The Ocean Ranger: Remaking the promise of oil

Abstract

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). "The sense of betrayal that emerged in the disaster's aftermath did not come from a sudden discovery that companies seek profits or that the ocean can kill" (p. 18). For Dodd, this is a simple statement of the obvious. "The shock was in governments' and oil companies' failure to acknowledge that a rig is a ship on which people live and work, not just a platform for drilling oil" (p. 18-19). Dodd's retelling of the Ocean Ranger story also indirectly re-conceptualizes the oilrig as a site of labour. Interrupting a technical reading of the disaster as one of mechanical failure - that eighteen inch breach of the world's largest semi-submersible oilrig and the consequences of human decision and action - Dodd brings to life how intertwined technological failure and regulatory failure can be. Rather than let the Ocean Ranger be washed up into evolutionary narratives of technical improvement through failure, Dodd has written into existence a story wherein "the rig was equipment, certainly, but it was also living and working quarters, inhabited and ultimately managed by men" (p. 37). It was a ship that sank, and a true story of a continuing marine disaster.