Anderson, Dewey Revette, and Stephen Curtis. Don Clark
    is the only one who isn't there. Though an assistant driller, he
    went out through the open door and is doing work out on the deck.
    The rest of them are doing what Dewey Revette said they'd do when he
    lost the argument at pre-tour. He'd said, "We'll work it out on the
    drill floor." That's what's happening now. The drill shack is about
    the size of a bedroom, with blackened windows and a mesh roof.
    Inside are screens and monitors and two big reclining chairs, each
    with a joystick. When Jason Anderson became a driller, he was so
    proud that the chairs were made by the company that makes the seats
    for Porsche. Now he's in one, in the fight of ? and for ? his life.

    Do they know this? They know that there is a "situation": Stephen
    Curtis sends out a call for help from the drill shack. Jason
    Anderson is talking about shutting the well down. That it isn't shut
    down leads Jason's wife, Shelley, to believe he is not aware of the
    peril they're in: "I know Jason. If he knew that the situation was
    as serious as it was, he would have shut down the well. All he
    wanted to do ? all any one of them wanted to do ? was survive and
    come home to their families."

    An hour after they started, the two floor hands, Dan Barron and
    Caleb Holloway, finish cleaning the pollution pans. They are
    standing on the drill floor, next to a door to the deck. They are
    used to "kicks," the little belches of the deep earth below the deep
    water. But what happens now is the earth's groaning vengeance: A
    methane bubble rises up through the well and what it produces when
    it hits looks for all the world like something from the movies: a
    gusher. It blows mud and seawater out of the hole, up through the
    derrick, and into the sky, whence it falls as black rain. Everybody
    on the rig floor is painted black. Everybody on the deck, too. Even
    people in the supply boats surrounding the rig are spattered in mud.
    There is an unimaginable moment of shock, panic, and crazed relief
    as something impossible happens on the Deepwater Horizon: Its lights
    burn even brighter. Its generators, force-fed methane, go crazy
    until the lights finally explode and go out. In that moment, Caleb
    Holloway says to Dan Barron: "I smell gas. Run." They go out through
    the door, and Don Clark is running in. Alonzo Petty says that he's
    heard that Don is responding to an urgent page from the drill floor;
    the floor hands figure he's just running instinctively toward the
    drill floor to help. He goes through the open door and is greeted,
    immediately, by the second blast, one that rips steel doors from
    their hinges and knocks the crane operator, Dale Burkeen, to his
    death. For a second, there is only the sound of gas in the darkness
    ? the sound of a gas jet magnified to inhuman scale, the /aaaaaaah
    /amplified to a terrible roar ? and for a second the ocean is
    restored to what it has always been, black and vast and as
    dismissive of human intrusion as it is of human hopes and human
    fears. Maybe even the stars come out.

    Then, the fire.

    http://www.esquire.com/features/gulf-oil-spill-lives-0910



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