Remembering the victims of the Transocean Deepwater Horizon

It’s easy to reduce a tragedy to a statistic.

Particularly in the maritime world, where individual seamen and offshore workers are often reduced to the generic term of “crew,” their lives lumped into the cold language of “P & I risk” and, most glaringly, “supercargo.”

Supercargo? That signifies extra persons aboard a vessel or platform beyond the normal billet, a term only slightly less human than “supernumerary.”

To quote from the glossary in each book from Retired SEAL Richard Marcinko’s best selling Rogue Warrior series: “Navy SEAL = Cannon Fodder.”

Let us not forget that among the coverage of the burning and sinking Transocean Deepwater Horizon rig, among the stories of the ever expanding oil sheen and cleanup efforts, there are 11 men whose lives were presumed to have been lost in the explosion Tuesday night.

These were men with children and wives, mothers and fathers, working 12 hour days for 14 days straight in a risky environment to provide the fuel to drive our cars and live our lives.

We don’t know much about who these men from Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas were as the names have rightly been withheld in order to spare their families from the prying media.

As of this weekend, two of the men’s names have surfaced through the families themselves. One was 38-year-old Karl Kleppinger, Jr. of Zachary, Louisiana. His father, Karl Sr., supported the Coast Guard’s decision to call off rescue efforts.

"Given the magnitude of the explosion and the fire, I don't see where you would be able to find anything," he said. The other name we know about is Shane Roshto of Amite, Mississippi. His wife Natalie “has pretty much accepted the fact that her husband is not coming back," said Scott Bickford, an attorney for the family.

"The time of reasonable expectation of survivability has passed," said Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry.

The first lawsuits were filed on behalf of the victims within a day of the tragedy and some critics will focus on alleged greed by so-called ambulance water-chasing lawyers pouncing on grieving families like a pack of hyenas upon a dying water buffalo. But no matter the moral turpitude of quick moving counselors, let not the sacrifices of the 11 men be forgotten. Some would say that referring to those who died in the explosion as victims who sacrificed their lives is to insult the dead with a hyperbole unfitting to people who lost their lives merely by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, no matter how terrible a fate it was.

Heroes or not, these men may go down as the pioneers of 21st century offshore safety reforms. As the deadliest U.S. offshore platform disaster in 46 years in terms of loss of life, the media coverage will force the light of exposure into just how safe that industry really is and what can be done to make sure another Deepwater Horizon explosion never happens again.

(Some information was compiled from Associated Press reports.)