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Oil spill cleanup workers health in danger
flywallyfly
Posts: 1,453
It never ceases to amaze me how much the lives and health of the "average Joe" is dismissed by the elite and corporations.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/riki-ott/ ... 78784.html
At What Cost? BP Spill Responders Told to Forgo Precautionary Health Measures in Cleanup
Venice, Louisiana -- Local fishermen hired to work on BP's uncontrolled oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico are scared and confused. Fishermen here and in other small communities dotting the southern marshes and swamplands of Barataria Bay are getting sick from the working on the cleanup, yet BP is assuring them they don't need respirators or other special protection from the crude oil, strong hydrocarbon vapors, or chemical dispersants being sprayed in massive quantities on the oil slick.
Fishermen have never seen the results from the air-quality monitoring patches some of them wear on their rain gear when they are out booming and skimming the giant oil slick. However, more and more fishermen are suffering from bad headaches, burning eyes, persistent coughs, sore throats, stuffy sinuses, nausea, and dizziness. They are starting to suspect that BP is not telling them the truth.
And based on air monitoring conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a Louisiana coastal community, those workers seem to be correct. The EPA findings show that airborne levels of toxic chemicals like hydrogen sulfide, and volatile organic compounds like benzene, for instance, now far exceed safety standards for human exposure.
For two weeks, I've been in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama sharing stories from the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which devastated the community I lived and commercially fished in, with everyone from fishermen and women to local mayors to state governors and the crush of international media.
During the 1989 cleanup in Alaska, thousands of workers had what Exxon medical doctors called, "the Valdez Crud," and dismissed as simple colds and flu. Fourteen years later, I followed the trail of sick workers through the maze of court records, congressional records, obituaries, and media stories, and made hundreds of phone calls. I found a different story. As one former cleanup worker put it, "I thought I had the Valdez Crud in 1989. I didn't think I'd have it for fourteen years."
In 1989 Exxon knew cleanup workers were getting sick: Exxon's clinical data shows 6,722 cases of upper respiratory "infections"--or more likely work-related chemical induced illnesses. Exxon also knew workers were being overexposed to oil vapors and oil particles as verified through its air-quality monitoring program contracted to Med-Tox. The cleanup workers never saw results of this program. Neither did OSHA, the agency supposedly charged to oversee and independently monitor Exxon's worker-safety program.
Alarmed by the "chemical poisoning epidemic," as expert witness Dr. Daniel Teitelbaum would later call it when he testified on behalf of sick workers, Exxon created a partial release form to indemnify itself from future health claims. Exxon paid its workers $600.50 to sign it, as I discovered in court records.
Sick workers were left to fend for themselves. Merle Savage was a foreman on the Bering Trader during the cleanup and supervised 180 workers. She described a persistent headache and "bronchitis" symptoms in 1989 that "wouldn't go away." Her medical doctors didn't connect her symptoms to her hazardous waste cleanup work. She is now completely disabled.
Richard Nagel, a master captain, supervised the workers who sprayed the dispersant Inipol. Exxon called Inipol, a "bioremediation" agent, but the Material Safety Data Sheet listed the solvent and human health hazard, 2-butoxyethanol. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency knows the Product Schedule is rife with abuse and products are used interchangeably - and that "misuses may cause further harm to the environment than the oil alone," but the charade continues. Nagel outlived most of his crew on the Pegasus. He was fifty-three when he died in 2009 of complications from systemic illnesses that his medical doctors never connected to his cleanup work.
Unlike the Exxon Valdez tragedy, in more recent oil spills human-health studies were conducted by independent qualified personnel. After the 2002 Prestige oil spill, medical researchers reported that fishermen and residents of Galacia, Spain, suffered identical symptoms to Exxon Valdez and now BP Gulf responders when cleaning up off their coast - or just from breathing air laced with oil vapors, driven by hurricane force winds. Similarly, after the 2007 Hebei Spirit oil spill off the coast of Taean, South Korea, medical researchers documented respiratory damage, central nervous system damage, and even genetic damage in volunteers and fishermen who worked on the cleanup.
There is no excuse for sick people. BP and the federal agencies charged with worker safety know that the risks of working on a hazardous waste cleanup are extraordinarily high and that it will take a concerted effort to keep workers safe and healthy. Further, it will take an equally extraordinary effort by BP and the federal government to protect public health in coastal communities downwind or downstream from the toxic stew in the Gulf.
Yet I don't see either BP or the federal government taking sufficient--or any--action to prevent human tragedy in the form of acute and likely long-term illnesses from its uncontrolled leak.
Years after the Exxon Valdez human-health tragedy, Eula Bingham, who was assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health in the Carter Administration, said of the federal OSHA inaction, "Quite frankly, they should have been more aggressive, but the government just folded."
