Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez, Ixtoc I etc.

[AlaskaDenise]

21 years later there is still oil just below the surface of beaches, and impacts on wildlife still exist - reduced populations, DNA damage, etc.

Here's a good powerpoint on the 10-year environmental followup:
http://www.epa.gov/oem/docs/oil/fss/fss02/ricepresent.pdf

Litigation for fishermen took 19 YEARS!!!! see here.

Exxon donated $26 million toward a sealife research center in Seward, that continues to do research on wildlife and environmental damages from pollutants. They have some research papers listed.

One note (I cannot find the link again), is that after the Valdez spill, 70% of fishermen lost their boats from foreclosure. While the oil companies may reimburse fishermen for their net profits, all the money that circulated from their expenses may or may not be reimbursed.

After the Valdez spill, it was often said the US "learned its lesson about oil spill preparedness".

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[sharon sanders]

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez

Thank you AlaskaDenise for sharing first hand experience.

 

[AlaskaDenise]

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez

It has been heartbreaking to watch the impact on people's lives, especially as they struggled for far too many years to get some financial compensation. It was truly David vs. Goliath.

That oil not only reduced wildlife populations, but caused deformities, leukemia, DNA damage, etc. for many years. It would be interesting to find a paper about whether those genetic changes still persist after 21 years.

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[Sally Furniss]

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez

Thank you AlaskaDenise!

 

[AlaskaDenise]

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez

History?s 10 Most Famous Oil Spills

The Deepwater Horizon Spill has become the largest in US history.

Did you know that Exxon Valdez?s Captain, Joesph Hazelwood, never had his masters? license revoked and it remains valid to this date?

To put the recent conviction of Cosco Busan?s pilot John Cota in perspective, here are ten of the world?s largest oil spills in which the pilot was not convicted of federal charges.

Amoco Cadiz
The Amoco Cadiz encountered stormy weather and ran aground off the coast of Brittany, France on March 16, 1978. Its entire cargo of 68.7 million gallons of oil spilled into the sea, polluting about 200 miles of Brittany?s coastline.

Arabian Gulf Spills
Beginning in late January of the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraqi Army destroyed tankers, oil terminals, and oil wells in Kuwait, causing the release of about 900,000,000 barrels of oil. This was the largest oil spill in history.

Argo Merchant
On December 15, 1976, the Argo Merchant ran aground on Fishing Rip (Nantucket Shoals), 29 nautical miles southeast of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts in high winds and ten foot seas. Six days later, the vessel broke apart and spilled its entire cargo of 7.7 million gallons of No. 6 fuel oil.

Barge Bouchard 155
On August 10, 1993, three ships collided in Tampa Bay, Florida: the barge Bouchard 155, the freighter Balsa 37, and the barge Ocean 255. The Bouchard 155 spilled an estimated 336,000 gallons of No. 6 fuel oil into Tampa Bay.

Barge Cibro Savannah
On March 6, 1990, the Cibro Savannah exploded and caught fire while departing the pier at the Citgo facility in Linden, New Jersey. About 127,000 gallons of oil remained unaccounted for after the incident. No one knows how much oil burned and how much spilled into the environment.

Burmah Agate
On November 1, 1979, the Burmah Agate collided with the freighter Mimosa southeast of Galveston Entrance in the Gulf of Mexico. The collision caused an explosion and a fire on the Burmah Agate that burned until January 8, 1980. An estimated 2.6 million gallons of oil were released into the environment, and another 7.8 million gallons were consumed by the fire

Exxon Valdez
On March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska. The tanker was traveling outside the normal shipping lanes in an attempt to avoid ice. It spilled 10.8 million gallons of oil (out of a total cargo of 53 million gallons) into the marine environment, and impacted more than 1,100 miles of non-continuous Alaskan coastline. State and Federal agencies continue to monitor the effects of this spill, which was the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

Ixtoc I
The 2-mile-deep exploratory well, Ixtoc I, blew out on June 3, 1979 in the Bay of Campeche off Ciudad del Carmen, Mexico. By the time the well was brought under control in March, 1980, an estimated 140 million gallons of oil had spilled into the bay. The Ixtoc I spill is currently #2 on the all-time list of largest oil spills of all time.

