Rig: An Oral History of the Ocean Ranger Disaster (review)

In 1980, the small town of St. John’s, Newfoundland became the home base of the Ocean Ranger, at the time the largest self-propelled semi-submersible offshore drilling unit in the world. Oil had been newly discovered in Hibernia in 1979 and the prospect of job opportunities and a brighter future breathed life into the area’s population, with many young men returning home who had gone west in search of employment.

Just two years later, the Ocean Ranger and all eighty-four members of her crew would go down in one of the worst winter storms the region had seen, Canada’s worst maritime disaster since World War II.

Rig, a collection of more than thirty oral narratives recalling the Ocean Ranger disaster, is especially poignant today, one year after the Deepwater Horizon tragedy in the Gulf. While differences certainly exist in the two situations, what remains the same are the anxieties, resentments, and grief of the survivors and families, and local suspicion of the companies involved (Mobil in 1982, BP in 2010), all intermingled with worry about the future of the industry and lost jobs.

The author of Rig is Mike Heffernan, a native of St. John’s who lost a relative in the disaster. I use the term, “author,” loosely, because except for a two and a half page epilogue, Heffernan does not write anything in the book. It is solely made up of narratives, with no introduction other than a couple of excerpts from news reports from the time. Only three years old in 1982, Heffernan began his interviews after the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Ocean Ranger’s sinking. Heffernan provides no explanation on how he chose his narrators, where and when he conducted the interviews, or if he edited the narrations or archived them anywhere.

Heffernan offers this motivation in his epilogue: “People wanted to tell their story, one that has been with us for as long as we have cast our nets from this rock: tragedy at sea. Part of my job was to inform a whole new generation who knew nothing of the indelible mark the disaster has left on our collective psyche. But for those directly impacted, facts were unimportant, facts were not personal truth. What I really wanted to share were their experiences and precious feelings. This is a book about memory and emotion, not history” (199–200). (Anyone wanting to read about the actual mechanics of the failure of the Ocean Ranger can read James Chiles’ book, Inviting Disaster [New York: HarperBusiness, 2001], or find any number of articles on-line, including investigative reports into Mobil and their subsidiaries after the sinking.)

Heffernan’s goal of presenting people’s memories and emotions through narrative has certainly been achieved. With no survivors, the tale unfolds through the words of family members, co-workers who stayed on shore, and rescue team members. Although Heffernan began conducting the interviews twenty-five years after the event, the impressions in almost every case are as raw and painful as they might have been if recorded twenty-five days after the tragedy. The book is unrelievedly grim. Just a handful of photos of crew members and the rig itself appear between narratives.

There are certain themes common to disaster narratives that are present here. References to the “unsinkable” rig brought back images of the Titanic, whereas survivor guilt runs through many of the narratives—the “There but for the grace of God go I” reaction: “It could’ve been me on the rig instead of Ken: in fact, we had even talked about changing shifts” (41), from Lloyd Major. From John Crowe: “Even today when I talk about George it’s hard not to cry, seeing as I’m the one that got him the job, seeing as we ended up becoming real good friends” (27).

Heffernan organizes the narratives in five sections. Part 1, “Madhouse,” contains the narratives of people as...