I am in Louisiana as a volunteer to help make sure that, this time, the no one just folds. We need independent medical researchers to monitor health impacts. We need the Obama Administration to take aggressive steps to protect public health and worker safety and stop this unfolding tragedy before it gets worse.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/riki-ott/ ... 78784.html
At What Cost? BP Spill Responders Told to Forgo Precautionary Health Measures in Cleanup
Venice, Louisiana -- Local fishermen hired to work on BP's uncontrolled oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico are scared and confused. Fishermen here and in other small communities dotting the southern marshes and swamplands of Barataria Bay are getting sick from the working on the cleanup, yet BP is assuring them they don't need respirators or other special protection from the crude oil, strong hydrocarbon vapors, or chemical dispersants being sprayed in massive quantities on the oil slick.
Fishermen have never seen the results from the air-quality monitoring patches some of them wear on their rain gear when they are out booming and skimming the giant oil slick. However, more and more fishermen are suffering from bad headaches, burning eyes, persistent coughs, sore throats, stuffy sinuses, nausea, and dizziness. They are starting to suspect that BP is not telling them the truth.
And based on air monitoring conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a Louisiana coastal community, those workers seem to be correct. The EPA findings show that airborne levels of toxic chemicals like hydrogen sulfide, and volatile organic compounds like benzene, for instance, now far exceed safety standards for human exposure.
For two weeks, I've been in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama sharing stories from the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which devastated the community I lived and commercially fished in, with everyone from fishermen and women to local mayors to state governors and the crush of international media.
During the 1989 cleanup in Alaska, thousands of workers had what Exxon medical doctors called, "the Valdez Crud," and dismissed as simple colds and flu. Fourteen years later, I followed the trail of sick workers through the maze of court records, congressional records, obituaries, and media stories, and made hundreds of phone calls. I found a different story. As one former cleanup worker put it, "I thought I had the Valdez Crud in 1989. I didn't think I'd have it for fourteen years."
In 1989 Exxon knew cleanup workers were getting sick: Exxon's clinical data shows 6,722 cases of upper respiratory "infections"--or more likely work-related chemical induced illnesses. Exxon also knew workers were being overexposed to oil vapors and oil particles as verified through its air-quality monitoring program contracted to Med-Tox. The cleanup workers never saw results of this program. Neither did OSHA, the agency supposedly charged to oversee and independently monitor Exxon's worker-safety program.
Alarmed by the "chemical poisoning epidemic," as expert witness Dr. Daniel Teitelbaum would later call it when he testified on behalf of sick workers, Exxon created a partial release form to indemnify itself from future health claims. Exxon paid its workers $600.50 to sign it, as I discovered in court records.
Sick workers were left to fend for themselves. Merle Savage was a foreman on the Bering Trader during the cleanup and supervised 180 workers. She described a persistent headache and "bronchitis" symptoms in 1989 that "wouldn't go away." Her medical doctors didn't connect her symptoms to her hazardous waste cleanup work. She is now completely disabled.
Richard Nagel, a master captain, supervised the workers who sprayed the dispersant Inipol. Exxon called Inipol, a "bioremediation" agent, but the Material Safety Data Sheet listed the solvent and human health hazard, 2-butoxyethanol. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency knows the Product Schedule is rife with abuse and products are used interchangeably - and that "misuses may cause further harm to the environment than the oil alone," but the charade continues. Nagel outlived most of his crew on the Pegasus. He was fifty-three when he died in 2009 of complications from systemic illnesses that his medical doctors never connected to his cleanup work.
Unlike the Exxon Valdez tragedy, in more recent oil spills human-health studies were conducted by independent qualified personnel. After the 2002 Prestige oil spill, medical researchers reported that fishermen and residents of Galacia, Spain, suffered identical symptoms to Exxon Valdez and now BP Gulf responders when cleaning up off their coast - or just from breathing air laced with oil vapors, driven by hurricane force winds. Similarly, after the 2007 Hebei Spirit oil spill off the coast of Taean, South Korea, medical researchers documented respiratory damage, central nervous system damage, and even genetic damage in volunteers and fishermen who worked on the cleanup.
There is no excuse for sick people. BP and the federal agencies charged with worker safety know that the risks of working on a hazardous waste cleanup are extraordinarily high and that it will take a concerted effort to keep workers safe and healthy. Further, it will take an equally extraordinary effort by BP and the federal government to protect public health in coastal communities downwind or downstream from the toxic stew in the Gulf.
Yet I don't see either BP or the federal government taking sufficient--or any--action to prevent human tragedy in the form of acute and likely long-term illnesses from its uncontrolled leak.
Years after the Exxon Valdez human-health tragedy, Eula Bingham, who was assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health in the Carter Administration, said of the federal OSHA inaction, "Quite frankly, they should have been more aggressive, but the government just folded."
