The primary story about BP’s Oil in the Water has been the effect it is having on animals and plant-life in the Gulf of Mexico, and then with the economy. People who make their livings on a destroyed environment are going to complain. But, there is also the question of whether the oil and other chemicals that are killing all life in the Gulf can also have any effect on humans.
So, should tourists be encouraged to visit the water, and play around in it, or should they be discouraged. The tourism economy is suffering because many people are wary. However, politicians who want to encourage tourists downplay and minimize the effect of oil and these other chemicals,
such as here,
CDC advises “Everyone, including pregnant women” to avoid areas affected by spill; Expert says crude oil contains “some of the most toxic chemicals that we know”
By oilflorida, on June 23rd, 2010
Health Data Gaps, BP Suspicions Worry U.S. Panelists, Bloomberg, June 22, 2010:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has issued health warnings…
While they suggest there is no threat, the CDC simultaneously advised “everyone, including pregnant women” to avoid spill-affected areas. …
Shira Kramer, an epidemiologist who has conducted research for the petroleum industry on the health consequences of exposure to petroleum, said she is concerned that the risks are being downplayed.
“It’s completely scientifically dishonest to pooh-pooh the potential here when you are talking about some of the most toxic chemicals that we know,” said Kramer, who is founder and president of consulting firm Epidemiology International in Hunt Valley, Maryland. She isn’t involved with the Institute panels.
“When you talk about community exposure, you are talking about exposures in unpredictable ways and to subpopulations that may be more highly susceptible than others, such as those of reproductive age, people who are immuno-compromised, children or fetuses. …
“[W]e have a soup of chemicals from the crude, chemicals from the dispersants and pollutants that were already in the water. Who can say how they will interact?”
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-22/health-data-gaps-bp-suspicions-worry-u-s-panelists.html
From the CDC’s website:
People, including pregnant women, can be exposed to these chemicals by breathing them (air), by swallowing them (water, food), or by touching them (skin). If possible, everyone, including pregnant women, should avoid the oil and spill-affected areas.
The beaches looked safe enough to the Governor, but did he consider the nature of the oil and that there is a lot of it in the water?
Some reporters went to the Gulf to see things for themselves,
http://www.floridaoilspilllaw.com/g4-corexitoil-eats-through-boat-hulls-kidneys-photosvideo
One of the claims made about the oil disaster is that it will have effects inland. It will have these effects, partly, because the oil and other chemicals will be drawn up into the clouds, with water vapor, and dropped in the rain wherever inland the weather takes it.
Some people do not agree that oil in the clouds is possible,
Others tell us they’ve seen oil scattered along their sidewalks after it has rained,
Should we take this video as evidence that oil can be in rain? Mother Jones had this answer,
For the most part, oil itself doesn't actually evaporate, though some of the chemical elements in crude oil can. (The sticky tar balls washing ashore are the remnants.) That hasn't stopped some from hypothesizing that, given the dispersants BP has been applying in unprecedented quantities in the Gulf and the lack of information about how they work, it's possible that dispersant-altered oil may indeed be entering the atmosphere. The EPA says this isn't the case. "EPA has no data, information or scientific basis that suggests that oil mixed with dispersant could possibly evaporate from the Gulf into the water cycle," the agency said in a statement. (But then again, the EPA also has very little science on the environmental or health effects of dispersants, as it has admitted previously.)
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says largely the same thing:
The notion of oily rain is a myth. Oil as a whole does not evaporate—it is not possible that it would be in the clouds or coming down in the form of rain. Oil is made up of component parts, some of which are volatile and do evaporate into the atmosphere, but these separate and diffuse out into the air. Other component parts do not evaporate and are left behind as weathered oil, residue or tar balls.There's a bigger concern than oil visibly raining from the sky; it's the toxins you can't see. Gases in oil that can evaporate are known as volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. A 2003 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report notes that light crude can lose up to 75 percent of its initial volume due to evaporation of VOCs after a spill. That study also notes, troublingly, that "despite the importance of the process, relatively little work has been conducted on the basic physics and chemistry of oil spill evaporation."
http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/06/raining-oil-gulf-oil-spill-BP
Others have wondered whether the oil is not the only chemical that can travel in the clouds,
Is Toxic Corexit Rain Killing Crops in Mississippi?
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
June 26, 2010Yobie Benjamin, writing for The San Francisco Chronicle, is reporting what nobody else in the corporate media is reporting — a mysterious disease has stricken crops in Mississippi and it may be connected to the BP oil gusher.
“It seems like damage brought by the oil gusher has spread way beyond the ocean, coastal areas and beaches. Collateral damage now appears to include agricultural damage way inland Mississippi,” writes Benjamin. The disease has caused widespread damage to plants from weeds to farmed organic and conventionally grown crops.
