Don't Forget Horizon's Human Toll: An Editorial - NOLA.com

Don't forget Horizon's human toll: An editorial
By Editorial page staff, The Times-Picayune
May 22, 2010, 6:45AM

Jason Anderson, 35, of Bay City, Texas, died in the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig April 20. So did 37-year-old Aaron Dale Burkeen, a crane operator from Neshoba, Miss. Donald Clark, a 49-year-old assistant driller from Newellton met the same fate. A family friend who knew Mr. Clark told a Washington Post reporter, "He was strictly a family man ... He had a good heart. He's gonna be real missed."

So are the other eight men whose bodies haven't been found since the fateful explosion. They're going to be missed, too. After the rig exploded and sank, the well began gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It's been frustrating for the dead men's families that the world has focused its gaze on the unfolding environmental catastrophe while paying scant attention to the lives that were lost a month ago.

It is fitting, therefore, that Sen. Mary Landrieu has authored a resolution "honoring the crew members who perished aboard the offshore oil rig, Deepwater Horizon, and extending the condolences of the Senate to the families and loved ones of the deceased crew members." The measure's cosponsors include Sen. David Vitter and all the senators from Mississippi, Alabama and Texas.

Surely, we have the capacity to be concerned about both our vulnerable coast and to remember Stephen Curtis, a 39-year-old assistant driller from Georgetown, and Roy Wyatt Kemp, a 27-year-old from Jonesville. Like the men mentioned above, Mr. Curtis and Mr. Kemp each left behind a wife and children.

Michelle Jones gave birth to a second baby boy, Maxwell Gordon Jones, on Friday, 24 days after her 28-year-old husband Gordon Jones was killed on the rig.

Karl Dale Kleppinger, a 38-year-old veteran of Operation Desert Storm, lived in Natchez, Miss., had a wife and a son and took care of two nieces when their father left the family. Days after the Coast Guard stopped searching for the bodies of the men lost in the explosion, some of Mr. Kleppinger's co-workers drove his truck back to Mississippi. When the family heard the truck pulling up, "Everybody started running," his mother-in-law told The Washington Post. When they saw it wasn't their loved one, she said, "We all just fell apart after that."

Blair Manuel, a 56-year-old chemical engineer from Gonzales, had three daughters and was engaged to be married in New Orleans in July. Dewey Revette, a 48-year-old oil driller who had worked that job for 29 years, left behind a wife and two daughters in State Line, Miss. Shane Roshto, a 22-year-old husband and father, wrote the date of his wedding and the date of his 3-year-old son's birth inside his hard hat and would refer to them when he felt down. Adam Weise, a 24-year-old hunter and fisher from Yorktown, Texas, began working on the rig right out of high school, and according to the Victoria Advocate is mourned by his mother, grandmother and his companion.

The 11 men came from 11 different cities, from Texas to Mississippi. We should vow to remember them even as the fight to protect our coast continues.

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Link: http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/dont_forget_horizons_human_tol.html

:cry:

:kick:

That's the first time I've seen them too.

The story of that truck coming home...

:cry:

11 who died. It certainly hasn't been on the news at all.

:kick:

which pales by comparison to this.

AND we here in Southern Louisiana who are going to die from the toxic water, air, and poisoned food supplies over the next 100 years.