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Surviving cook from rig explosion describes her journey to safety

Posted on Apr 27, 2010

She followed a mysterious “man in a white T-shirt.”

The best news—the only good news in a sea of bad news—to come out of the Transocean Deepwater Horizon tragedy so far is that 115 out of 126 workers survived.

One of them, Oleander Benton, a cook on the rig when it exploded April 20, gave an account of her flight to safety to the Associated Press.

At 10:00 p.m. Tuesday, Benton was seated in the laundry room with another worker when the lights blacked out.

Then came the explosion. The rig shuttered, debris dropped from the overhead and she hit the deck, as her training called for.

Benton, 52, described how she followed a mysterious man in a white T-shirt through rubble-strewn hallways and onto the extremely hot deck which was caked with mud that was shooting from beneath the rig.

Benton couldn’t say who this guide out of nowhere was. With 126 crewmembers working inside a structure the size of two football fields, it’s conceivable this was the first encounter they’d ever had. Still, she trusted him enough to follow.

"I could not see anything but that man. He just kept on saying 'Come this way, come that way.' It was like he was coaching me to my lifeboat, because I couldn't see," she said.

Benton made it to her lifeboat, muster was taken and it seemed to take “forever to get that boat in the water,” she recalled.

She describes her injuries as minor. However, her attorney said she suffers from post traumatic stress disorder, is having difficulty sleeping and is terrorized by nightmares. She is contemplating filing a lawsuit but has not done so yet.

Benton is one of 115 surviving workers from the platform. 11 are missing and presumed dead.

Read more here.

Source: Associated Press

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