Benjamin believes the disease is the result of BP spraying the oil dispersant Corexit 9500 in the Gulf of Mexico. Corexit 9500 is believed to be responsible for widespread reports of oil cleanup crews reporting various injuries including respiratory distress, dizziness and headaches.
“Dispersants have never been applied on this scale, leaving environmental scientists guessing about the consequences. Corexit may have caused seven cleanup workers to be admitted to the hospital with shortness of breath and nausea,” reports Popular Science.
“Many have focused their concerns about Corexit… on what it’s doing under the water. But as we know, the oceans are part of a larger precipitation cycle, and scientists are worried that soon the consequences of using dispersants could be falling from the sky,” writes Beth Buczynski for Care2, an environmental website.
The EPA asked BP to stop using Corexit, which is banned in 18 countries due to its toxicity, but the oil transnational has refused.
There is no direct evidence that the crop damage in Mississippi is the result of Corexit 9500 falling from the sky. However, as Benjamin notes, there “is very strong suspicion that ocean winds have blown Corexit aerosol plumes or droplets and that dispersants have caused the unexplained widespread damage.”
A tropical storm located between the northern coast of Honduras and Grand Cayman has developed into the first tropical depression of the Atlantic hurricane season. “On shore, residents along the coast are also concerned about what could happen if the storm pushes ashore, overwhelming efforts to protect beaches, wetlands and waterways and making an already bad situation much worse,” reports KWTX in Waco, Texas.
“Tropical storms usually form in the far eastern Atlantic early in the season. But as the Gulf heats and the oil continues to spill into the open waters, that concern and storm potential will grow together,” Dr. Remata Reddy, who studies and teaches tropical meteorology at Jackson State University, told WAPT in Mississippi. “As oil evaporates and comes into contact with a tropical storm, the chances of acid rain falling within the storm are possible.”
If the storm reaches the United States and plants come down with the mystery disease afterward, we will have a pretty good idea Corexit is responsible.
And if Corexit is killing crops, what is it doing to humans and animals?
http://www.prisonplanet.com/is-toxic-corexit-rain-killing-crops-in-mississippi.html
Some people argue that the disaster in the Gulf, though significant now, will be short lived. There will be natural degradations of the oil products by bacteria, wave action, and evaporation. But, given past experience, we should doubt that the effects will last only a short time.
Exxon Valdez foreman: ‘Oil is 1,000 times more toxic than we thought’
By oilflorida, on June 1st, 2010
They called it the “Valdez crud,” but it was more than a cough and diarrhea.
“We thought it was a flu that was going around and everybody kept getting it,” said Merle Savage, who was general foreman of the cleanup crews of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound.
Instead, the stuff that was making cleanup workers sick was a toxic cocktail of oil droplets in mist they inhaled from spraying the shoreline with hot water and chemicals that were used to disperse the spill’s massive black wave. …
Savage, who wrote a book, “Silence in the Sound,” about the Exxon Valdez cleanup, recounts those risks as she sits in the upstairs “Alaska Room” of the North Las Vegas home where she now lives with her son and daughter-in-law.
Many of the thousands of Exxon Valdez cleanup workers have died or have become seriously ill from inhaling the toxic mist and handling dispersants that contained benzene and other chemicals.
Of dozens of lawsuits that were filed by sick workers, seven were settled out of court and the records have been sealed.
One cleanup chemical, 2-Butoxyethanol, can be absorbed through the skin and cause blood and kidney damage resulting in headaches, respiratory problems and even death, according to the material safety data sheet for the dispersant, INIPOL, which was used in the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez spill.
After she wrote her book in 2003, Savage teamed up with marine toxicologist Riki Ott to warn about the dangers involved with cleaning up oil spills. In a video with Ott, Savage described the shoreline cleanup as being “like a war zone.”
“What we know now is the oil is 1,000 times more toxic than we thought,” Savage said. “The BP spill is going to be worse. I’m warning workers to understand how toxic the crude oil can be.”
Savage’s personal experience is that the ill effects have lingered for years.
“When I came to Las Vegas in 1995, I was sick. I had bronchial problems,” she said. “I lived with extreme diarrhea day in and day out for years.”
During that time she has had severe pain in her joints and underwent a biopsy for a spot on her liver.
“They said I was an alcoholic, but I don’t drink and I don’t smoke,” she said.
While pain pills and other medications didn’t work for her problems, Savage researched some natural remedies.
“I found out about toxic chemicals and detoxed myself with a lemon juice concoction,” she said. “And I sleep on a blanket with magnets in it. It gets your system back in shape.
After the Exxon Valdez ran aground on March 24, 1989, Savage signed on to be a cleanup worker.
