Six Months After BP Blast: 11 Devastated Families

(Oct. 19) -- It has been a tough six months since Shelley Anderson lost Jason, her husband, the love of her life, in the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig. While once the Anderson household of Midfield, Texas, had grand plans for the future, good days now are measured in small steps.

"The best we can do every day is to stay on some sort of schedule," she said in an interview with AOL News. "Get up in the morning. Get everybody to school. Make sure everyone has clean clothes."

Anderson has gone back to work teaching school, no longer a stay-at-home mom tending to Lacy, 5, and Ryver, almost 2.

"The house is falling apart. I've been on the side of the road with my vehicle," she said. "It's hard. It's lonely. I miss my husband and my children miss their father and I can't fix that."

For a time afterward, the story of the 11 men who lost their lives on April 20 was so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the disaster, the families became known as the Forgotten 11. Now, with the well capped and the fishermen again fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, attention is turning away from the spill altogether. But for the families, the ordeal continues.

The struggle for some is getting through the day. Finding a new normalcy. For others the pain has been magnified by more trouble and grief.

In Baton Rouge, Michelle Jones, eight months pregnant at the time of the well blowout, is raising a son who will never know his father, Gordon. Natalie Roshto, married at 18 and widowed at 21, has come home to Liberty, Miss., finding her house burglarized. Twice. Courtney Kemp, 27, lost not only her husband, Wyatt, but also her brother, Corbin, who died in a car crash last month. Of her three brothers, she and Corbin were closest. He had stepped into the void and helped out with chores that Wyatt was no longer there to perform.

"Life before the explosion was great," Kemp said. She and Wyatt lived in a house they'd built in Jonesville, La., in 2008, just four miles down the road from her parents. They had been high school sweethearts since their sophomore year. Last January, their youngest daughter, Maddison, was born.

Oct. 30 will be their sixth wedding anniversary

"They say time heals all wounds," she said. "I don't know that I necessarily believe that. Because it is very hard."

Nine Were Married, One Engaged, One a Bachelor

The men on the rig worked three weeks on, three weeks off, and commuted to work from three states -- Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. They ranged in age from 22 to 56. Nine worked for Transocean Ltd. and two for M-I SWACO, the company that supplied the mud for the well.

Shane Roshto was the kid of the group, although he had worked for Transocean for four years. Nine of the men were married with children. Blair Manuel, the oldest and a mud engineer for M-I SWACO, was a father of three and engaged.

The lone bachelor, Adam Weise drove 10 hours from Yorktown, a wisp of a town an hour southeast of San Antonio, to catch the chopper out to the rig. His life up to that point had been the envy of many Texas sons: He had been a high school football star, known to his hometown as one of the "fabulous five," who had signed onto the oil rig for the pay.

"Adam was my baby, just 24 years old," Arlene Weise told reporters.

Anderson first learned that the rig had blown up on the local news the morning after as she dressed her daughter for preschool. Three days would pass before she learned the bad news. "All the while, I had watched the burning rig for days without knowing if my husband was hurt or alive," she wrote in an account she kept of these past months. "Later, I learned Transocean knew in a few short hours that Jason was missing, but was never told."

She switched off the TV. "My great-grandmother sat for a week watching all of this," Anderson said. "She made herself sick." On April 30, 10 days after the rig blew up, she died.

The bodies were never recovered. The loss was made even more abstract by occurring 50 miles from shore, in fouled ocean waters where BP's runaway well spewed for the next 86 days. There wasn't even a place for mourners to lay a wreath. For a while, the family of Dewey Revette, 48, who had worked for Transocean for 29 years, tied a ribbon around a tree near Revette's home in State Line, Miss.

"None of us will even be able to visit a cemetery where Gordon was laid to rest," Keith Jones, Gordon's father, told a congressional hearing.

Natalie Roshto was the first to sue. (So far, six families have sued and two more have settled out of court.) Soon after the court papers were filed, Roshto read cruel comments on the Internet accusing the widows of cashing in on their husbands' deaths. She talked to GQ magazine. But after that, she stopped giving interviews.

"She's not looking to gain celebrity or fame from the death of her husband," said her attorney, Scott Bickford.

But she testified before Congress, along with Kemp and several other family members. When Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., asked the women what they would ask BP, they replied with a series of questions.

"Why?" Roshto asked simply, before continuing. "What went wrong? Why weren't you out there trying to do something in the weeks before when they were having problems?"

Kemp quietly wondered: "Why is it that money is more important than someone's life?"

Life Goes on in the Present Tense

Shelley Anderson still talks about Jason in the present tense. "He is the most wonderful man in the whole world," she said. Their eighth wedding anniversary was July 27. "He wasn't there, but I celebrated."

After Ryver was born in 2008, she had quit teaching to become a stay-at-home mom. She and Jason had added on to the house and were in the midst of remodeling the kitchen

They had plans to buy land, maybe 20 acres. They'd build a barn and fix the pond and get a couple of cows.

"He had a deal worked out with the neighbor," she said. "It's not going to work out now. I can't take care of that."

Looking back, the what ifs are too painful to contemplate. There are so many, they are hard to ignore. What if the blowout had hit just a few hours later? Wyatt Kemp might have been gone from the rig by then, on his way back home. Some of the men might not even have been on the rig at all, except for a quirk of fate. Dale Burkeen, a crane operator, was relieving another crane operator for dinner when the explosion occurred. Gordon Jones, a mud engineer for M-I SWACO, was filling in for one of the regular mud engineers away on vacation.

Jason Anderson might not have been there. Transocean had tried to promote him to teach well-control school. But he wasn't ready to work in an office, in a job that might require the family to move to Houston. He had accepted a transfer to another rig. But Transocean needed him for one last week to train some crew on the Deepwater Horizon. His six days were up, he was due to leave the platform the morning of April 21. He was all packed.

"The thing I think about is he had taken the other job," Shelley Anderson said. "But the rig manager had asked him to come in to work. One more week. Jason is not going to say no."

SEE ALSO: Deepwater Horizon Victims: The Forgotten 11