Deja Vu – Rig on Fire

By Patricia Zick @PCZick

As I sipped the aromatic brew, I glanced at the morning’s headlines before the television and George Stephanopoulos diverted my attention.

It was only a blip on the charts of the day’s news stories. I would have missed mention of it if I’d gone to the bathroom when George said an oil rig had caught on fire in the Gulf of Mexico the night before. On the morning of April 21, 2010, other news took precedence over this minor incident occurring miles off the coast of Louisiana.

As I flipped the channels to find more news, I learned that volcanic ash from a recently erupted volcano in Iceland was costing airlines $1.7 billion to combat the loss in flights. The day before the Supreme Court overturned a ban on videos depicting animal cruelty. Matt Laurer announced the death toll after the April 14 earthquake in China now topped 2,000.

CNN reported that a former coal miner at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia decided to give an interview detailing the unsafe conditions at the mine prior to the explosion two weeks earlier.

But nothing more on a little oil rig burning in the middle of the ocean. Since the fire occurred the night before, the morning newspapers contained no reports.

The above is an excerpt from my novel Trails in the Sand. I wrote this passage based on my very real experience the morning I first learned about BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion.

This morning, more than three years later, I again sat up in bed drinking my first cup of coffee and listening to the news on Good Morning America when Josh Elliott announced that a natural gas rig off the coast of Louisiana was burning out of control after an explosion on the rig. He announced that all forty-four workers could be accounted for this time. In the case of Deepwater Horizon, eleven men lost their lives.

Natural gas is now spewing in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Here’s the latest from CNN at http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/24/us/gulf-rig-explosion/index.html.

Here’s to this deja vu ending today and not four months from now.

A Florida environmental novel and family saga

Trails in the Sand has made it into the semi-finals in the Kindle Book Review contest. It’s available on Kindle, Nook, and in paperback.