Almost Every Cleanup Worker From The 1989 Exxon Valdez Disaster Is Now Dead

[Chomsky]

Yikes. True?

Warning To Gulf Volunteers: Almost Every Cleanup Worker From The 1989 Exxon Valdez Disaster Is Now Dead


Michael Snyder | Jun. 30, 2010, 12:20 PM | 35,344 | 75

Are you sure that you want to help clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? In a previous article we documented a number of the health dangers from this oil spill that many scientists are warning us of, and now it has been reported on CNN that the vast majority of those who worked to clean up the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska are now dead. Yes, you read that correctly. Almost all of them are dead.

In fact, the expert that CNN had on said that the life expectancy for those who worked to clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill is only about 51 years. Considering the fact that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is now many times worse than the Exxon Valdez disaster, are you sure you want to volunteer to be on a cleanup crew down there? After all, the American Dream is not to make big bucks for a few months helping BP clean up their mess and then drop dead 20 or 30 years early.


This news clip from CNN is absolutely stunning. If this is even close to true, then why would anyone want to be involved in helping to clean up this oil?....




The truth is that what we have out in the Gulf of Mexico is a "toxic soup" of oil, methane, benzene, hydrogen sulfide, other toxic gases and very poisonous chemical dispersants such as Corexit 9500.

Breathing all of this stuff is not good for your health, but the reality is that the true health toll of this oil spill is not going to be known for decades.

However, the early reports are not encouraging....

*Already, a large number of workers cleaning up the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico report that they are suffering from flu-like symptoms.

*According to another new report, exposure to the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has resulted in 162 cases of illnesses reported to the Louisiana state health department.

*In addition, according to one local Pensacola news source, "400 people have sought medical care for upper or lower respiratory problems, headaches, nausea, and eye irritation after trips to Escambia County beaches."

This is going to be something that we all want to keep a very close eye on.

But it is not just oil spill cleanup workers and people who have gone to the beach who are reporting health issues. The following is a report from a reader named Dee....

My 2 friends and I have been sick with headaches and vomiting, also it feels like heartburn, just feeling lousy. We have not been to the Gulf but there is an inlet at the end of our street. We live on the West side of Pensacola FL. near the Bayou. At first I thought it was just me. My 2 friends are having the same symptoms, all at the same time. Right now I have a dull headache, and my stomach is queasy. I have been thinking maybe the chemicals from the oil cleanup or the oil itself is causing us to be ill. It has been raining all day off and on. I started feeling ill late last night. I was wondering if anyone else in Pensacola have the same symptoms.

So what can we conclude from all this?

Well, it is still very early, but when this crisis is all said and done the biggest tragedy of all might be the health devastation that this oil spill has caused.

If the Exxon Valdez oil spill is any indication, a lot of pe0ple are going to end up dying early deaths.

So once again, do you really want to go down there and clean up this oil?

Of course all of this oil is not just going to clean itself up.

But if we all refuse to participate, who will clean it up?

Perhaps BP CEO Tony Heyward and other high ranking BP executives could roll up their sleeves and go down there and start cleaning up all of that toxic sludge.

It's their mess, so let them clean it.

http://www.businessinsider.com/warni...ow-dead-2010-6

[c1ue]

Re: Almost Every Cleanup Worker From The 1989 Exxon Valdez Disaster Is Now Dead

The video doesn't include a name, nor does the 'testimony' include any actual data sources.

From the 'Big Oil' comments though, I'd not be surprised if the 'expert' was actually an NGO employee or perhaps affiliated with a law firm.

Not that dispersants or oil byproducts couldn't be toxic, but at levels which would be associated with a 25 year lifespan reduction - GRG55, VIT, and any number of other oil industry workers would have to be getting pretty damned concerned were there any truth to the alarmist statements by that chick.

[Chomsky]

Re: Almost Every Cleanup Worker From The 1989 Exxon Valdez Disaster Is Now Dead

The video doesn't include a name, nor does the 'testimony' include any actual data sources.

From the 'Big Oil' comments though, I'd not be surprised if the 'expert' was actually an NGO employee or perhaps affiliated with a law firm.

Not that dispersants or oil byproducts couldn't be toxic, but at levels which would be associated with a 25 year lifespan reduction - GRG55, VIT, and any number of other oil industry workers would have to be getting pretty damned concerned were there any truth to the alarmist statements by that chick.

Absolutely and totally alarmist. I put this up hoping GRG or roughneck etc. would comment and (hopefully) debunk.

