by Eyal Press
“THE SHARP END OF THE SPEAR”
Just as dirty work was disproportionately allotted to certain classes, so, too, was it concentrated in certain places: “rural ghettos” where prisons like Dade were located; remote industrial parks where slaughterhouses set up shop; towns full of “least resistant personalities” where refineries were built and coastlines were opened to offshore drilling, creating eyesores that the residents of places like Marin County, California, were spared. The geography of dirty work both mirrored and reinforced race and class inequality, ensuring that stigmatized industries and stigmatized institutions were situated in less affluent parts of the country, places like “Cancer Alley.”
To be sure, not everyone saw these industries as stigmatized or regretted working in them. A few days before visiting Morgan City, I had dinner with Rick Farmer, a drilling engineer. We met in La Villa Circle, a gated community near Lafayette where he lived in a large brick house with a columned porch and a pair of magnolias out front. Farmer had grown up in more hardscrabble circumstances. The son of farmers, he cut his teeth in the oil industry when he was eighteen, working as a roustabout while attending Mississippi State University, where he earned a degree in petroleum engineering. He had just turned sixty and was financially secure and openly grateful for a career that had enabled him to avoid the drudgery of a conventional day job. Working offshore was “an adventure,” he said. He loved the feeling of being out at sea and the rush that came from getting things done. He also didn’t mind the salary, mentioning that he made between $350,000 and $400,000 a year.
If this was dirty work, a lot of Americans would have happily signed up for it, I thought while listening to Farmer describe how lucky he felt in the brick-floored kitchen of his spacious home. But not everyone would have considered him lucky, nor had he always felt this way himself. In 1984, he was pulling a well apart when some equipment collapsed. The falling debris instantly killed one of his coworkers and left Farmer permanently disabled, bound to the wheelchair in which he sat during dinner. His house was designed to accommodate his disability, with halls and doorways that were wide enough for him to maneuver around. This had not always been the case on the rigs he’d worked on. At dinner, he recalled having to crawl on his hands and knees to go to the bathroom. He also recalled the despondency he felt after the accident, when he took to drinking to try to dull the pain. When the pain persisted, he contemplated suicide. “Two years after it happened, I was ready to end it,” he said. Eventually, some friends persuaded him to go to a rehabilitation center, where he met with a psychiatrist who handed him a pillow that he tried with all his might to tear apart. “Why me?” he howled. Then Farmer, who’d been raised Catholic, flung aside the pillow and thought of the torment endured by Christ during the Crucifixion. “We are all forsaken,” he told me he realized in the throes of his despair. He had been a devout churchgoer ever since.
Surviving a near-death experience was not unusual in the oil industry. The person who’d introduced me to Farmer was Lillian Espinoza-Gala. She lived in Lafayette, in a wood-frame house crammed with books about the oil industry, for which she began working in 1973, becoming one of the first female roustabouts in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, there were no separate bathrooms for women on rigs, she said. There were also few jobs for which Espinoza-Gala seemed less suited. Although her father worked in the oil industry, she had drifted in a different direction, joining the peace movement after several of her high school classmates returned from Vietnam in body bags. At one antiwar rally, she handed out a pamphlet that read, “Big Oil Is Raping the Earth.” Eventually, after a series of adventures that took her all the way to Canada, where her relationship with a charismatic peace activist went awry, she returned to Louisiana and began looking for a job so that she could pay the tuition to go back to school. One day, her father came home and told her that offshore companies were going to start hiring women. “I could do that,” she said. Some time later, she went on her first hitch, pulling her sandy-blond hair beneath a hard hat and trading in the jeans swathed in antiwar patches that she often wore for a pair of coveralls. All her friends in the peace movement were appalled. To her surprise, she actually liked the job. Working on an offshore rig was like “living on a castle in the middle of the ocean,” she told me. There was a lot about the job she came to love.
What she did not love was seeing more people die for no good reason. On two occasions, she was on a rig when fatal accidents occurred. One of the accidents, in 1981, caused by corroded wellheads about which she had tried to sound the alarm, killed a welder and injured her severely. Afterward, she was helicoptered to the ER, blood spattered and unconscious. The accident shattered several bones in her right hand, which was permanently disfigured, and ended her career as a roustabout. But it eventually propelled her to embark on a new career, as an industry safety consultant determined to prevent other rig workers from going through similar ordeals.
