In April of 2010, BP began aerial spraying of a deadly toxic mist that settled over the Gulf of Mexico and coastal communities from Louisiana all the way to the west coast of Florida. These communities were gassed after BP’s Deepwater Horizon’s oil well gushed more than 200 million gallons into the Gulf of Mexico. Cleanup teams sprayed 1.84 million gallons of a dispersant called Corexit 9500A onto the Gulf’s surface.
The immediate aftermath of the explosion was that 11 workers were killed with 17 injured and it caused the Deepwater Horizon to burn and sink almost a mile to the sea bed. The same blowout that caused the explosion caused a massive offshore oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico
It has been estimated that nearly a million sea creatures have perished in the years since the explosion. It is documented that thousands of marine mammals, sea turtles, and other sea creatures have died as well as 800,000 seabirds and shorebirds.
The well kept secret is that humans are sick and dying from the poison as well. Rashes cover the entire bodies of residents, they have severe asthma attacks, children are losing their hair in clumps and frequent seizures are occurring today in coastal towns all across the Gulf states.
Cleanup workers that were hired by BP are in respiratory distress. They have skin lesions and flesh eating disease, debilitating migraines, cardiac episodes, liver failure, rectal bleeding and premature death.
Today, other effects are becoming apparent such as birth defects in children born to mothers who were exposed to Corexit with some “affected as tangentially as washing clothes stained with oil. Recent local media reports cite rises in autism among coastal children who were in utero or very young during the cleanup.”
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All of that from a dispersant famously declared by one BP spill supervisor in the heat of the disaster to be “as safe as dishwashing liquid.”
In keeping with perpetuating this notion, the federal district court in New Orleans currently assessing damages owed by BP has thrown each of those ailments out as criteria for medical compensation, Dr. Michael Robichaux, who treated hundreds of spill victims, told Bellona by phone from Raceland, Louisiana.
But cancer as a longer-term result of exposure to the BP spill has been until recently an outcome much of the medical community, big oil, some marine researchers, and even many non-profits have been reluctant to acknowledge. It’s a hot-potato topic, they say. Too dicey. Too speculative. Too dangerous. Even Dr. Robichaux an ardent health advocate for former cleanup workers, shied away from drawing any conclusions connecting Hill’s cancer to Corexit.
But the biggest effect of mentioning the “C” word, says Marylee Orr, Executive Director of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN) – the go-to organization for tallying the health aftermath of the BP spill – is that it causes hard wrought research dollars for establishing the health link to dry up as fast as BP claims its oil has.
If you live in a coastal area where oil is being drilled the first response will be aerial spraying of Corexit. This is happening worldwide and this may very well poison you, your friends and family. Hell, Canada just approved it’s use for potential oil spills nationwide.
The oil industry needs to die, it is killing us by climate change, killing people directly through out the world by poisoning the land, air and water that people need to survive.
Excerpts below from a must read article from Hakai Magazine titled: Why do we pretend to clean up oil spills?
Self-reporting combined with an appalling spill-recovery record underscores how poorly industry’s preferred technologies perform in the field. Deploying dispersants, for example, is about as effective as cleaning oil-soaked birds and remains another example of response theater designed to hide the real damage. During BP’s catastrophic spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the company sprayed over 6.8 million liters of Corexit. It was the largest volume of dispersant ever used for an oil spill and one giant chemical experiment.
Researchers have known for decades that mixing oil with Corexit rarely works. Short compares it to adding detergent when you’re washing dishes: it produces a cloudy suspension that scatters through the water but hovers close to the top. Sweden has banned its use, and the UK followed suit, based on the potential danger to workers. That didn’t stop the aerial bombing of Gulf of Mexico waters with Corexit—which actually killed oil-eating bacteria—because it looked as if the authorities were doing something. Their work made little difference. Bottlenose dolphins, already vulnerable, died in record numbers from adrenal and lung diseases linked to oil exposure.
“We’ve put the wrong people in charge of the job,” says McMahon, who has charted industry’s oil spill myths for years. Corexit, industry’s favorite dispersant, is widely believed to contain hydrocarbon, which gives it an ominous undertone. The product was first developed by Standard Oil, and its ingredient list remains a trade secret. Although the oil industry boasts a “safety culture,” everyone really knows that it operates with a greed culture, adds McMahon. Over the years, industry has become adept at selling an illusion by telling regulators and stakeholders whatever they want to hear about oil spills (in the past, executives claimed that their companies recovered 95 percent of spilled oil).
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Based on the science, expecting to adequately remedy large spills with current technologies seems like wishful thinking. And there will be no change unless responsible authorities do three things: give communities most affected by a catastrophic spill the democratic right to say no to high-risk projects, such as tankers or pipelines; publicly recognize that responding to a large oil spill is as haphazard as responding to a large earthquake and that there is no real techno-fix; and recognize that industry won’t adopt more effective technologies that actually recover oil from the ocean until governments and communities properly price the risk of catastrophic spills and demand upfront multi-billion-dollar bonds for compensation. “If they spill, they must lose a bloody fortune,” says Short.
The worst oil spill in the United States has been whitewashed by the media, the fossil fuel industry and the government. There are many groups and individuals that are fighting to keep the damage that was unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico in the public eye. The Rising: Connecting human health and oil operations, is one such group, and they have begun a fund raising effort to air a must see film (see trailer below), so that this story does not die as so many of the powerful wish that it would. If you are still angry over this crime against the plane at a crime against humanity, you can help support them financially. Please donate and if you can’t spread the word of their David vs. Goliath effort by liking their Facebook page and sharing this story with everyone that you know. Mahalo nui loa
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