with Big Oil and the way the two impact life around us. Consider the
following and substitute Big Oil with renewable oils (biodiesel ect) and the
net outcome would have been completely different.
Luc
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=606121
When crude oil devastated Alaska's coast in 1989, the damage to wildlife was
all too clear. Only now is the cost to human life being fully realised. Andy
Rowell reports
31 January 2005
It was at 7.15am on a cold Alaskan morning on 24 March 1989 that Dr Riki Ott
was awoken by a loud banging on her front door. It sounded urgent. Still in
her nightdress, she raced downstairs. "How long will it take you to get
dressed?" asked a distressed colleague. "Five minutes. Why?" Ott replied.
"We've had the big one. There's a tanker aground on Bligh Reef. It's lost 10
million gallons, but there's four times that on board."
Only the night before, Ott, a marine biologist, had warned the local mayor's
oil action committee about the possibility of a big spill. "Given the high
frequency of tankers into Port Valdez, the increasing age and size of that
tanker fleet, and the inability quickly to contain and clean up an oil spill
in the open water of Alaska, fishermen feel that we are playing a game of
Russian roulette," she said. "Gentleman, it is not a matter of what if, but
when."
Hours later, on a calm, moonlit night, the 1,000ft-long Exxon Valdez
ploughed into reef, a well known hazard in Prince William Sound. In charge
was Captain Joseph Hazelwood, who, it would transpire later, had lost his
driving licence through drink-driving. Having been drinking that night, he'd
left the third mate at the wheel. The collision tore a car-sized hole in the
vessel's side and ruptured eight of the 11 cargo tanks.
Since that day, Ott has tried to uncover the true social, health and
environmental costs of the spill, and has just written a book exposing the
lies and myths surrounding it. The oil spill killed more wildlife than any
in history, but her book also tells of the mounting human cost of the
catastrophe, and the implications for our use of oil.
Ott, 50, grew up in Wisconsin at the height of the scare over the toxic
pesticide DDT. Her father gave her a copy of Rachel Carson's book Silent
Spring, which exposed the problems of DDT and helped to spark the modern
environmental movement. "At 13, I decided to become a marine biologist, like
Carson. At 18, I left to find an ocean." She gained a doctorate in marine
toxicology and became a commercial fisherwoman.
Flying over the Exxon Valdez the morning after, Ott watched as the vessel
spewed millions of gallons of highly toxic oil into the sea. A bluish haze
was rising above the oil. The official estimate of the spill was 11 million
gallons, but years later Ott uncovered a secret report by the State of
Alaska putting the true figure at about 30 million. The slick spread over
10,000 square miles of Alaska's coastal seas, as far as 1,200 miles away.
The images were a public-relations disaster for Exxon and other oil
companies. Pictures of workers wiping rocks with rags looked totally
inadequate. The numbers killed ranged from thousands of marine mammals,
including otters, seals and orcas, to hundreds of thousands of sea birds,
such as murres and ducks, to millions of fish.
Every oil spill brings untried new ways of trying to clean up. The
unacknowledged truth is that only really effective tactic is not to spill it
in the first place. "They didn't know what to do. The oil industry
collectively is not able to clean up oil once it is spilled on beaches," Ott
says. Still, 11,000 people were hired to clean up the oil.
Exxon tried an untested method of blasting the rocks with high-pressure
hot-water hoses. This washed the oil away, but with devastating
consequences. As well as wiping out wildlife that had survived the disaster,
the hoses caused chronic health problems for the workers - and this is the
hidden story. They vaporised the oil into a fine mist that the workers
inhaled. This toxic cocktail contained polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, now
classified as some of the worst chemicals known to man.
Crude oil was known to be dangerous. A 1988 Exxon Safety Data Sheet said
"High vapour concentrations are irritating to the eyes and the respiratory
tract, may cause headaches and dizziness... may cause unconsciousness, and
may have other central nervous system effects including death" and added
"Minimise breathing vapours. Minimise skin contact." Fishermen trying to
stop the oil spreading soon became nauseous and dizzy. So did the first
workers, who claim they weren't given protective equipment or warned that
the oil fumes could be hazardous to their health.
Ott argues that Exxon failed to protect workers because it did not provide
protective clothing, adequate training or information about the risks. Some
clean-up crews were told that respirators were "optional", while others were
given respirators that did not work. One study later found that in a survey
group, 70 per cent of clean-up workers were not given respirators.
Workers started coming down with the "Valdez crud", a term used by doctors
to describe symptoms including headaches, sore throats, sinus infections and
coughs. The problems became so widespread that the former Alaskan medical
doctor for BP warned that clean-up crews should be "pulled off the beaches
to avoid further tragedy in the form of human suffering, illness and
disease".
