In memorandum to the eleven workers killed on the transocean BP deep horizon rig:
My thoughts go this morning to a guy we became very good friends with back in the 60’s, now passed. I will call him “TO”….. He was an elderly gentleman who had started his oilfield career in Oklahoma in the early boom days when there were wooden sidewalks in town and the streets were filled with the remnants of the oil activity around them. They mostly lived in tents out on the locations of the drilling sites. He had been involved in many of the early and frequent gushers on land, very dangerous situations when the recovery of oil was still in it’s baby stages. His wife was a wonderful lady and a fantastic cook, her cream, lemon and berry pies were the best in the county. She prepared and packed his meals before he left for whatever shift he was working. This was either “daylight tour” – “morning tour” – or “evening tour”, changing as the need arose.
TO made the comment to me one time that he always ate his pie first as soon as he got to location because he never knew if he’d make it through the day or night to have it as dessert after his meal and he wasn’t about to miss it.
Funny, but true….. TO was for sure one of a kind.
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Sunday July 20th, 1981, 6:00 a.m. the ringing phone startled us awake. The man on the other end of the receiver said “there has been an accident….the whole crew (including your son) is being transported as I speak, on a flight for life helicopter to” …… through my muffled sobs I didn’t hear anything else as I handed the phone to my husband. As I tried to get out of bed and stand up, my legs begin to crumple beneath me and I had to grab the edge of the dresser to stay on my feet. Dressing as quickly as possible we rushed to the car and started the 2 hour drive ahead to get us to the receiving hospital. All we knew was that he was alive and was in the ICU burn unit. Communications were confused and they had given us the wrong name and location of the hospital, so time stretched before us as we got to the right place where he lay. The trip from our home to there was agonizingly slow as we searched for him and was directed from hospital to hospital.
When we finally arrived and explained that we were his parents they pointed the way to his room. Each room had large windows so the medical personnel could keep an eye on the patients… we walked past his room the first time because we didn’t recognize the young man lying in the bed… We did not recognize our son until I stopped to look in his eyes.
His face swollen to the size of a large inflated balloon was a mass of red and black and white. The red was blood, the black was burned flesh, and the white was open wounds seeping fluid. Between the IV lines attached to him, and the oxygen tubes, I leaned over to kiss him on the forehead and my heart ached because I could not hold him in my arms….. My baby boy lay close to death and I couldn’t even touch him.
As he lifted his hand, fluids ran in a steady stream from his fingers back to the piles of gauze lying beneath him. Those were the beginning hours of 10 days in ICU and many agonizing months of recuperation…
It had all started following his freshman year in college….. He had gotten a job on a rig, the perfect summer job that would provide the hands on experience he needed as he pursued his petroleum engineer degree. The “total” education required to teach him the practical side of his studies.. As is standard practice, the driller had stopped by their various homes that morning to collect his crew of 4 others and head out to the rig which in this case was located about 40 miles from our house. They had left our house about 4:00 a.m. Our son was up, dressed and ready when the driller drove in the driveway.
As was popular in those days and in an effort to reduce the cost of travel, the driller had outfitted his old suburban with a propane tank behind the back seats… On the way to location that morning, he had stopped off at a producing lease to get some fuel. As he filled the enclosed tank, one of the hands who was sleeping next to our son in the 2nd seat awoke, and in his sleepy daze, lit a cigarette. As he did, the spark overtook the fumes inside of the vehicle and there was an instant explosion. Our son remembers only seeing flashes of fire surrounding him. The doors flew open as the men escaped, as soon as he was out of the vehicle, he run away into the field to the only safety away from the fire he could see ahead. Eventually the driller was able to catch him, threw him to the ground where he was rolled in the dirt until the flames were extinguished. At that time the driller (who was not in the vehicle at the time of the explosion and therefore the only one not injured) got all of the burned crew loaded back in the vehicle and drove them to the nearest hospital. Thank God only the inside of the vehicle had burned and it was still in operating condition. It was a 25 mile drive to where they could get help. On the way some of the men were screaming, some were crying, one was unconscious…and our son remembers hearing his own groans expressing the horrendous pain….
