Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

  Sara lived in Katy, Texas, a town just west of Houston where she’d grown up and where she and Stephen had settled after getting married. The day after he got home from his hitch, they were planning to meet with a real estate agent, having just gotten preapproved for a loan to buy a house. Now Sara wondered if Stephen would ever come home. None of the hospital burn units that she tried reaching had any information about him. Eventually, she received another call from Transocean, informing her that although the blowout had caused multiple fatalities, Stephen was among those who’d 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 with her mother, Sara tossed some belongings into a suitcase, drove to the Houston airport, and boarded the next available flight to the Gulf. The following morning, at around 3:30, she got a call from Stephen, who told her he was on his way to the hotel where she and other family members had gathered to wait. “Are you okay?” she asked him. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said.

  Later, when she saw him shuffle through the hall that had been cordoned off for surviving crew members, she knew immediately that he wasn’t fine. His expression was blank, and like the other survivors, he looked shell-shocked and traumatized.

  “When he walked in, from the look in his eyes, it was obvious that something horrible had happened,” she recalled.

  GRIMY CARYATIDS

  Eating meat produced in industrial slaughterhouses is one way that consumers benefit from dirty work performed in distant places on their behalf. Relying on fossil fuels that are drilled, mined, and fracked to sustain their lifestyles is another. In 1937, after visiting the coalfields of Yorkshire and Lancashire the year before, a British writer named Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name, George Orwell, reflected 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 exertions were as invisible as they were essential to society. “In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner 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.”

  “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,” Orwell went on. When you see workers stoop down and shovel coal onto conveyer belts inside the narrow, dust-choked tunnels, “it is brought home to you, as you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants—all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.”

  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. (“The most definitely distinctive thing about them is the blue scars on their noses,” Orwell wrote. “Every miner has blue scars on his nose and forehead, and will carry them to his death.”) By the time Stephen Stone found himself on the Deepwater Horizon, the taint of working in the extraction industry was less physical than moral. People who cared about the environment associated the oil industry with events like the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, which blackened the shorelines of Prince William Sound, and with carbon emissions that imperiled the planet. It was an industry whose pipelines and projects threatened delicate ecosystems like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska; an industry from which more and more reputable institutions—universities, philanthropic organizations—had begun divesting; an industry that anyone concerned about the fate of the earth would sooner protest than turn to for employment. JOBS FOR CLEAN ENERGY, NOT FOR DIRTY OIL, read a sign at a rally on a college campus in Iowa, expressing a view that more and more environmentalists, scientists, and young Americans shared.

  But while condemning the greed of oil companies was easy enough, avoiding relying on the product they produced was more difficult, the evidence suggested. For all the talk of shifting to wind and solar power, fossil fuels still supplied 84 percent of the world’s energy in 2019, and in many places their use was increasing. Part of the reason for this was the emergence of a middle class in countries like China and India. Another factor was the massive carbon footprint of the United States, which made up less than 5 percent of the world’s population but consumed a quarter of the world’s energy. More than eighty years after The Road to Wigan Pier was published, “dirty oil” was no less important in the metabolism of global capitalism than coal had been in Orwell’s time, thanks in no small part to the lifestyles of Americans and to the policies of their leaders. Although he spoke frequently about the importance of addressing climate change, Barack Obama presided over a massive increase in crude oil production, which grew by 3.6 million barrels a day during his tenure. When Obama left office, the United States was the world’s leading petroleum producer.* His successor, Donald Trump, was an even more unabashed promoter of the fossil fuel industry, rolling back environmental regulations to restore America’s “energy dominance.”

  Stephen Stone did not grow up dreaming of working in the energy industry. He was far more interested in enjoying his natural surroundings. Throughout his childhood, his favorite place to spend time was outdoors, swimming in the Tennessee River or trekking through the wilderness near his home in Grant, Alabama, a small town nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians. The bucolic setting suited him, at least until he got a bit older, when life in a backwoods town with limited opportunities began to feel stifling. During what would have been his senior year in high school, he started working the night shift at a rug factory in nearby Scottsboro, the same factory where his mother worked after his parents got divorced. After graduating, he quit the rug factory and enlisted in the navy. Two and a half years later, in 2007, he was discharged, mainly because he’d spent too much time drinking and partying at the string of sun-splashed naval bases (Aruba, Panama City) where he was stationed. Upon returning to Grant, he started calling various oil companies to see if he could land a job on a rig, both because he’d heard that oil companies liked to hire former navy guys and because the work paid well, far more than any other job a high school graduate from rural Alabama was likely to stumble across. Some time later, he flew to Houston to interview for a position as a roustabout with GlobalSantaFe, an offshore drilling company that would later be bought by Transocean.