“I worked two weeks on the spill, holding a hose with hot water gushing out and steam coming up,” she said. “At first we didn’t have masks. But later on we had paper masks that wouldn’t last a day.
“There was crude oil and dead seaweed all around. The smell from that was horrible.”
The rain gear workers wore would be cleaned using a solution that contained benzene and other chemicals, Savage said.
She eventually was promoted to the post of general foreman.
Even though workers would become sick, most didn’t want to be sent from the boats and barges back to Valdez because they didn’t want to lose their jobs.
“Everybody on my barge was complaining and throwing up,” she said. “Even I was sick.”
Before she left her boat at the end of the cleanup, she kept computer printouts of the workers’ roster.
Little did she know then that the names would become a valuable resource in her effort to make them and their families aware of the toxic exposures they endured.
“I’ve had children who had parents who were cleanup workers and brothers, too. I know of 30 people who have contacted me since,” Savage said.
“Thousands of people are suffering from the Valdez cleanup with no compensation. And there were Exxon officials on each barge. I knocked heads with a couple of them.”
http://www.lvrj.com/news/exxon-valdez-oil-risks-spur-warning-for-gulf-cleanup-crews-93258964.html
http://www.floridaoilspilllaw.com/exxon-valdez-foreman-oil-is-1000-times-more-toxic-than-we-thought
Further discussion of the health issues here,
…The true depth of the disaster is being lost partly because events are being reported without much context and with more attention paid to boat racing executives on weekend holiday than to poisonous gases in the air. In terms of health and medicine there is a cover-up going on and that is nothing new or surprising. Historically it has been impossible for medical officials to be truthful about public health issues. This is exemplified by their dishonesty regarding the danger of mercury-containing dental amalgams as well as the danger of mercury-containing vaccines. So how can we expect them to be capable of coming clean about the health implications of the Gulf oil spill disaster? This is not a joking or theoretical matter. You may or may not have not noticed on television that workers in the oil cleanup are not wearing masks, meaning medical and health officials learned absolutely nothing from the Valdez disaster and the toxic sickness that enveloped them.
Allopathic doctors are neither ready nor able to treat the victims of the catastrophic toxicity arising from the oily vomit coming out from the bowels of the earth. Doctors need to be keenly aware of potential health risks to people exposed to not only oil in the water but also to fumes in the air. It should be perfectly clear that as long as the well remains uncapped, the situation will grow worse with more and more people’s health adversely affected. Notice how they are not talking much about the end of this disaster anymore and for good reason.
The evidence is growing stronger and stronger that there is
substantial damage beneath the sea floor. Indeed, it appears
that BP officials themselves have admitted to such damage. This
places an enormous urgency to reduce the amount of –
or completely stop – the leaking oil this summer.As early as the May 7th the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental action group, was warning that people along the coast were already reporting headaches, nausea, coughing, and throat irritation. "There are significant health risks associated with this oil spill and the risks aren’t just to wildlife, they are also to humans," said Dr. Gina Solomon, senior scientist with the NRDC. "The risks include acute health effects from the air pollution from the oil itself, along with health effects from burning the oil as well as contamination of the food chain, all of which can result in a long-term health concerns."
From Tampa Meteorologist Bobby Deskins from almost two months ago, "Here in the Bay Area, there were widespread reports of an odor in the air. Air quality tests have proved to be inconclusive, but it is not a far stretch to believe the odor came from the incident. That possibility seems even more likely when you consider the smell went away once the winds here then turned to the SE-S. That would blow the odor back toward the northern Gulf of Mexico."
A high pressure system centered over the Gulf of Mexico will bring light northwesterly winds to the oil spill area over the next few days was the report from Tampa on the 18th of June. As a result, models that attempt to predict the future track of the spill are suggesting that the oil will head back toward the southeast. These kinds of reports are going to become increasingly important to doctors and patients alike who are going to have to deal with the deadly winds, as they will probably soon be called.
Chris Landau is a proponent of the inorganic oil creation process and has published on this subject warning people of the danger of drilling so deeply into the bowels of the earth. The process of oil creation he talks about differs from what we were all taught in school. He poses that oil is the byproduct of natural deep earth processes and that oil doesn’t come "from decayed plant matter." The gulf oil volcano is proof that he is correct and that the oil coming up from 40,000 feet has nothing to do with dinosaurs but has everything to do with deadly chemicals and life-threatening toxicity.
Landau says this is not a "spill." A spill is finite. This is a blowout, an explosion of oil spewing out of the earth under great pressure. What is spewing out, blasting out with more pressure than we comprehend, is a toxic mixture of various chemicals, some of which can kill you at a mere 400 parts per million. There’s hydrogen sulfide, benzene, methane, pentane, propane, ethane, butane, and a host of other combinations of hydrogen and carbon. All are dangerous in various concentrations. They are dangerous to breathe in and dangerous to touch. They cause cancer, lung damage and death. Some of them are so dangerous they cause genetic damage, passing their destruction onto generations yet unborn.
