BP oil still tars the Gulf.

• Author: Juhasz, Antonia
• Position: British Petroleum Company PLC

Nearly two years have passed since the explosions aboard the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig, leased by BP and owned by Transocean, killed eleven men and unleashed nearly five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It became the largest oil and environmental disaster in U.S. history.

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For many Americans, the story of the BP disaster began on April 20, 2010, and ended on August 15 of that year, when the Obama Administration declared that "the majority of the oil is gone," though the opposite was true.

For those on the Gulf Coast, the disaster remains, and life continues to be measured in terms of "before" and "after" the BP oil spill. They are tired of it all: BP, the government, the lies and the lawyers, the hardship and the illness, the oil on the beach and in the water, the dead dolphins and the disfigured fish, the ever-shrinking hauls of oysters, crab, and shrimp, and the rest of the nation's cold shoulder. They still don't know the answers to many life-and-death questions. But they keep going, hoping for life to return to the way it was before.

I'm driving toward Grand Isle, Louisiana, with microbiologist and toxicologist Wilma Subra. We enter the tiny town of Larose, where we see the Southern Sting Tattoo parlor. Wilma and I had taken this same drive a year and a half earlier. In the interim, the facade has changed, but not the underlying concerns.

Shortly after the spill, artist and owner Bobby Pitre transformed his parlor into a gateway of shame for BP and a challenge to President Obama. It became an iconic image of the oil spill, appearing frequently in news reports. But now the signs are gone and Bobby is once again serving up tattoos, not despair.

"It's nearly two years in and the oil spill remains a constant in everyone's life," he tells me. "I'm a surfer, and I haven't been in the water since this happened. Lots of people still aren't working. I don't want to turn a blind eye and say it's all peaches and cream, but you got to get away from it sometimes for your soul, you know? We just want to go back to business as normal."

Back to normal may not be possible for the families of the eleven men who died aboard the Deepwater Horizon. But they, too, press on.

Gordon Jones, a mud engineer for drilling service contractor M-I SWACO, was killed on the Deepwater Horizon. He was just twenty-eight years old and preparing for the birth of his second son, Maxwell Gordon Jones, who was born in May 2010. His brother, Stafford, was two years old at the time.

I join Gordon's father, Keith, and Gordon's stepmother, Sandra, at their Baton Rouge home. Before I even sit down, they beam, handing me new photos of Maxwell and Stafford.

Keith speaks of an evening when Stafford stood on top of a chair to get a better look at a photograph of his father teaching him golf. Stafford began to talk to the photo. "He just was having a quiet conversation with his dad," says Keith, his voice trailing off.

Since his son's death, Keith has made it his mission to ensure that his family--and the families of ali those who died aboard the rig, and every other family that suffers a similar fate--is provided just support from the company at blame. This has meant a tireless and thus far unsuccessful effort to get the U.S. Congress to amend the Death at High Seas Act. But Keith is not done trying.

Keith has also waged an unrelenting fight to ensure that BP is brought to justice. "Everything that BP did that led to this blowout--everything, I mean everything--was done to save money or to save time," Keith tells me. "If time is money, then it was all about money. Halliburton made some mistakes; Transocean made some mistakes. But this was BP's rig, and they had the final say on everything. And every decision they made was about greed. It's that simple."

Unlike Transocean and M-I SWACO, BP has not offered a single word of condolence, card, flower, or even a handshake directly to Keith or any member of his family for their loss, he says.

But BP has spent a lot of money selling the idea that all is back to...