It goes from incredibly noisy to absolute silence and the only thing on are the emergency lights that let ships know there is a structure.”

Peg Howell was fresh out of engineering school when she found herself in charge of an entire offshore oil rig ¹. She was the first woman in the Gulf of Mexico, maybe in the world, to earn the job title, Company Man. “Nobody trains you for that moment when you have to evacuate and you are the last person off of the rig. In fact, nobody ever told me I would be the last person off the rig.” Her job as a Company Man was to shut everything down, get everybody off the rig, and be one of the last two people to evacuate.

“There is a rope with a knot hanging. You grab the rope and you swing out and you drop onto the back of the workboat.” So much time passed as she was getting the rig ready for evacuation that when she reached the lowest deck to make the risky rope swing escape, waves were violently rocking the boat and rig and the ocean spray from the wind made it hard to see. She had to swing at the exact moment when the waves were at their lowest point. She swung thinking, “I went to college for this? I’m risking my life for this job.”

“I was very big on proving to my dad that girls could do anything that boys could do.” When she became a Company Man one of her greatest accomplishments was showing her dad. “I showed him what I was in charge of, this rig, all these men, all of the equipment. I think he was shocked and it was the first time in my life he had ever told me he was proud of me.” She stayed in the business for a few years before deciding that it was not her passion.

After working for Outward Bound, a company that teaches leadership skills through outdoor adventure learning, she started her own consulting business. She always pictured herself settling in Cape Cod but her husband wanted her to see where he was from, South Carolina. She fell in love with the area and settled in Pawley’s Island. Then the threat of offshore drilling came to the South Carolina coast. With Peg’s leadership and oil business expertise, she mobilized an entire community to fight what seemed like the inevitable. She spent all of her time sharing her knowledge with the community and guiding them to action. She was the face of Stop Offshore Drilling in the Atlantic (SODA) and a force to be reckoned with. She not only had the experience, she had the art of including everyone and making it a social movement.

“One of the strengths and weaknesses of SODA was our diversity, definitely diversity of thought. Where we didn’t do well was we certainly didn’t have enough voices from the African-American community in our county. What little input we got was hard to get a hold of and that is a problem in this county in general.” Eventually, SODA won their fight against offshore drilling when leasing was withdrawn by the Obama administration but Peg continues to work in the community and bring it together. “There are so many ways to define diversity but at the very least you should be able to see it. You should be able to see how an organization is represented racially, by gender, by age. Many of the corporations I have worked with have been working on that for decades and then to go to that Santee Cooper meeting and see a row of generally older white men just blew me away.”

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Diversity is important to Peg and creating a community that embraces it is something she would love to see. She has been working with the Frances P. Bunnelle Foundation to help Georgetown County become a place where everyone wants to be. “What can we do in this community to get people jointly involved in the quality of the conversation so we are all working together for the same end? We all want to grow the economy in the county but we want to do it in a way that supports what we already have and helps people who are currently not benefiting. ³”  

She has hope for the future and the next generation makes her really proud. “My son told me to come get the SUV because his carbon footprint was too big,” she excitedly reports. Change is happening and people, especially the young people, are making choices to change the course. Since her role in SODA ⁴, her focus on issues has shifted. “I am so much more aware of what is going on in the political process nationally. I listen to everything that is going on in our South Carolina State Assembly. I am hyper aware now of what our government is either doing to us, for us, or against us.” If energy change is going to happen, Peg believes citizens need to start casting votes based on that issue. “Individual citizens have to take responsibility for the people they elect, really know the issues and how those people are going to represent. Those people elected have to take the responsibility for each vote they cast to make sure it is representing their constituent base.”