  It was on this visit to Houston that Stephen decided to strike up a conversation with the redhead sitting next to him on the airport shuttle. The redhead was Sara, who had just come back from a trip to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. They chatted for three hours, bonding over everything from their shared southern heritage—he was from Alabama, she from Texas—to their fathers’ fondness for the same restaurant in Houston, a clam-and-oyster bar called Captain Tom’s. Afterward, they exchanged phone numbers. Within a year, they’d gotten married.

  In some ways, Sara and Stephen made for an odd couple: she was a college graduate with an introspective manner; he was a good old boy who was quick with a joke and liked to laugh and party. From the moment they started talking, though, Sara was struck by Stephen’s intelligence, the books he mentioned reading, and the thoughtful gaze in his eyes. Whenever he would go offshore on a hitch in the years to come, Sara would notice, Stephen made sure to pack some reading—novels, poetry, philosophy. He also brought along a couple of pocket-size notebooks that he would fill with poems and drawings. To some college graduates, marrying a rig worker, even one who wrote poetry
in his spare time, might have seemed like a step down. To Sara, it felt natural. Virtually everyone she knew in Katy came from a family with ties to the oil industry. Her own father had worked in the industry for decades, which was another thing she and Stephen had in common. The rhythm of the lifestyle, marked by two- and three-week hitches during which rig workers were separated from their spouses, was familiar to Sara, who often went months without seeing her father during her childhood. When Stephen would leave on hitches, she would miss him, but she also liked having time to focus on her own interests, in particular her art. In college, she’d majored in painting and photography, visual mediums through which she’d always found it easier to express herself than words. After she graduated, one of the first jobs she landed was as a fine art reproduction artist, copying paintings that were sold to doctors’ offices and furniture stores like Ethan Allen. The pay was modest, and duplicating other artists’ compositions felt strange to her, but the job boosted her confidence and made her realize how important it was for her to find an outlet for her creative impulses.

  * * *

  In the aftermath of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, Sara’s creative impulses went into overdrive. After seeing images of the spill on television, she persuaded Stephen to take a road trip through the Gulf so that she could film what was happening and take some pictures. She also started painting more seriously. Among the canvases she composed was a series of portraits of the blast’s survivors. The paintings were drafted, fittingly, in oil and were inspired by a visit that she and Stephen paid to Washington, D.C., a few weeks after the blowout, where they and other survivors were invited to testify at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Deepwater disaster—a disaster that was still unfolding and that, upon closer inspection, was hardly a surprise. The immediate cause of the blast on the Deepwater Horizon was a bubble of methane gas that floated up through the drill column, most likely because of a breach in the cement casing that enclosed it, and spread across the deck before igniting into a deadly fireball. In the view of many analysts, the deeper cause was a lack of attention to risk—and an excessive focus on profits—that characterized the entire oil industry and was particularly pronounced at BP, the company that leased the rig from Transocean and owned the exclusive rights to the Macondo Prospect well, an oil and gas reservoir located forty-nine miles off the coast of Louisiana. In the 1990s, BP had undergone a restructuring, outsourcing many technical functions and concentrating on maximizing production in each of its so-called strategic production units. The company’s emphasis on the bottom line, affirmed in the motto “Make every dollar count,” drew praise from business analysts. Safety experts were more alarmed. In 2005, an explosion at a BP refinery in Texas City killed fifteen workers and injured hundreds more. An investigation conducted afterward by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board found “serious deficiencies” in “safety culture” at the refinery and faulted BP for pushing for 25 percent budget cuts “even though much of the refinery’s infrastructure and process equipment were in disrepair.” Between 2007 and 2010, OSHA cited BP for 760 safety violations, by far the most of any major oil company. Leasing the Deepwater Horizon cost BP one million dollars a day, and the Macondo well had fallen behind schedule, ratcheting up the pressure to brush aside concerns that might have slowed the pace of drilling. Some workers feared that raising such concerns would get them fired, which helps explain why an array of ominous signs—problems with the cementing, flaws in the blowout preventer—were ignored. Hours before the rig went up in flames, 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 remained uncapped for eighty-seven days, blackening and befouling everything it touched. Tar balls washed up on the shores of beaches in multiple states. Shrimp and oyster harvesters were put out of business. By the time the Macondo well was shut, an estimated 210 million gallons of oil had leaked out, twenty times the volume of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