Hydrogen sulfide has been detected at
concentrations more than 100 times greater than
the level known to cause physical reactions in people.Landau explains the process, where the deadly gas comes from: "Hydrogen sulfide is coming out of the earth itself, part of deep down below. At lower concentrations, hydrogen sulfide gives off a rotten egg smell, but you can’t smell it at 150 ppm. This is what makes the stuff so dangerous. You can’t smell it at higher concentrations, and it will kill you at higher concentrations. The EPA itself has observed odor-causing pollutants associated with oil on the shore in the gulf region and is constantly taking measurements."
Inhaling air contaminants is making some people sick now and may make many more chronically ill in the future. Local populations are already toxic from other chronic exposures from airborne mercury and other chemicals making people more sensitive to current toxic assaults from the oil disaster. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources Environmental Protection Division has issued a Code Orange air quality alert for Metro Atlanta for Friday, June 18. That means the air is considered unhealthy for sensitive groups.
The wind can easily spread the oil in any direction
according to the direction the wind is blowing.Reports are coming in that people in Atlanta are reporting breathing problems. It seems many are feeling sore throats, constant slight headaches, extreme fatigue, and nausea while outside. Is it so surprising that when the rain and wind come up from the Gulf into southern Georgia people would suffer from the toxic fallout? Those living in the Gulf region are at serious health risks and neither the media, the EPA, the CDC nor the president is warning them. In fact there seems to be a complete cover-up and news blackout of the events as they are unfolding, though we see scattered reports from local news agencies confirming most everything in this presentation. Thousands who are doing cleanup duty and working on the ships are seriously in harm’s way. And then it is anyone’s guess how far and wide the toxic damage will carry.
The Louisiana Environmental Action Network released its analysis of air monitoring test results by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA’s air testing data comes from Venice, a coastal community 75 miles south of New Orleans in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish.
The findings show that levels of airborne chemicals have far exceeded state standards and what’s considered safe for human exposure. For instance, hydrogen sulfide has been detected at concentrations more than 100 times greater than the level known to cause physical reactions in people. Among the health effects of hydrogen sulfide exposure are eye and respiratory irritation as well as nausea, dizziness, confusion and headache. The concentration threshold for people to experience physical symptoms from hydrogen sulfide is about 5 to 10 parts per billion but has been measured higher than 3,000 parts per billion early on in this exponentially unfolding disaster.
EPA is monitoring for hydrogen sulfide (H2S) at a number of
locations near Venice and Chalmette, Louisiana, and Mobile,
Alabama. Monitors are detecting H2S in the Venice, LA area.Louisiana’s ambient air standard for the VOC benzene, for example, is 3.76 ppb, while its standard for methylene chloride is 61.25 ppb. Long-term exposure to airborne benzene has been linked to cancer, while the EPA considers methylene chloride a probable carcinogen. Air testing results show VOC concentrations far above these state standards. On May 6, for example, the EPA measured VOCs at levels of 483 ppb. The highest levels detected to date were on April 30, at 3,084 ppb, following by May 2, at 3,416 ppb.
Platforms in the Gulf of Mexico are populated by
more than 10,000 workers. They must be protected
from hazardous exposures to toxic VOCs.Tens of thousands more are deployed on shore and at sea trying to hold back the dark waters. Depending on their proximity to the oil leak, wind direction, wave action, and cleanup tasks being performed, BP Deepwater Horizon cleanup workers in the Gulf are potentially exposed to the Mississippi Canyon crude oil components n-hexane, naphthalene, benzene, ethyl benzene, toluene, and xylene; other volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in dispersants and other oil spill remediation chemicals; methane, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide and other toxic gases; acid gases like sulfuric acid; polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and particulates from diesel and gasoline engine exhaust and burning oil. Even this list is not exhaustive. Potential short-term health effects from these exposures include Irritation to eyes, skin, and respiratory system; dizziness; rapid heart rate; headaches; tremors; confusion; unconsciousness. Potential long-term health effects include cancer, birth defects, and permanent nerve damage as well as damage to the liver, kidneys, respiratory, reproductive, blood, and immune systems.
So, yes the chemicals can make people sick, but, as some politicians have argued, these substances have not come ashore or been dispersed into the air in quantities that will hurt people.
The questions about whether the oil in the water will make people on land sick should be discussed and investigated by the government. We should be getting advice about this that’s been uninfluenced by the oil companies or tourism industries who have an interest in minimizing the perception of what’s happened.
Do we still have an agency that can investigate this issue?
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Posted by: Red Wing Store | December 02, 2011 at 04:10 AM