More: One aspect of the disaster three years ago that British Petroleum is trying to keep quiet is the effect of the oil dispersant Corexit on clean-up workers and Gulf residents exposed to the chemical. A BP executive attempted to downplay the risks of exposure by saying, "it's as safe a Dawn dishwashing liquid". Hardly. Eighty-seven days passed before the Macondo well was finally sealed off, and during that time BP, with the blessing of the EPA, dumped tons of the chemical into the sea. A worker feeding clean-up crews in Louisiana attempted to remove the chemical from the canteen floors where workers had tracked in a sticky mess of crude oil and Corexit. Within days of exposure on her arms and face she fell seriously ill, coughing up blood, suffering constant headaches and sore throat. The professional cook soon lost the use of her hands as muscle spasms turned them into useless claws. Her mind went too, with a loss of short term memory so bad that she went to work one day without pants. Her skin was inflamed and irritated. She shared her excruciating and grotesque aliments with thousands of workers cleaning up BP's oil spill, the largest accidental spill in history. The symptoms were eerily similar to Gulf War syndrome. In the Persian Gulf War, soldiers were exposed to deliberate crude oil spills and the chemicals used to clean.
BP was desperate to hide the sheer enormity of the Macondo well blowout from the public and the government. It chose to do this by employing chemical warfare. Corexit would chemically bond with the crude oil slicks, break the oil up and sink it--out of sight, out of mind. The 1.84 million gallons of Corexit made the oil spill disappear, but the environmental reaction to the chemical was more severe than to the spilled crude oil alone. A technical manual BP got from Corexit supplier NALCO was suppressed by the company, but a copy leaked out and it details the horrible ecological cost of using huge amounts of the dispersant. BP lied about the safety of Corexit. The combination of Corexit and crude oil has produced an unprecedented number of seafood mutations, declines in seafood catch of 80%, and massive die-offs in the zooplankton that supports the entire marine food chain. Because the company and the government were unprepared for the disaster's scale, the company choose to hide the disaster and make it worse by doing so. BP even enlisted the help of the fishing industry that it was killing with pollution from its blowout by using fishing boat to skim, burn and otherwise get rid of leaked oil. None of the fishermen helping BP got hazardous material advisories or protective clothing. Some of them got sprayed with Corexit from the air.
A peer-reviewed study published in Environmental Pollution nineteen months after the blowout concluded that crude oil becomes 52 times more toxic when combined with Corexit. The NALCO technical manual describes Corexit 9527, the more toxic of the two types dispersed, as "an eye and skin irritant...repeated exposure may cause injury to red blood cells (hemolysis), kidney or the liver. The manual added, "excessive exposure may cause central nervous system effects..." When BP was confronted with the contents of the leaked NALCO manual in a meeting with whistleblowers, company representatives refused to discuss it. Very little has changed in the regulatory environment for deepwater drilling in the Gulf in the aftermath. After a brief hiatus for public relations, business resumed. So the next time you see BP propaganda on TV about how, "the Gulf is open for business" think only of the lies it told about the biggest disaster in American history and the health of nature and humans it destroyed as a result. Because you will be paying for the cover-up for long, long time.{24.04.13}Federal District Judge Carl Barbier presiding over the BP trial in New Orleans issued an order today outlining the key issues to be addressed by attorneys for the parties in the liability phase of the admiralty case. He has given attorneys two months to submit briefs. The judge wants to know, among other questions, if BP can be found grossly negligent even if its act or omission was not the proximate cause the accident. The government's theory of the case is that the disaster was caused by a cumulative corporate policy of cost cutting at the expense of safety and environmental compliance. He also wants to know if the standards of an industry that is inherently risky and dirty, or compliance with applicable but weak government regulations would precluding a finding of gross negligence on the part of British Petroleum. [photo credit: New Orleans Times Picayune]
In related news, The House of Representatives passed a version of the RESTORE Act in the Surface Transportation Act bill on Friday. Last month the Senate passed the bill to use 80% of Clean Water Act fines for repairing the ecological damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The Clean Water Act provides for fines between $1100 and $4300 per barrel spilled depending on the degree of culpability. The Senate passage was a rare show of bipartisanship with a vote of 74-22 in favor. The RESTORE Act distributes the money to five Gulf States and sets up a Gulf Coast Restoration Council to develop and finance a plan for comprehensive ecological recovery, and establishes an continuing program to monitor the health of Gulf ecosystems. The bill now goes to conference and the President for signing.