The Ocean Ranger: remaking the promise of oil

Reflecting on Canada’s worst sea disaster since World War II, this chronicle captures the 1982 sinking of the oil rig Ocean Ranger, which took the entire crew of 84 men—including the author’s brother—down with it. The memory of this tragic event gradually faded into a sad story about a terrible storm, relegated to the “Extreme Weather” section of the news archives. Resurrecting this disaster from the realm of history, this study maps the sociopolitical processes of its aftermath, when power, money, and collective hopes for the future transformed a story of corporate indifference and betrayal of public trust into a “lesson learned” by a heroic industry. This book acts as a navigational resource for other disaster aftermaths—including that of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico—as well as a call for vigilant government regulation of industry in all its forms.