"They told workers they were safe, and they weren't," Ott says. "They put
keeping their reputation intact ahead of protecting people. When people
start to get sick you find out why, you get respirators, you get proper
protective gear. That didn't happen... They could have stopped the
high-pressure hosing. When they realised it wasn't working, they could have
stopped it. Exxon killed Alaska while trying to save it."
Ron Smith was one of the workers who headed to the spill hoping to earn good
money. He worked on the boats. He started to get intense headaches,
especially on sunny windless days, where he could watch the "vapours rising
like heat waves". Even after stopping work, the headaches and mood swings
continued. Eventually he went to see doctors specialising in environmental
medicine in Dallas, to be told he had "very high levels of some pretty
dangerous chemicals" in his body. Smith later settled a personal injury
lawsuit against Exxon, and he was subject to a gag order.
But it was not just oil the workers were exposed to. Exxon used fertilisers
and other industrial chemicals to try to break down the oil. One of the
chemicals used was Inipol. Its Safety Data Sheet warned that Inipol caused a
variety of health effects: dizziness, headaches, blood and kidney damage,
and red discolouration of the urine. Some workers, including Don Moeller,
started peeing blood.
When Moeller heard about the spill, he took time off from his job to looking
mentally handicapped people to work on the beaches, mopping up. Like many,
he had problems with the respirators, which were "no longer good after a
couple of hours".
His ledger for 1 August noted that, after the raingear he was given fell
apart, he worked for two hours with his legs "exposed". But he was told by
Exxon of Inipol that there was "no hazard to us. Just wear the right gear."
He was pulled off the beaches after blood was found in his urine. Moeller
continued to experience chemical sensitivity problems and night sweats for
the next few years. In 2001, he settled a lawsuit against Exxon and its
contractor.
Captain Richard Nagel worked on the clean-up for three years. In some bays,
the oil was six inches thick on the water. "You couldn't breathe right and
your eyes would tear constantly," he recalls. He was told about Inipol:
"This stuff is harmless. You can eat it and it won't harm you." In the early
Nineties, he too started suffering chronic symptoms - calcium breakdown and
blood disorders, seizures, acute anxiety and severe depression, loss of
balance, night sweats, blurred vision and memory loss. He has been told by
his doctors that he is dying.
Ott has been collating information about people who sued Exxon. "I found
Exxon's clinical data, showing that 6,722 workers reported respiratory
distress. That is more than one in two clean-up workers. That is like an
epidemic," she recalls. She argues that Exxon "covered-up mass chemical
poisoning of the clean-up workers".
At the end of their three-year investigation, Ott and her assistant, Pam
Miller, concluded that "there are, unquestionably and undeniably, people who
have died, and people who are suffering from chronic health problems
stemming from wrongful exposure during the clean-up."
It is unlikely that any of these people will be compensated. Of the cases
against Exxon so far, many have been lost, with a small number being settled
for tiny amounts, for a variety of reasons. These included the difficulty of
proving in court that the health problems were due to the spill, and the
fact that Exxon has the financial and legal muscle to defend any case
vigorously, including going to appeal. Exxon argues that "no cause and
effect" between ill health and the spill has been proven in the 25 cases
that have made it to court.
Indeed, Exxon is still contesting the main civil legal case against the
company. In 1994, a judge ordered the company to pay about $4.5bn in
punitive damages, but the case has gone back and forth between America's
Supreme Court and the Alaskan courts. Ott claims that Exxon has saved
billions by delaying paying compensation.
Exxon's spokesman, Tom Cirigliano, dismisses Ott as a "propagandist" and her
book as "nothing new and flaky science". He argues that Exxon acted
"responsibly" and took the spill "very seriously", pointing out that they
"stayed with the clean-up until the federal government and State of Alaska
said it was complete". He dismisses the health concerns, arguing that Exxon
monitored the health of workers: "Safety was our number one priority during
the clean-up of the spill."
He said: "Certainly, there were respiratory problems, which are very common
when you put large groups of people together in very small quarters."Asked
if any of the respiratory problems were due to the spill, he said: "No, we
don't believe there were any... It is hard to say. There may be people who
had a sensitivity to some of the materials being used ... There was
certainly no increase in the normal number you would expect who have a
sensitivity". He does admit that hot-water hosing "would probably not" be
done today.
Ott says scientific studies have shown that an estimated 50-100 tons of oil
remains in Prince William Sound. As it breaks down, it accumulates in the
food chain from mussel beds, clams and whelks to worms, crabs and fish and
then to mammals. Ott contends that oil continues to harm wildlife 15 years
after a spill.
Ott says the Exxon Valdez spill forces us to re-evaluate our continuing
dependence on oil because of the effect it is having on our health and
wildlife. She draws a parallel with lead in petrol: "With lead, we
recognised these problems back in the 1920s, but it took us until 1989
finally to get the lead out of petrol. Now it looks like we need to take the
petrol out of our cars as well."
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