Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

  Stephen wondered this again when, within a year of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Transocean awarded lavish bonuses to several senior executives for overseeing the “Best Year in Safety Performance” in the company’s history. The decision was announced only a few months after a nonpartisan national commission submitted a report about the Deepwater spill to President Obama. Based on an exhaustive six-month investigation, the report linked the blowout to “a series of identifiable mistakes made by BP, Halliburton, and Transocean that reveal such systemic failures in risk management that they place in doubt the safety culture of the entire industry.” The report listed nine questionable decisions that were made when less risky alternatives were available, alternatives rejected because pursuing them might have cost money and time. When Stephen learned about Transocean’s “Best Year in Safety Performance” bonuses, he was still a Transocean employee. Afterward, he submitted an angry resignation letter. “I quit,” he said. “I was like, fuck you guys. I don’t want to be a part of your company.”

  In Achilles in Vietnam, the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay argued that a primary cause of moral injury among military veterans was the betrayal of “what’s right” by their commanders, giving rise to mênis, a Greek term that Shay likened to “indignant rage … the kind of rage arising from social betrayal that impairs a person’s dignity.” According to Shay, this is what consumes Achilles after his commander, Agamemnon, violates his sense of moral order in the Iliad. It is what Shay found again and again among veterans who felt their dignity had been trampled on in Vietnam. And it is what 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 the 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 vacationed there with his family. It was one of his favorite places, famous for the ribbon of pristine white sand that graced its shores. After the Deepwater spill, much of the island was surrounded by orange booms, and the sand was stained with oil sludge, a sight that filled Stephen with both 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 difficult feelings about the world she’d grown up in, a world she realized she had long viewed through rose-tinted glasses. Throughout her upbringing, she told me, she was taught that oil rigs were actually good for the environment because, when they sank, they created reefs for fish. The footage she recorded on the trip through the Gulf told a different story. Later, when she watched BP air ads on television burnishing its commitment to the environment, she was furious. But unlike Stephen, Sara bristled at blanket condemnations of the oil industry that failed to distinguish between companies that behaved recklessly and those that at least tried to act responsibly. She also bristled at environmental groups that, after the blowout, seemed to focus far more attention on the pelicans and dolphins poisoned by the oil spill than 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. Sara could not understand why they were so invisible. “It’s just weird,” she said.

  But Stephen did not seem to find 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 find it easier to sympathize with dead dolphins than with workers like him.

  “People see the environment as completely innocent,” Stephen said, “whereas we, just being in that industry, you know, you kind of brought it on yourself.”

  “TROUBLED WATERS”

  Stephen did not seem to begrudge people for feeling this way, and arguably with good reason. He had, after all, collected a paycheck from Transocean, making upwards of sixty thousand dollars a year as a roustabout, a salary that was bound to increase as he gained more experience (roustabouts were entry-level deckhands who were paid less than anyone on rigs save for the mess hall chefs). Were it not for the blowout, he probably would have continued 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. The same incentive explained why thousands of working-class men flocked to places like the Williston Basin, home to the Bakken Formation, during the fracking boom, where drillers and riggers could sometimes pocket more than ten thousand dollars a month. Some of Stephen’s coworkers on the Deepwater Horizon earned six-figure salaries despite having nothing more than a high school diploma. As with fracking, the job was hard—twelve-hour shifts during which Stephen raced around stacking equipment, mixing drilling mud, and performing other menial tasks. But it beat living paycheck to paycheck with few benefits or vacations like everyone he knew back in Grant. When Stephen came home from hitches, he and Sara would often hit the road, taking trips to places like Zion National Park in Utah without worrying about when the next paycheck would arrive.

  “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, a life with its share of perks and benefits. If environmentalists had little sympathy for the workers who enjoyed these perks while ignoring the “dirty facts” about the fossil fuel industry cataloged in a report published by the Natural Resources Defense Council—water pollution, land degradation, the discharge of three-fourths of America’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 of an industry that catered to America’s insatiable demand for cheap oil, just as companies like Sanderson Farms and Tyson catered to the demand for cheap meat.

  Who ended up doing this work was shaped by class but also, perhaps even more so, by region and geography. In 1994, the sociologists William Freudenburg and Robert Gramling examined the regional patterns in a book titled Oil in Troubled Waters, which compared the status and prevalence of offshore drilling in two states with large shorelines, Louisiana and California. It was in California that in 1969 a blowout on an oil platform in the Santa Barbara Channel first drew attention to the environmental risks of offshore drilling. The spill sparked widespread outrage, galvanizing support for the National Environmental Policy Act, a landmark law that was enacted the following year. It also prompted the then secretary of the interior, Walter Hickel, to issue a moratorium on offshore drilling in California’s waters. Decades later, few residents of the Golden State were clamoring to change this, Freudenburg and Gramling found. Virtually every Californian they interviewed opposed offshore drilling. The opposition was so uniform that they started to ask subjects if they simply knew anyone in California who held a different view. Virtually no one did.

