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Life after Deepwater Horizon. The hidden toll of surviving disaster on an oil rig.

By Aile Press. Red by Christopher Ragland. And produced by Haddie Moia.

On the morning of the 21st of April 2010, Sarah Ladisstone began frantically calling the

burn units of various hospitals in Alabama and Louisiana. 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.

The blast took place the day before Stephen was scheduled to return home from his latest three-week

hitch on the rig, a semi-submersible floating unit called the Deepwater Horizon.

In the hours after a spokesperson from Trans-Ocean, the company that owned the Deepwater Horizon,

called to tell her that an incident had required the rig to be evacuated,

Sarah veered between panic and denial. One minute, she was telling herself that Stephen was fine.

The next, she was convinced that she would never see him again.

On Facebook, she came across frightening messages. The waters on fire, the rig is burning,

posted by the spouses of other workers. At one point, Sarah 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 life coverage of the blowout. 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. The news made them drop their phones and scream. Sarah lived in Katie, Texas,

...