I am in Louisiana as a volunteer to help make sure that, this time, the no one just folds. We need independent medical researchers to monitor health impacts. We need the Obama Administration to take aggressive steps to protect public health and worker safety and stop this unfolding tragedy before it gets worse.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
I disagree. It is definitely the employer responsibility to protect it's workers from the hazards of the work. If BP didn't know the hazards, that can be somewhat understandable if the hazards ended up being different than what they thought. But, once the samples had been analyzed and it was determined that the employees are exposed to excessive amounts of something, it's 100% the employer's responsibility to provide them with adequate protection.
for full context the article is here but the quote was in regard to all the failed attempts to save the oil, which is what they've been trying to do, not stop the leak
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/us/17spill.html?hp
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
Actually, the law says it's the responsibility of the employers to ensure safe working conditions. And I would argue that many people are de facto forced to take jobs - like, for instance, the fishermen and women who now have no source of income from which to feed their families. And, as I think the article addressed, oftentimes the workers don't know the risks of the work they are doing. Passing the blame on to the workers doesn't remove the responsibility of the employer who is creating the hazardous work conditions.
This brings to mind the uranium mines built on the Navajo Reservation by the U.S. Dept. of Energy when they "needed" uranium to build nuclear weapons. Uranium has already been proven as a carcinogen, and many of the other health effects were (and are still) unknown. Not only did they not tell the workers about the hazards of the job, but they intentionally chose a vulnerable population to exploit... one that was impoverished, socially isolated, and undereducated. This went on for decades, even after WWII was over. The mines were finally closed and the mining companies packed up and left, but the communities are still dealing with it today. I recently attended a community meeting on the reservation with the EPA and other organizations that are trying to address clean-up and do studies about health effects. There are hundreds of abandoned mines, but only one that has been chosen by the EPA to be cleaned up. People live and work and play on these mines (they're hard to identify). Their primary sources of water were contaminated by a dam breech that was just as significant as Three Mile Island but that received no media or government attention. And these are just the secondary effects of the mines on the community. Many, many of the workers have already died from cancer. So I was at this meeting with the community and the organizations that are trying to help the community and it came time for questions. People asked about the results of the latest studies and where they could go for treatment, etc. Then this little old Navajo lady raised her hand and asked her question in her language and it was translated. Her question was, "You knew these mines would harm us. Why did you build them here?"
It is not her fault her community was fucked. And it wasn't the fault of the workers that they died.
They should tell BP: We will work w/o respirator if you have your loved ones doing the same right beside us!!!!
Where I'm not ugly and you're lookin' at me
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
I think when it comes to adverse health effects, medical science, studies, epidemiology, risk analysis, etc. are involved. These are not things your average person can always fully understand - and we see this in all sort of scenarios, not just issues with hazardous workplaces. So I don't think the workers can be expected to know and understand all the research about adverse health effects of various situations. They must instead trust the employers - especially when the employers prevent other information from being disseminated throughout the workforce.
Of course you know if you're a fireman you might get killed in a fire or if you're a cop you might get shot by a criminal or if you're a soldier you might get killed in war. But you don't necessarily know that if you're a soldier you might get cancer from exposure to depleted uranium, for instance. Knowing that exposure to X at levels of Y over a time period of Z might cause whatever adverse health outcomes is not as common sense as knowing that getting shot can kill you. Know what I mean?
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
I'm not sure what you mean when you say it's NOT as cut and dry as it would seem.
Regardless, I think there's a lot of misinformation in this day and age as well. Corporations have really muddied the waters with junk science to give people, including workers, the impression that certain levels of exposure are safe when they're really not. It's gotten to the point that even the courts are confused, so how can we expect workers to know what to believe when their primary source of information is the corporation they work for?
Case in point, do you know what level of exposure to oil in the ocean is safe and what's harmful? Do you know what measures to take to protect yourself from undafe levels? I don't.
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
Many of the fishermen who signed up to work for BP cleaning up the oil signed contracts that forbid them from talking to the press. Perhaps for that reason, reports of illnesses have been somewhat slow to emerge. Last week, the wives of some of the fishermen spoke out publicly about the symptoms their husbands were experiencing. This week, some fishermen are starting to come forward. In this WDSU TV interview, one of the fishermen reports feeling drugged, disoriented, tingling, fatigued, and also reporting shortness of breath and cough. These are symptoms that are consistent with what one might expect from exposure to hydrocarbons in oil.
There are also disturbing photos that have been posted on the internet and in the LA Times, showing clean-up workers on beaches in regular street clothes without even the benefit of gloves. These people are in contact with the weathered oil (as opposed to fresh oil bubbling up from the continuing leak). Weathered oil is considered less dangerous than fresh oil because the toxic vapors have dissipated, but it is not benign. Skin contact with even the weathered oil is very damaging, so gloves should be required. In addition, the oil can contaminate shoes and clothing, and could then be worn home where it could pose a risk to young children. The oil needs to be cleaned up, but it should be done right.
This coming week, fishermen from Alaska who were involved in the clean-up after the Exxon Valdez oil spill are coming down to the Gulf Coast to meet with local fishermen. The goal is to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. I blogged previously about scientific studies of health effects in clean-up workers from prior oil spills. So it's encouraging to see that the workers are sharing stories. The only way to keep people safe is to learn from history, and to force BP to act responsibly (or is that an oxymoron at this point?) One of my NRDC colleagues will be at the meeting this week, and she will be gathering information on what's happening out there. Stay tuned for updates in the effort to protect the clean-up workers.
i hope people start to realize that these corporations care nothing about the environment or the people