  In southern Louisiana, a series of blowouts also took place in the early 1970s, polluting the Gulf and, in some cases, causing fatalities. But unlike in California, no m
oratorium on offshore drilling ensued. By the time Freudenburg and Gramling conducted their study, more than thirteen thousand production wells had been drilled in the Gulf of Mexico’s outer continental shelf. Once again, the subjects of their study all seemed to hold the same view of this activity, only this time it was the opposite view: in Louisiana, opposition to offshore drilling was nonexistent. Only a handful of respondents knew someone who harbored even mild reservations about it.

  What accounted for these starkly divergent attitudes? One explanation was ideological: California was a liberal state whose residents tended to care about the environment and distrust industry, whereas Louisiana was a conservative one where people held favorable views of business.

  But the divergence also reflected radically different economic prospects. As Freudenburg and Gramling noted, the Californians they interviewed did not seem to care that closing the coast to drilling might hamper economic development. In fact, many of them were transplants from other states who had chosen to live in Northern California “to get away from that kind of shit,” as one respondent put it, describing rigs and derricks as eyesores that would defile the state’s natural beauty, which needed to be protected from development. Louisianans did not have the luxury of thinking this way. The oil industry meant jobs in a place that was starved of them. To no small extent, this belief helped explain the ideological differences, Freudenburg and Gramling’s study suggested.

  More than a decade later, the Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild discovered something similar when she began interviewing Tea Party activists in Louisiana’s bayou. Like her neighbors in Berkeley, Hochschild’s subjects did not like the idea of eating oil-tainted shrimp and seeing their lakes and rivers polluted. But many saw drilling as essential to their survival. “The more oil, the more jobs,” went the logic Hochschild encountered. “The more jobs, the more prosperity.” Which, in turn, led people to support luring oil companies to Louisiana by offering them lower taxes and less government regulation. Unlike Freudenburg and Gramling, Hochschild did not find that support for drilling was monolithic. Younger, college-educated Louisianans who lived in urban areas often held different views. But among longtime residents of southern Louisiana who lived in smaller towns and had less education, it was extremely pervasive. As it happens, these residents fit the demographic described in a consulting report Hochschild came across, advising companies that owned plants or refineries that emitted large amounts of pollution on where to locate. According to the report, the ideal location was a place with a high concentration of “least resistant personalities.” One characteristic of “least resistant personalities” was that they were longtime residents of small towns. Another was that they had only high school educations.

  It was easy for the residents of liberal, eco-conscious states to view such people with condescension while conveniently forgetting how dependent on them they were. “The centrality of oil and gas exploration to the Gulf economy is not widely appreciated by many Americans, who enjoy the benefits of the energy essential to their transportation, but bear none of the direct risks,” noted the national commission report on the Deepwater Horizon disaster. People in California could essentially off-load these risks to less privileged Louisianans who did the dirty work of running petrochemical plants and drilling offshore for them. And yet the truth is that even in southern Louisiana energy companies were not always welcomed with open arms. Back in the 1930s, fishers and trappers in the Bayou region expressed bitter resentment at the maudits Texiens (damn Texans) who began dredging canals and drilling holes into salt domes to extract oil from beneath the land that was their main source of livelihood. “It was like we had been invaded,” one resident complained. Over time, however, the ill will gave way to pragmatism. The opportunity to work in the oil industry came to be appreciated in places like Black Bayou, home to an oil field run by Shell, and later, as companies shifted their focus to offshore drilling, in the towns and parishes dotting Louisiana’s coast.

  By the end of the 1990s, nearly one-third of America’s domestic energy supply came from offshore production in the Gulf of Mexico. To Louisianans who found jobs in the petroleum industry, this was both a source of livelihood and a point of pride, even if serving as “America’s Energy Coast” also had downsides, including the highest level of air pollution in the country and the degradation of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands. In American Energy, Imperiled Coast, Jason Theriot, a historian who grew up in southern Louisiana and was the grandson of an oil worker, described how, in the late 1990s, some Louisiana politicians began to argue that their state deserved more help to offset these costs. Much of the oil and gas that flowed through the state’s pipelines ended up servicing other parts of the country, they pointed out, absorbed into the metabolism of prosperous regions like New England. Meanwhile, Louisiana’s coastal communities were sinking, leaving the residents of cities like New Orleans more vulnerable to storms and hurricanes, a problem likely to grow worse in the future, thanks to rising sea levels precipitated by climate change. Louisiana “has not received appropriate compensation for the use of its land and the environmental impacts of this production,” argued Senator Mary Landrieu, who introduced a bill, the Conservation and Reinvestment Act, that called for her state to receive more of the revenue generated by offshore drilling to help restore its wetlands. Notably, however, the leaders pushing for reinvestment stopped short of threatening legal action, much less of calling for a moratorium on offshore drilling, steps that risked alienating an industry on which Louisiana relied. As Theriot observed, “Those leaders carefully walked the fine line between pursuing the restoration agenda and preserving the main driver of the state’s economy.”