To some extent, accidents on offshore rigs were unavoidable. But the toll in lives was not the same in all countries. Between 2004 and 2009, fatalities in the offshore industry were “more than four times higher per person-hours worked in U.S. waters than in European waters, even though many of the same companies work in both venues,” noted the national commission report submitted to President Obama after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The report traced this disparity back to the 1980s, when a series of deadly accidents took place, including a blowout on the Piper Alpha, a platform in the North Sea, that killed 167 people. In Norway and the United Kingdom, the response was to enact stronger regulations that put the burden of preventing future disasters on industry. The United States adopted a laxer approach. One reason for this was that the oil industry vigorously opposed regulation. Another was that the U.S. Minerals Management Service, the federal agency responsible for overseeing safety and environmental standards in the Gulf, also oversaw the collection of royalties from oil and gas leasing operations. After taxes, these royalties were the second-largest source of government revenue, which helped explain why the MMS approached industry “more as a partner than a policeman,” as one agency official quoted in the national commission report put it. None of this changed as oil companies started drilling riskier wells in deeper waters. Nor did it alter much as different administrations took office. As the national commission’s report noted, “The safety risks had dramatically increased with the shift to the Gulf’s deepwaters, but Presidents, members of Congress, and agency leadership had become preoccupied for decades with the enormous revenues generated by such drilling rather than focused on ensuring its safety. With the benefit of hindsight, the only question had become not whether an accident would happen, but when.”
Espinoza-Gala served as a consultant on the national commission report, helping to write the chapter on worker safety. The Deepwater Horizon disaster did lead to some positive changes, she told me. The MMS was replaced by the newly formed Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. New safety regulations were passed. Yet Espinoza-Gala was understandably in no mood to harp on this progress on the day we got together. We met on May 2, 2019, which happened to be the thirty-eighth anniversary of the accident that almost killed her. The day before, the Trump administration put out a revised well-control rule that gutted the safety regulations passed after the Deepwater blowout. Under the new rules, independent auditors were no longer required to inspect safety equipment on rigs. Testing requirements for blowout preventers were also weakened. Overseeing these changes was Scott Angelle, a close ally of industry whom Trump had appointed to run BSEE and who proceeded to meet repeatedly with executives from oil companies that had been cited for violating safety regulations. “Help is on the way,” Angelle promised the executives. Espinoza-Gala did not mince words about what delivering on this promise would mean for rig workers. “He has the potential to kill people that are connected to this community, and it will be on his soul the rest of his life,” she said of Angelle, who was from Lafayette. Yet she acknowledged that it mi
ght be wishful thinking to assume this would weigh on his conscience. Espinoza-Gala told me that years earlier, when Angelle was running for Congress, Espinoza-Gala told me that she started calling various candidates in the race to ask them what they were going to do about offshore safety. “Offshore safety?” one of the candidates responded. “That’s not an issue, Lillian. There’s no jobs! The only thing people care about in Louisiana is jobs.”
Just as Louisianans did not have the luxury to protect their coastline from environmental degradation, so, too, did they lack the luxury to protect rig workers from getting maimed and killed, the candidate was essentially telling her. Espinoza-Gala refused to accept this logic, both because of her own near-death experience and to honor the memory of the eleven workers who died on the Deepwater Horizon. When the blowout happened, she told me, it felt just like 9/11 to her. Ironically enough, it also led her to conclude that the emphasis on safety was misplaced—personal safety, that is. “Personal safety is, Wear your hard hat! Don’t fall down!” she explained. It was the message that companies drummed home to workers in training sessions, leading them to think that avoiding accidents was up to them, which is what she herself had believed as a roustabout. “When I worked offshore, I thought all our accidents were caused by us,” she said. It was the same message dirty workers in prisons and slaughterhouses received: if a problem existed, it was their personal fault. What mattered far more, Espinoza-Gala had come to believe, was “process safety,” a product of choices made long beforehand—cutting costs, rushing projects—that made the entire system unsafe. Process safety flowed from decisions reached by senior executives who sat at what she called “the blunt end of the spear,” as opposed to their underlings on “the sharp end of the spear,” the frontline workers who risked death and injury, doing the dirty work for them.
The drillers and roustabouts imperiled did not all work offshore. According to Michael Patrick F. Smith, who went to North Dakota to get a job as a swamper during the fracking boom, “From 2008 to 2017, roughly the same number of oil field workers were killed on the job as U.S. troops in Afghanistan.” Since the Deepwater disaster, Espinoza-Gala had been giving PowerPoint presentations about how to prevent more workers from dying, in part to debunk a common narrative that emerged after blowouts, which is that lives might have been saved if the people on the rig—the ones at the sharp end of the spear—had acted more responsibly. This narrative had important moral consequences, leading workers to blame themselves or their peers, rather than the executives pulling the strings above them, when things went awry. One afternoon when I visited her, Espinoza-Gala led me into her office, a small, wood-paneled room whose walls were decorated with various mementos. On one wall was an award recognizing her as “one of the first Gulf of Mexico female production roustabouts.” On another was a picture of eleven wooden crosses planted on a strip of sand, one for each of the workers killed on the Deepwater Horizon. Espinoza-Gala slid into a chair in front of a computer monitor and, using the two fingers on her right hand that she could still bend freely, began clicking on a mouse pad. Halfway through her PowerPoint presentation, she clicked on a slide that showed the faces of each of the workers who had died. There was Donald Clark, forty-nine, an assistant driller from Louisiana. There was Aaron Dale Burkeen, thirty-seven, a crane operator from Mississippi. Wearing hard hats and safety gloves—personal safety—didn’t help these workers, she noted. Feeling less pressure to keep costs down, or more freedom to report safety concerns to their superiors—process safety—might have. Some of the workers on the Deepwater Horizon had shared their concerns about the lack of safety with family members, Espinoza-Gala told me. One of the victims even asked his wife to make out a will for him just before the blowout. Other workers confided in Lloyd’s Register, which surveyed conditions on the Deepwater Horizon a month before the disaster, interviewing forty workers, several of whom said they “often saw” unsafe practices but were too afraid to report them. After the blowout, Congress recommended extending whistleblower protections to rig workers to alleviate this fear. But in 2017, BSEE determined that enforcing these protections was beyond its purview, another gift to industry from Scott Angelle and the Trump administration.
