The Ocean Ranger

Remaking the promise of oil

Bibliographic Data

ID14784269
AuthorsRafico Ruiz (0000-0002-9055-1660, McGill University, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume38
Issue1
Pages151-153
Publication date2013-02-21
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCanadian Journal of Communication (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0705-3657 • E-ISSN: 1499-6642
PublisherUniversity of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.22230/cjc.2013v38n1a2637
OpenAlexW1823641785
LanguageEN
Citations received5

U nlike many so-called "isolated" marine disasters, whether the loss of a ship or the material effect of a storm battering the shore, the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oilrig was a continuous event.In the months that followed, as the mainstream news media's constant tracking of the situation quite literally showed its underwater reality, oil from the Macondo well flowed for months into the Gulf of Mexico off the shores of Louisiana.The legal, financial, and regulatory outcomes of the "disaster" all remain subject to ongoing governmental and judicial review, if not public debate.Could the Deepwater Horizon be considered an ongoing disaster?Think back to February 14, 1982, and another rig disaster.These were the early, heady days of offshore oil drilling in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.The Ocean Ranger, a rig designed, owned, and operated by the New Orleans-based Ocean Drilling and Exploration Company, and under contract to Mobil Oil, was the largest semi-submersible oilrig in the world.It promised to enable the most technologically sophisticated exploration of oil the world, and the energy industry, had ever seen.As Susan Dodd's remarkable work, The Ocean Ranger: Remaking the promise of oil, recounts, that Valentine's night when a North Atlantic storm hit the rig with oceanic force.In the early hours of the morning, water started to come into a ballast control room located in one of the rig's legs.A portlight, eighteen inches in diameter, had been smashed by the drive of the water.As water began to cover the console used to stabilize the rig by controlling the rush of water in and out of its floating pontoons, the men aboard scrambled to find a solution.Without proper training, a decisive emergency response manual, or the basic know-how to respond in this extreme situation, they cut the power to the panel.The rig, engineered to be unsinkable, began to tilt.In an attempt to reestablish its balance, they turned the panel back on.Soon after, the rig was in a full list.The men called in a mayday, and began an unwitnessed evacuation of the rig.Among the 84 men who died that night, "lost at sea" in the tradition of marine disasters, was a young "mud engineer" by the name of Jim Dodd."My brother Jim's death was a personal loss for me and my family," Susan Dodd writes, "but it was also a political failure" (p.5).Dodd's meticulous, critical recasting of the individual, social, political, economic, and cultural legitimation crises that ensued from the sinking of the Ocean Ranger sheds light on the outcomes of the conflict between the very real, traumatic, and socially circulating death of 84 people and the "promise of oil."In the face of liberal capitalism's supposed dependence on future prosperity and continual economic progress, the Ocean Ranger, for Dodd, holds, in the retelling of the story of its sinking, the narrative possibility of conducting another form of memory work.Through a commingling of personal and collective trauma, a comparative analysis of governmental and cultural discourses, and a close examination of past and present failures of corporate regulation, Dodd asks: "How do our recoveries from personal and collective trauma relate to the capacity of liberal capitalism to stave off crises of confidence in our political and economic systems?" (p.25)

Environmental protection · Geography · Oil spill · Global Energy and Sustainability Research

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