  The desire to preserve this driver was understandable in a state that ranked among the poorest in the country. As a way to foster long-term prosperity, it was also likely to be futile. While boosters hailed energy production as a catalyst for growth, studies showed that communities that relied too heavily on resource extraction often suffered from persistent poverty. Such communities were vulnerable to dislocations when prices fell. Many also underinvested in human capital, a problem exacerbated by industry’s demand for tax breaks, which made it hard to fund schools and other public institutions. A striking example of this was Cancer Alley, an industrial zone in Louisiana that was home to 150 refineries and chemical plants, facilities that belched out vast quantities of pollution but that often avoided paying taxes, which was why the quality of the public schools was no better than the air quality. “Without property taxes, these parishes do not have money for their schools,” Cynthia Sarthou, the executive director of the Gulf Restoration Network, told me. “They get little or no money and all the pollution.” In the rest of Louisiana, it wasn’t a whole lot better, said Sarthou, who likened the state’s dependence on oil to an abusive relationship in which the victim kept coming back because she feared it was all she had. “We get the promise of income, so we put up with it,” she said. “Yet we’re still one of the poorest states in the nation.”

  A few days after meeting Sarthou, I saw some of this poverty up close on a visit to Morgan City, a port town where, in 1947, an offshore well was drilled beyond the sight of land for the first time. A plaque commemorating this milestone had been erected on the median of the first road I turned onto, next to a sculpture of an oil rig that looked weather-beaten and oxidized, with patches of rust spreading over its corroded metal facade. In the 1970s, after the OPEC embargo caused the price of oil to rise, Morgan City had been a boomtown, its harbor jammed with rigs and its streets crowded with people who came looking for jobs. So many outsiders flocked to town that “roustabout camps” sprang up to accommodate them. But by the mid-1980s, oil prices had fallen and the boom petered out. When I visited, the roustabout camps were long gone, and the only rig I saw in Morgan City’s harbor was Mr. Charlie, a rusted yellow pile that was now the main attraction at the Rig Museum. It was located at the end of a gravel road abutting the harbor and offered tours to v
isitors curious to stroll aboard an authentic oil rig. On my tour, which a couple of French tourists joined, a guide explained that Mr. Charlie had stopped drilling wells in 1986 and would have been converted into scrap metal if it hadn’t been saved by a local man named Virgil who decided to turn it into a tourist attraction. A modest attraction, to judge by the size of our entourage and the humble quarters of the museum, which was housed in a trailer park. After the tour, I chatted with Bryce Merrill, a former oil industry worker who was now the museum’s curator. Merrill didn’t hide the fact that Morgan City had seen better days. “There used to be seventy rigs out here,” he said, pointing to the harbor. “Now there are five. We’ve lost twenty-five hundred people in the last four years, and about twenty-five to thirty businesses have closed.”

  After stopping for lunch, I paid a visit to James Hotard, a short, barrel-chested man who worked as a training manager at Oceaneering, which supplied subsea hardware to offshore rigs. Hotard recalled the time when virtually anyone in Morgan City could find a job. “You didn’t even have to graduate high school,” he said. “Just get to eleventh grade, say I’m done with school, step out, and you could make forty to fifty thousand dollars as a welder.” Nowadays, he told me, young people with ambitions went to college and, upon getting their diplomas, moved elsewhere (his own daughter had just graduated from LSU and was heading to Houston). Driving through Morgan City, I didn’t find it hard to fathom why. Empty storefronts lined the moribund commercial center, which looked less like a boomtown than a ghost town. The housing on the residential streets was in a state of dramatic disrepair—porches crumbling, roofs moldering, wooden beams jutting out of run-down shacks. In front of one of the houses, I spotted a weather-beaten basketball hoop with a shredded net hanging from the rim. Next to it was an empty shopping cart. The image reminded me of something I’d seen before, though I couldn’t recall exactly what. Later, it came to me—the visit I’d paid to Florida City to see the Dade Correctional Institution, during which I’d stopped to talk to Jimmy, the man who was selling mangoes and lychees on the street, next to an empty shopping cart.