Peter J. Pilkington

A True Story of Loss, Corruption, Greed and Hope

Book by: Peter J. Pilkington

Review : John Lightfoot

“A Significant Casualty” is a true story, a full-length non-fiction manuscript, unadulterated by dramatization; a compelling and disturbing story that leaves the reader asking a question.

Today there are more than 10,000 commercial divers in the United States. The Center for Disease Control recently confirmed a commercial diver in the United States is 40 times more likely to die at work than an employee in any other industry”. Divers are workers and deserve the same workplace protection as a mailman, plumber, banker or talk show host.

Their work is a critical cog in the machinery of today’s society: offshore oil and gas production, bridge building and maintenance, undersea pipeline and telephone cables would all be prohibitively expensive or impossible dreams without their daily efforts.

Divers work in an unnatural environment to man. They must constantly look over their shoulder, striving to keep one step ahead of a mistake – for in their work a single mistake is all too often a fatal mistake.

This is the story of one such young diver, Brain Pilkington, killed doing the job he loved. He was not killed by a mistake. He was killed by a chain of errors perpetrated by work colleagues, his employers and a slow to change United States Government.

A shocked father refused to believe the too plausible explanation of his son’s death. He set out to clear his name. Refused a proper investigation by the authorities he persisted along their own route to uncover the truth.

Legal proceedings ensure and months later, after many hours of investigations and depositions the full story of that tragic day’s events seeped through the wall of silence built by the conspirators. The truth was a shocking tale of negligence, cowardice, exposed lies, willful violation of safety rules and grasping greed.

On land the guilty would have answered to justice, but the United States Coast Guard police the coastline and seas. They are better geared to investigating oil spills and damage to wildlife than investigating a questionable death.

The battle to clear a dead son’s name was long and arduous. Panels of hard eyed big city attorneys reduced a man’s life to dollars and cents, expert witnesses whored themselves for the price of a report while panicking defendants blamed Brian for his own death. They danced around the truth of months, denying the obvious, hiding behind meaningless legal posturing while billing by the hour.

It all stopped, Peter Pilkington, Brian’s father, broke the rules. He refused to discuss his dead son as a number, as a statistic. He talked of his boy growing up, of the grandchildren he would never have, never bounce on his knee. He talked of the flesh and blood and love that was his son, the real Brian his family had buried on a cold wet March morning. He made the attorneys accept his son had been killed by others on that fateful day and that a debt was now due.

The hardball attorneys cracked, apologies were made. A cynical “heard it all before” court stenographer rushed crying from the room. Corporate America had been brought face to face with a human life, and lost. Shortly afterwards a generous out of court settlement was made to Brain’s widow.

But the story doesn’t end with the cashing of a check in payment for a young man’s life.

Brian created a legacy in his passing. His father was appalled by the lack of safety regulations in the commercial diving world. Safety regulations that would have saved Brian’s life. He vowed his son’s death would not be in vain, just another fatal accident listing on a bureaucratic roster of indifference

They went after the diving contractors, who use young men as dispensable fodder, sacrifices to balance sheet profits. Contractors who pay fractions of union rates while carrying no insurance, who willfully ignore safety rules and life critical maintenance while joining grand sounding associations and espousing their belief in diver safety.

Peter pursued the United States coast Guard and other regulatory authorities responsible for policing offshore commercial diving operations. The Coast Guard can only call on an armory of outdated regulations, while their ignorance, lack of training and refusal of acknowledge mistakes renders them ineffective when tackling knowledgeable streetwise contractors.

Now Peter helped form a national organization dedicated to protecting divers lives. A strong Internet presence ensuring accessibility around the clock. Commercial divers previously afraid of employer repercussions can come forward and report illegal or unsafe working practices. Cowboy contractors will be blackballed and squeezed out of the industry.

Most importantly they are now actively collaborating with federal agencies to draft upgraded safety regulations for commercial divers. They have the back and support of many divers and the licensing divers and contractors. Hopefully their plans will bear fruit soon, before other young lives are needlessly wasted.

The story is one of loss, a demand for truth, perseverance, and hope. But above all it is written in the hope that Brian’s death was the catalyst that will ensure other families don’t have to take home their dead loved ones and bury them before their time