Before shutting down her computer, Espinoza-Gala clicked on one other slide featuring a worker, a bearded man in a navy suit and silk tie who was sitting at a congressional hearing, delivering testimony. It was Stephen Stone. Behind him was a woman with long red hair and freckled cheeks dabbing a tear from her eye. It was Sara. On the next slide, a congressman was shown holding up a photo of one of the blowout’s victims: a pelican, Louisiana’s state bird, encrusted with crude oil. A proud Louisianan and committed conservationist (“Bayou Vermilion Watershed: Keep It Clean,” read a sticker on the refrigerator in her kitchen), Espinoza-Gala was not unmoved by the image of the pelican. But, like Sara Lattis Stone, she found it difficult to understand why the pelicans aroused more sympathy from politicians than the workers. “The widows were in these hearings, where they’re holding up pictures of birds instead of their husbands!” she said. For a long time, she told me, this enraged her. Eventually, she came to terms with it, reluctantly concluding that if not for the pelicans, the Deepwater Horizon disaster would likely have gone unnoticed in Washington, the way most rig accidents did, owing to the low value placed on the lives of the roustabouts who did the dirty work.
“If eleven workers would have died, nobody would have cared,” she said. “It’s only because of the birds and the pollution.”
“LAYERED EFFECTS”
A few weeks after meeting Lillian Espinoza-Gala, I saw Sara Lattis Stone again. She was still living in California, but she was no longer married to Stephen. Not long after I’d visited them in San Clemente, they had moved to Portland together, seeking a fresh start in a calmer, slower-paced environment. The move took place shortly after they’d reached a settlement with Transocean that compensated them for the pain and suffering the blowout had caused. Both BP and Transocean ended up paying out billions of dollars in such settlements, leading some media outlets to portray the companies as victims of opportunistic lawyers filing a blizzard of inflated claims. Sara did not share the amount of their settlement with me. What she did tell me was that in the nearly five years it took to iron out, a period when Stephen couldn’t work and she had to stay home to take care of him, they burned through all their savings and had to rely on family (in particular, her parents) to get by. She also told me that they wanted to hold out for a trial but ended up agreeing to a settlement out of desperation as medical bills went unpaid and debts piled up. “I feel really crappy about that,” she said. For her and Stephen, the settlement was both a relief and a source of discomfort. Although the cash was welcome, they came to see it the same way Flor Martinez viewed the bonuses her husband earned as a supervisor at Sanderson Farms: as dirty money.
In Portland, their lives would return to normal, Sara had assumed. She and Stephen moved into a large craftsman-style house on a tree-lined street in a gentrifying neighborhood. Sara turned a room on the ground floor into an art studio. “Everything would be okay,” she told herself hopefully. But things were not okay. Instead of calm, the neighborhood was noisy, with police sirens that blared through the night, setting Stephen’s nerves on edge. Meanwhile, Sara began to experience a physical breakdown, migraines and ripples of pain that flared in her back and spread through her body. The pain grew so severe that, eventually, she couldn’t get out of bed. “At one point, my legs were so heavy I couldn’t walk up the stairs,” she recalled.
Until this point, Sara had reserved most of her energy for caring for Stephen—making sure he took his medications, monitoring his intake of food and alcohol, assuaging his anxiety. Now her attention shifted to her own needs. To alleviate the pain in her back, she started seeing a chiropractor. To ease the emotional distress that she sensed might be causing it, she started seeing a therapist. The experience was transformative, enabling her to begin working through what she came to see as
her “secondary trauma,” a condition that she learned could afflict people who spent prolonged amounts of time in the company of individuals with PTSD and vicariously absorbed some of their symptoms. The condition was prevalent among the wives of military veterans, to whom Sara began reaching out on online chat forums. But as Sara took steps to take better care of herself, she also grew more aware of how unhealthy Stephen’s coping mechanisms were. In San Clemente, he had spent his days reading sci-fi novels and smoking marijuana. In Portland, he discovered a new diversion, long, intricate board games that sometimes took weeks to solve, an activity that occupied his mind but pulled him further and further away from reality. The zeal he used to display for hitting the road and exploring new places after returning from hitches had not resurfaced. Neither had the levity Sara remembered from the pre-blowout days, when he would walk into a room and say something that instantly got people laughing and smiling. These qualities, she was beginning to suspect, might never resurface.