What if Oil Platforms Belonged to the People Who Worked on Them?
Reading Time: 5 minutesThe Dangerous False Choice That Governs the Oil Industry, Maybe they already do., The dangerous toll of offshore oil extraction.
A response to Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s ‘Rigland.’
It was clear the food drop wasn’t going to arrive. Holed up on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, miles from the shore of Ciudad del Carmen—an industrial island and major outpost for Mexico’s oil industry—there weren’t many other options. Workers balled up bread for bait and threw lines over the side of the platform. Later, they feasted on ceviche and fried fish. This, one of the women there later told me, delighted the workers. It was among her favorite memories in 11 years working offshore.
When I set out to report on Mexican women working offshore, I expected to focus on harassment, discrimination, and abuse and the grueling labor conditions that facilitate them. Women are in the minority on platforms—one interviewee was the only woman among dozens of men; others recounted being in groups of only five or 10 women on an entire platform, outnumbered 1 to 10 or 20. The conditions they face are often punishing: In Mexico, platforms are isolated with limited communication, living situations are dorm-style and sometimes coed, and many workers have short-term contracts with little protection. The work is dangerous—they’re exposed to heavy machinery, harsh weather, and hazardous chemicals.
I heard plenty of stories of these precarious conditions—women who were spied on while they showered or changed, discriminated against due to pregnancy, and verbally abused. But more often, women shared experiences like the fishing story. They wanted to tell me about spending hours carving tomatoes to look like flowers to make a meal feel more special; about coordinating workers to bring their favorite candies to stuff holiday piñatas so they would all feel less alone; about learning to teach yoga, helping their colleagues relieve the years of work-related pain and exhaustion their bodies had come to carry. They told me these stories not to excuse or brush over the other, darker realities of working offshore but to show me, Look what we’ve built, despite it all.
Oil platforms are cities in the sea, designed to extract—oil, sure, but also a great personal toll from the people who work on them, and an environmental and social toll from the communities they depend on. It’s a paradox, then, that these metal behemoths are also arenas for human resilience.
Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s ‘Rigland,’ part of the Future Tense Fiction series, dramatizes this paradox. After his coastal community is forced to evacuate inland, the story’s protagonist, Temple, founds a settlement on a defunct oil rig off the Niger Delta. The company that abandoned the rig—and whose work put Temple’s community in its disastrous position, with climate crisis–charged superstorms and ensuing oil spillage from damaged infrastructure—returns to charge its new inhabitants rent, or else evict them. But Temple has bigger plans, not just for his rig but for the cluster of abandoned metal cities scattered across the sea. ‘We will take your instruments of death,’ he tells the company’s representatives, ‘and make them beautiful.’
Rigs are, indeed, instruments of death. In August, a rig in transport off the coast of Nigeria’s Delta State collapsed, reportedly killing six. In July, at least two people died after an oil platform caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico. In February 2022, at least five workers were killed after a Nigerian oil ship exploded. More than 18 months later, the Associated Press recently reported, the ruins of the ship were still visible and appeared to be leaking oil. In September 2020, Bloomberg dubbed Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil company, the ‘world’s deadliest COVID company’—314 employees and seven contractors had died from COVID. In the U.S. alone, between 2015 and 2020, the offshore oil and gas industry suffered 19 worker fatalities.
Because the offshore industry is never separate from the land-bound communities it stretches out from, the health and human consequences onshore are similarly deadly—and even more expansive. A 2013 study found that ‘an average of 240,000 barrels of crude oil are spilled in the Niger [D]elta every year,’ which researchers determined ‘could lead to a 60% reduction in household food security,’ along with a long list of other health consequences. From 1976 to 2014, another study estimated that some 3.1 million barrels of crude oil were spilled in the region, containing metals including copper, manganese, iron, zinc, nickel, cadmium, chromium, and lead, and threatening residents with heavy metal intoxication. These oil spills and industry negligence have transformed the Niger Delta into one of ‘the most polluted places on earth,’ and researchers estimated that in 2012 in Nigeria, ‘oil spills before conception killed around 16,000 infants within the first month of their life.’ Pregnant women with high levels of exposure to oil pollution are also at a higher risk for postpartum hemorrhage, among other maternal-health risks. In ‘Rigland,’ years of oil spills and the storm that forced Temple’s community inland—the two inextricably linked—erase the division between sea and shore. ‘The stormwater levels were so high, the surface so black,’ Okungbowa writes, ‘that there was no longer any demarcation between where the creeks ended and the land began.’
But rigs are as deceptive as they are deadly, because they promise opportunity where there is little. The leaders in Temple’s community shook hands with oil companies because they were convinced that doing so would be an investment in the future: They’ll build schools and roads, the leaders thought. Temple decided to work in the industry himself—as an armed bodyguard, employed to ‘foil attacks by local agitators who often trained their sights on midstream pipelines’—with a similar hope: that it would be a bridge to a university education.
While their work was different—they were doctors, chefs, engineers, waitstaff, and technical assistants, among others—the women I interviewed in Ciudad del Carmen had similar motivations. They wanted to send their kids to college, buy a car, pay their bills, and use the degrees for which they had studied so hard. They came from cities, dotted along the Gulf of Mexico, whose economies were organized around sending people offshore.
Those very cities, though, are the frontline victims of a climate crisis exacerbated by the industry that promised to enrich them. Ciudad del Carmen, an island, is battered each year by increasingly powerful hurricanes; last year, 600 people had to evacuate after flooding. The infrastructure investments that could have made the city more resilient to climate threats were made instead to accommodate more oil extraction. One estimate predicts that by 2050, a quarter of the landmass of the neighboring state of Tabasco, Mexico’s top oil producer, will be underwater. There (as elsewhere), the oil industry has contributed not only to sea-level rise and extreme weather but also to deadly coastal erosion, the combination of which threatens some 92,500 residents, according to reporting from the Mexican magazine Gatopardo. ‘Imagine a town that has everything: the sea, heat, vegetation; its people have everything they need,’ a local doctor told Gatopardo. ‘Then one day a company arrives and stains it black, destroying every living thing in its path. And nobody cares.’
Along the Gulf of Mexico, in the Niger Delta, and in oil-producing communities across the world, the promise of oil-forged prosperity quickly morphs into betrayal. The promise remains persuasive because it plays on precarious economic circumstances, creating an artificial conflict between people’s immediate needs and the long-term survival of their communities. We all, ultimately, make choices that privilege one time horizon over the other. But the further we’re removed from the frontlines, the more choices we have—and the easier it is to pretend we’re not making a decision at all.
What would it look like, then, to discard that false choice between surviving now and thriving tomorrow? What if we found ways to return power in oil communities to the people who live there, rather than companies who suck them dry, then wash over them?
The people who know the industry best can show us how. They are experts in reclaiming space. I was surprised, at first, when many of the women I spoke to who worked offshore referred to the platforms where they worked as ‘my platform,’ rather than ‘the platform.’ They reminded me that the platforms didn’t belong to Pemex or to the long list of private companies pulling resources from the ocean—not really. They belonged to the people who lived half their lives there, in 14-day stints, who laughed and cried and celebrated birthdays and fell in love there. The workers, like the characters in ‘Rigland,’ transformed spaces that were inherently inhospitable and made them theirs. Maybe they always were.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/oil-industry-climate-crisis-nigeria-mexico.html
Ref: slate
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