In visiting with one of the nurses at that hospital later, she said it had started out as a quite, beautiful summer morning and shortly after she came on duty she was in the hall way leading from the main entrance to emergency. She heard some yelling, looked up and here were 4 monster looking men coming in the doors ….some barely able to walk, dead flesh hanging from each of them, and all of them screaming that there was another one unconscious out in the car….. There was a flurry of action as everyone was grabbing gurneys, getting the men as comfortable as possible, administering oxygen and pain medications to them and the immediate help they needed. As doctors and nurses did what they could to stabilize their patients, arrangements were made for flight for life in order to transport them to another hospital where they could receive the specialized care they needed at the largest equipped burn unit in our state. They were in flight when we got the call that morning.
Following our initial shock the situation was assessed and we started dealing day to day with the after effects of 3rd degree burns over 30% of our beloved son’s body. I stayed with him that night and the next afternoon I remember as he slipped in and out of consciousness he came to long enough to request a drink of water. I reached for the cup on the bedside table, and the nurse that was in the room at the time yelled at me…. She grabbed my hand, said “NO! He MUST learn to use those hands, he can pick up the glass himself”. The tears ran down all of our faces as he struggled to reach for it, pick up the glass of water, bring it to his lips, suck through the straw, and swallow the refreshing liquid it held. At the time I thought she was the cruelest person on earth, and it was all I could to to restrain myself……but I soon learned what she was trying to teach us. Later she apologized to me for sounding so harsh, but she knew what she was doing and it was a necessary step in his recovery.
The morning routines started with my son’s daily soaking bath where he was handed a mirror and taught to hold and use the large tweezers to pull the dead skin from his body….. following that, medications were applied to help with pain control and healing, and the therapist arrived to work with him on the stretching exercises for his hands, necessary to keep the new skin pliable. It was a daily routine as his wounds healed and he was eventually moved to a regular room, then home.
Home brought it’s own challenges as he learned to deal with the shocked looks on his friends faces as they came to visit him for the first time, and the challenge of being able to sleep through the night without reliving the trauma of the flash fire. It brought our first visit to the vehicle where we viewed his beautiful hair that had melted and matted to the inside head covering on the inside roof of the vehicle. The months passed, he did not return to the rigs that summer but was able to return to college in the fall. Transferring to a larger, out of state college the next year, he returned and worked on the drilling rigs over semester breaks and the next summer. After college and two years following the receipt of his degree he was hired as an engineer working on off shore rigs in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Indonesia for two more years. He continues this day working in the industry and running our business. We love having he and his family close to us again!
The boy who lit the cigarette and was burned the worst, also continues working on the rigs and is one of the best tool pushers we have around in the area and we see him often as he brings work into our shop on a regular basis. One of the other guys developed a bad drinking problem and lost his family through divorce, and has not been heard of in a long time, another guy went into a different career, and the driller died a few years later from a heart attack.
The accident they were in could have been prevented. Do we hold resentment against the man and the industry that caused our son’s suffering and almost cost him his life? I can only say there were years when both were at the surface, but eventually we let it go and realized it was yet another incident in our world’s quest for a necessary evil.
I do not use the word evil lightly…. Along with the bad, it has been very good to us, it has taught us much. The biggest lesson was that nothing worth having is easy. Along with knowing that propane tanks should not be hauled inside vehicles, we know the importance of following the rules (already in place in the industry) to constantly monitor processes, putting safety first for the individuals involved, and how ongoing technology will improve the methods of protection. There is still so much more for everyone to learn…..
Through our son’s suffering and through the lives lost of many others over the years to bring us this product, we know that we have a choice of learning about and appreciating and improving what we have, and/or stopping the quest completely… It is up to us.
This has been a difficult post….. bringing up painful memories is never easy but I felt it was necessary to make you stop and think about the people who are directly involved. Each one of the hundreds of thousands oil field workers for the drilling companies, production companies and support companies has their own story and each one is unique. Our son was left with a few scars inside and out, and no longer works on the rigs directly but instead repairs and develops equipment needed to keep rigs running safely. He takes his work seriously. Today he is today a healthy, happy husband, father of two beautiful children and a loving son who proudly calls himself “oilfield trash”, 3 generations of it.
In memory of the eleven men who died in the gulf spill accident, and their families I say thank you to them and I know there is so much more to what they did for us.