[Rajiv]

Re: Almost Every Cleanup Worker From The 1989 Exxon Valdez Disaster Is Now Dead

Absolutely and totally alarmist. I put this up hoping GRG or roughneck etc. would comment and (hopefully) debunk.

I thought of posting this when it originally came out, but was not able to find anything confirmatory, other than the original CNN report. However, now there was this other interview with Riki Ott, a marine toxicologist.

and there is this - Health of Exxon Valdez cleanup workers was never studied

ANCHORAGE — You'd think that more than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, scientists would know what, if any, long-term health dangers face the thousands of workers needed to clean up the Gulf of Mexico spill.

You'd be wrong.

"We don't know a damn thing," said Anchorage lawyer Michael Schneider, whose firm talked with dozens of Alaska cleanup workers following the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in preparation for a class-action lawsuit that never came.

In New Orleans last week, U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin delivered a similar, if more subtle, message to a gathering of health experts meeting to talk about how to protect people working on the massive BP oil spill still gushing in the Gulf of Mexico.

"Current scientific literature is inconclusive with regard to the potential hazards resulting from the spill," Benjamin said. "Some scientists predict little or no toxic effect . . . while other scientists express serious concerns about the potential short-term and long-term impacts the exposure to oil and dispersants could have on the health of responders and our communities."

That lack of published, peer-reviewed study of the Exxon Valdez cleanup workers has made protecting the growing number workers in the Gulf of Mexico all the more difficult and has Alaska watchdogs warning that BP and government regulators are repeating mistakes that made people sick a generation ago.

"We don't have the good answers that we could have had from the Exxon Valdez to either know that there are problems or to reassure people that there were not," said Mark Catlin, an industrial hygienist who visited the cleanup in 1989 and says some Gulf workers aren't receiving enough training to protect themselves.

Critics have questioned whether the Obama administration has left too many decisions about the health and safety of the oil spill workers to BP's discretion as a growing number of workers complain about exposure to toxins.

Earlier this month, McClatchy reported that records released by the state of Louisiana showed that BP wasn't recording most worker complaints of illness after exposure to oil. While Louisiana records described least 74 oil spill workers complaining of becoming sick, BP's own official recordkeeping noted just two such incidents.

That followed a McClatchy story that said BP's plan to protect workers, which the Coast Guard approved on May 25, exposes them to higher levels of toxic chemicals than generally accepted practices permit.

The plan also doesn't require BP to give workers respirators, to evacuate them from danger zones, or to take other precautions until conditions are more dangerous. BP's plan also fails to address the health impacts of more than 1 million gallons of dispersants used so far in the cleanup.

Catlin was part of a Laborers International Union team of specialists who shortly after the Exxon Valdez spill warned Alaska's state labor department that spill workers could face lingering kidney and nervous system damage from prolonged exposure to oil and called for long-term monitoring of worker health.

No formal follow-up study apparently was ever undertaken, however, or if it was, its results weren't published, three of the original reports' authors said.

In the years since, Alaska workers have reported ailments ranging from flu-like symptoms to chemical sensitivity to neurological damage.

Exxon has consistently maintained that there's no evidence spill workers experienced any adverse health effects as a result of the cleanup. Spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said she isn't aware of any long-term study the company conducted on its own.

"The challenge is largely due to the fact that cleanup workers tended to be transient, temporary workers, which made any medical follow-up difficult," she said.

Sandee Elvsaas, who was director of the spill response operations for oil services firm Veco Corp. in the village of Seldovia, disputes that. She said she still has names of workers she sent out to spray beaches and boats fouled by the spill and who got sick.

"The people from the village are still here. . . . We're here. They just haven't come to ask," Elvsaas said.

"Terrible rashes and headaches and vomiting. They were nauseated . . . These were not the same people I sent out," she said.

A 1993 study conducted on the mental health fallout of the spill on workers and communities and published in the American Journal of Psychiatry concluded that people living in Alaska communities touched by the spill were more likely to suffer generalized anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

No similar studies have been published on physical ailments, however. Fred Blosser, a spokesman for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said NIOSH hasn't done any research on long-term health effects on Exxon Valdez workers.

Riki Ott, a biologist, activist and fisher from Cordova, Alaska, who's written two books about the Exxon Valdez spill, said the link between respiratory problems and exposure to oil and chemicals used in the cleanup was explored in an unpublished 2003 pilot study by a Yale graduate student.

The phone survey of 169 workers concluded that those who performed jobs with high oil exposure or exposure to oil mists, aerosol and fumes were more likely to report symptoms of chronic airway disease than workers with less exposure.

