None of the hospital burns units that she tried reaching had any information about him.Įventually, Sara received another call from Transocean, informing her that although the blowout had caused multiple fatalities, Stephen was among those who had managed to escape from the burning rig. Now Sara wondered if Stephen would ever come home. The day after he got home from his hitch, they were planning to meet a real estate agent, having just received preapproval for a loan to buy a house. Sara lived in Katy, Texas, a town just west of Houston where she’d grown up and where she and Stephen had settled after getting married. The news made them drop their phones and scream. As they peered at the screen, they heard the same update, describing the blast as a catastrophic accident and raising the possibility that no one on the rig had survived. At one point, Sara got on the phone with one of them, a woman who had her TV tuned to the same channel that she was watching, which was airing live coverage of the blowout. On Facebook, she came across frightening messages – “the water’s on fire!”, “the rig is burning” – posted by the spouses of other workers. The next, she was convinced that she would never see him again. One minute, she was telling herself that Stephen was fine. In the hours after a spokesperson from Transocean, the company that owned the Deepwater Horizon, called to tell her that an “incident” had required the rig to be evacuated, Sara veered between panic and denial. The blast took place the day before Stephen was scheduled to return home from his latest three-week hitch on the rig, a semisubmersible floating unit called the Deepwater Horizon. She was searching for news about her husband, Stephen, who worked on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico where a massive explosion had occurred. On the morning of 21 April 2010, Sara Lattis Stone began frantically calling the burn units of various hospitals in Alabama and Louisiana.
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