  There were also human costs, which Sara sought to capture in her paintings. One of them was of Chris Jones, whose brother, Gordon, was one of eleven workers killed in the disaster. Sara sat next to him during the congressional hearing. In Sara’s portrait, Jones’s lips are pursed and his face, painted ash blue, is creased with anguish. Another painting depicted a woman with her mouth agape and tears shimmering in her bright blue eyes. It was a portrait of Natalie Roshto, whose husband, Shane, also died on the rig. Titled Survivors, the paintings were stark and vivid, capturing the raw grief that filled the room. But the portrait that Sara drew of Stephen captured something different. Based on a photo that was taken during his testimony, it shows a bearded figure with a vacant, faraway expression in his eyes. He does not look grief stricken so much as bewildered and unmoored.

  The bewilderment was still apparent when I met Stephen several years later, at a bar in San Clemente, California, where he and Sara were living at the time. They were staying in an apartment that Sara’s parents had bought (her father grew up in California and was planning to move there after retiring). Stephen was in his late twenties, with a shaggy mop of chestnut-colored hair and languid, downcast eyes. At the bar, he was taciturn, nodding occasionally at something Sara said while straining 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 physical 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. Not coincidentally, 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 fire-retardant coveralls and fumbled his way toward the deck, at which point he saw that the entire rig was smoldering and heard the panicked screams of his coworkers. It was an experience he now feared reliving every time he shut his eyes, Sara had come to realize. “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-story dwelling in a complex of look-alike gray bungalows where they lived with a terrier named Kale and two pet ferrets. With each successive visit, Stephen grew a bit more open and talkative. He told me about his upbringing in Grant. He described his stint in the navy. He recited some of his poetry and showed me his collection of books—Shakespeare, Yeats, Thoreau. The blowout had not diminished his appetite for reading, but the genre that captivated him had changed. He now gravitated mainly to science fiction and had gotten particularly obsessed with outer space, which Sara interpreted as a sign of the compulsion he felt “to be away from reality, away from earth.” Stephen did not dispute this interpretation. He also did not deny that after the blowout another way he’d tried to escape from reality was by consuming large amounts of alcohol. The liquor helped him fall asleep at night, but it also fueled some erratic behavior. One night, after drinking with a friend, he grabbed the keys to their car, zoomed down a one-way street in the wrong direction, and rammed into a brick wall. The accident fractured vertebrae in his neck and collapsed a lung. When we met, Stephen had cut back on the drinking, but an air of melancholy enveloped him. Much of the time, so did a plume of marijuana smoke. Throughout my visit, he sat on an L-shaped couch in the living room of the apartment, sipping black coffee from a green mug and, every few minutes, lighting up and taking another toke from a bowl of weed. The pot was medical marijuana that 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. Like military veterans wh
o’d survived IED explosions in Iraq, Stephen was sensitive to loud noises and given to paranoid fears and panic attacks. The rattle of ice in the freezer was enough to set him off sometimes, Sara told me. A few days before I arrived, she’d found a knife on the dashboard of their car. Stephen had pulled it out after becoming convinced that the driver he’d spotted in the rearview mirror was following him.

  But as with many military veterans, there was something else that seemed to afflict Stephen no less: 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 control. The experience left a bad taste in Stephen’s mouth. A few weeks later, a Transocean representative reached out to him and, over a cup of coffee at Denny’s, offered him five thousand dollars for the personal belongings he’d lost on the rig, which he accepted. Then the representative asked him to sign a document affirming 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.”

  To both Transocean and BP, the survivors were not human beings who deserved to be treated with dignity, Stephen was coming to feel, but a potential legal liability that needed to be contained. To people with a cynical view of the oil industry, this would not have come as a surprise. But Stephen was not such a person. When he applied for the job at Transocean, he understood that working on an offshore oil rig could be dangerous, but he also assumed the industry did everything possible to protect workers. “I thought everything was followed to a T safety-wise,” he said. After the blowout, as he read about how little money oil companies spent on safety and how many warning signs on the Deepwater Horizon had been ignored, a wave of disillusionment washed over him. “Who the fuck was I working for?” he wondered.