Showing posts with label Transocean. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Transocean. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Deepwater Horizon Memorial Service
Transocean
, the company that operated the oil rig
that exploded last month in the Gulf of Mexico, sponsored a memorial service today in Jackson, Mississippi for the 11 employees who are missing and presumed dead in that accident. Many of the 115 surviving workers from the rig, whose collapse triggered the massive oil spill still going on in the Gulf, were expected to travel from throughout the south to attend the service. I will admit to greeting this news with some cynicism. My first thought was that today -- five weeks after the accident -- was a little late to be holding a memorial service. The second was that, having allegedly tried to muscle its workers into signing waivers the day of the accident, the company had a lot of nerve inviting them to this service and saying they were a "community."
Let's take that second thought first. I still am skeptical that the executives at Transocean are very concerned with the wellbeing of this community of theres. Their past actions, at least as alleged in court documents, don't seem to support that. However, the fact that they allegedly did something really awful does not actually preclude the possibility that they're doing something good. Whatever their motivation -- be it altruism or pure PR -- bringing the workers back together and holding a memorial service is a good thing to do, and the executives at Transocean get some credit for it.
This brings us to the timing of the service. As memorial services go, this is pretty late. Depending on your religious tradition, services to honor the dead are usually held within a week or two of the death, and in some traditions with 24 or 48 hours. Funerals and memorial services give a sense of "closure" to survivors, which is not to say that they are somehow then "over" the death, but rather that the death itself as an event is over and the healing can, perhaps, begin. For the survivors of the Deepwater Horizon
, there has been no formal event to mark the end of the event. When they finished with the lawyers on the day of the explosion, they went to be with their families, some were still in the hospital, and they scattered to their home towns. At that point, the search was still on for the 11 missing men.By the time the search was called off, the hospitalized were out of the hospital and the dust had settled somewhat, the two week window for a service had passed. At that point, the easiest thing to do would have been nothing. Each of the 11 families undoubtedly held services according to their own traditions and beliefs in their own communities, and Transocean was not really obligated to do much other than possibly send a representative to those services.
Having a memorial service sponsored by the company, however, allows the survivors to come back together, to see each other, to be with others who understand what they went through, and to reach some kind of closure. It recognizes that the dead workers hailed not just from communities defined by their residences, but from a community of workers who were on the rig that day and most of whom were employed by Transocean.
It has been said that funerals are more for the living than for the dead. That is certainly my personal belief. In this instance, a delayed but well-planned memorial service offered comfort not just to the bereaved, but to the survivors. That is how it should be, and why Transocean chose to do the right thing is entirely beside the point.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Were Oil Rig Workers Coerced After the Explosion?
As most of us know by now, on April 20, an oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers. The well in question belongs to BP, but the oil rig was owned by Transocean. Allegations have now surfaced that, after the surviving workers were rescued from the rig, they were kept at sea for 15 hours and then brought to a hotel where they were asked to sign pre-printed statements indicating whether they witnessed the accident and whether they were injured. Only after this were they allowed to see their families.
Workers who have now filed lawsuits against the company are now finding that Transocean will be using those statements against them. The survivors argue that their statements were coerced. No one but the lawyers and the survivors really know what happened that night.
When we think about a statement being "coerced," we usually imagine some B-movie crime drama. Bright lights shine in the person's face. Threats are made. Perhaps torture is used. The New Oxford American Dictionary
defines "coerce" as:persuade (an unwilling person) to do something by using force or threats.It seems unlikely that thumbscrews were literally applied to the oil workers. It does not appear that anyone is alleging that the workers were threatened if they didn't sign. So were their statements coerced?
Putting aside the semantics of the word, I think it's safe to say that their statements are not reliable. One of the things trauma survivors experience is difficulty making decisions and appreciating the consequences of their actions. Their judgment is impacted. That's why we routinely tell people not to make life-altering decisions in the days or weeks following an incident. People shouldn't be deciding whether to quit their job when there's just been a horrible incident at work -- they can't think it through clearly. People who have just been rescued from an exploding oil rig where 11 of their coworkers have died don't have the cognitive capacity to decide whether to sign something, or even really to assess whether it's true.
In addition to this, Maslow argues that you can't attend to higher order needs until more basic needs are cared for. In Maslow's hierarchy of needs
, the most basic level is physical needs, the second is safety and the third is love/belonging, which includes family. The evacuated oil workers were, at best, concerned about this third level when they were asked to sign those statements, and probably still pretty concerned for their safety as well. Problem solving and morality (which would include telling the truth) are on level five, self-actualization. The workers were in no condition to worry about that.Were they coerced? If they thought that signing the statements was the only way to get out of there, then they were. Otherwise, it's not so clear. What is clear is that those statements shouldn't hold up in court any more than if the workers had been drugged when they signed them. What's more, the Transocean lawyers almost certainly knew that. They were hoping to scare people out of suing. Apparently, it hasn't worked.
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Meet the Quarterback
- Naomi Zikmund-Fisher
- is a clinical social worker, former school Principal and a Crisis Consultant for schools and community organizations. You can learn more about her at www.SchoolCrisisConsultant.com
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