Based on the findings, Ott has told Congress that roughly 3,000 former cleanup workers are likely suffering spill-related illnesses.

Studies of other oil spills report similar trends.

A report on the 2002 oil tanker Prestige spill in Spain concluded "participation in cleanup work of oil spills may result in prolonged respiratory symptoms that last one to two years after exposure," according to the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Exxon's own internal medical reports, which surfaced in court documents years after the spill, showed an unspecified number of spill workers made thousands of clinic visits for upper respiratory illnesses. Exxon later moved to seal the records. NIOSH had the legal authority to subpoena the records but never did so.

Eula Bingham, an assistant secretary of Labor for occupational safety and health during the Carter administration, was part of the union team that visited the cleanup site in 1989. Bingham, now a professor of environmental health at the University of Cincinnati, said she worries about the apparent lack of a plan to protect volunteers from toxic exposure in the gulf.

"I think there are community people going out and scooping up the tar balls and doing some work that probably will never get paid by anybody," she said. "Who is looking after them? Who is measuring how much exposure they have to these toxic chemicals?"

One thing regulators learned from the Exxon Valdez spill and health concerns raised after the World Trade Center cleanup is the need for a database of workers whose health can be tracked in the future, said Blosser, the NIOSH spokesman.

"You need basically a way of knowing who was working at the site and information for contacting those workers over time," he said.

When BP chief executive Tony Hayward appeared before Congress on June 17, Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., pressed Hayward on what he called BP's failure to provide a roster of spill workers despite multiple requests.

"The equivocation in your answer is something that is not reassuring to those workers . . . who potentially have been exposed to these chemicals in ways that can impact on their health," Markey said, according to a transcript.

Blosser said BP provided the worker information last week.

Basic worker health information could also play a role in future court cases against BP.

About 50 lawsuits were filed against Exxon over the Valdez spill, said Bergman, the company spokeswoman. She said she didn't know how many were settled out of court, though a separate case involving insurance companies revealed one worker was paid $2 million.

Schneider, the Anchorage lawyer, said his firm interviewed dozens of workers after the spill. Erin Brockovich — the environmental activist portrayed by Julia Roberts in a 2000 biopic — had gotten involved. There was talk of a class-action lawsuit.

"There wasn't a class of participants that stood up. Just folks who had been around the project and the process — many of whom had claims that they had became ill and stayed ill after working on the oil spill," Schneider said.

Most complained of respiratory problems, he said.

Ultimately, the lack of independent proof, including a proper study of workers' health that could show the employees got sick directly because of the spill, scuttled the lawsuit.

"If you're the oil industry, you may or may not have this data. Lord knows, you're not going to want to publish it," Schneider said.

(Hopkins reports for the Anchorage Daily News.)

Another series of articles at Science News

America’s worst oil disaster still isn’t over

Exxon Valdez oil lingers, as does its toxicity

Clearly there are long term effects of toxic exposure. However as the article above said, there have been no formal or informal studies on the health effects after the Exxon oil spill.

[Roughneck]

Re: Almost Every Cleanup Worker From The 1989 Exxon Valdez Disaster Is Now Dead

If that were true then I'd probably be a dead man. When I first got in the business the old timers would wash their tools in benzene,it's a helluva solvent. I could see where a small percentage who got a lot of short term exposure may have some lingering effects,but most everyone,dead. I doubt it.

[Starving Steve]

Re: Almost Every Cleanup Worker From The 1989 Exxon Valdez Disaster Is Now Dead

Might you all be so kind as to provide for me a list of the dead, their names, their cause of death, and their age at death, and their date of death? I want some proof here. Also, please provide me with a list of the workers who were exposed to the so-called toxic substances.

Needless to say, after the experience with the EPA linking taconite-tailings ( which are enriched iron ore pellets ) to stomach cancer and colon cancer, I don't believe anything from the eco-liars in Washington, nor anything from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

Please help me out here because I am the slow-learner and the divergent-thinker in the classroom. In other words, prove your work, show it to me, and let me check it. Just who are the so-called "experts" or so-called "scientists" who produced this work? Do these so-called "experts" work for Dr. Chu in the EPA in Washington? I need help here, so please fill-in the details for me.

Just who are those who survived working in the Exxon-Valdez clean-up? Would you be so kind as to give me a list of those who are living still to this day after being exposed to so-called "toxic substances" used in the clean-up?

I need lots of help here. How many survivors are there, and why are they still alive now? Prove your case for me.