Below is a recent excerpt from an article which implies that the BP oil spill + dispersants might be so toxic, that just going near it to clean it up might be poisoning the cleanup workers. Other estimates have put the area of the Gulf affected by the spill as as much as 40% of the whole Gulf.
Further, consider that many of the chemical compounds in the oil and the dispersants are both toxic and can evaporate - so logically, they’ll enter the ‘water cycle’ and result in toxic rain or just polluted air. Google “BP toxic rain” to see further expositions on this posibility. So the toxic effects could be spreading over the U.S. wherever the wind blows.
If the spill really is going to result in widespread cancer, poisoning etc, in humans as well as in all the life of the Gulf, I don’t see how BP can (justly) survive financially as a company… they’ll have to be entirely sold off to pay for all these damages, and then even that probably won’t cover the whole cost. What happens then?
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/gulf-oil-spill-health-effects-062110?click=esq_new
After studying cleanup workers from the Exxon Valdez spill, Ott is convinced that today’s Gulf fishermen are not merely risking their short-range health. “The Exxon Valdez oil was considerably less toxic than Louisiana sweet crude, and it wreaked havoc on any life forms that encountered it,” she says, including brain lesions, coma, and death. “We are setting up here for a giant human tragedy — decades of misery — especially if a storm or hurricane spreads it to normal everyday people onshore.”
Ott claims that Exxon exploited OSHA loopholes, such as a two-year filing limit even though overexposure symptoms can take decades to appear (another loophole: rejecting early claims as negligible cold and flu symptoms), to deny medical coverage to cleanup workers. “Now BP is using the loopholes. People are not supposed to be getting sick, but it’s happening.”
Savage, the Exxon Valdez worker who has been sick for decades, will continue to share her story, even if only a fraction of Gulf fishermen will hear it.
“These 18-year-old kids are throwing away their lives for fifteen dollars per hour to clean up the oil,” she says. “That’s the price on their lives, and there shouldn’t be a price.”