Jupiter
On September 16, 1990, the tank vessel Jupiter was offloading gasoline at a refinery on the Saginaw River near Bay City, Michigan, when a fire started on board and the vessel exploded.

Megaborg
The Megaborg released 5.1 million gallons of oil as the result of a lightering accident and subsequent fire. The incident occurred 60 nautical miles south-southeast of Galveston, Texas on June 8, 1990.

http://gcaptain.com/maritime/blog/historys-10-most-famous-oil-spills/

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[AlaskaDenise]

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez

Another list of "the worst oil spills", but not related to captain outcomes and covering 1967 to 2004:

http://www.marinergroup.com/oil-spill-history.htm

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[AlaskaDenise]

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez

snip



2004-March 4 - CHINA - Nearly one million people in south-western Sichuan province were without water for drinking and bathing, after chemicals spilled from a factory into an important Yangtze river tributary, state media said. The authorities shut down water supplies after a mixture of synthetic ammonia and nitrogen from the Sichuan General Chemical Factory leaked into the Tuo river in the densely populated province, the Shanghai Morning Post reported. Water supplies for four residential areas - Jianyang, Zizhong, Neijiang and Luzhou - were severely polluted, and could remain cut for several days, the report said.

2004-October 2 - INDONESIA - An oil spill has swamped a chain of tourist islands off the coast of the Indonesian capital, polluting a marine park and hitting businesses in the area, officials and media reports said. Oil began leaking in the region known as the Thousand Islands, and government officials said the spill may have been caused by leaking oil pipes operated nearby by China National Offshore Oil Corp, or by a mishap loading oil onto tankers. The islands have been hit by at least five oil spills in the past year, driving occupancy rates at some resorts to just about 30 per cent, according to Jakarta Tourism Agency. The oil slick has also hurt fishermen and seaweed farmers in the area, officials said.

2004-November 21 - CANADA - Scientists warn the 44,000 gallon oil spill at an oil platform off Canada's Newfoundland province could kill up to 100,000 seabirds. The spill, coming at a bad time for the birds, occurred at the Terra Nova offshore oil platform as a result of a malfunction. A few days laster, the slick covered at least 14 square miles. The birds at risk include turrs, dovekeys and black-legged kittiwakes, as well as migrating birds such as shearwaters.

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[AlaskaDenise]

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez, etc.

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez, etc.

In gulf oil spill's long reach, ecological damage could last decades

Snorkeling along a coral reef near Veracruz, Mexico, in 2002, Texas biologist Wes Tunnell spotted what looked like a ledge of rock covered in sand, shells, algae and hermit crabs. He knew, from years of research at the reef, that it probably wasn't a rock at all. He stabbed it with his diving knife. His blade pulled up gunk.

"Sure enough, it was tar from the Ixtoc spill," Tunnell said.

Twenty-three years earlier, in 1979, an oil well named Ixtoc I had a blowout in 150 feet of water in the southern Gulf of Mexico. The Mexican national oil company Pemex tried to kill the well with drilling mud, and then with steel and lead balls dropped into the wellbore. It tried to contain the oil with a cap nicknamed The Sombrero. Finally, after 290 days, a relief well plugged the hole with cement and the spill came to an end -- but only after polluting the gulf with 138 million gallons of crude.

That remains the worst accidental oil spill in history -- but the Deepwater Horizon blowout off the Louisiana coast is rapidly gaining on it.

The spill has now been partially contained with the cap that BP engineers lowered onto the mile-deep geyser Thursday night. That means roughly a quarter to half of the flow is being piped to a surface ship, the national incident commander, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, said Saturday. BP hopes to improve the rate captured in coming days. If official government estimates are correct, 23 million to 47 million barrels of oil have spewed so far.

Ecosystems can survive and eventually recover from very large oil spills, even ones that are Ixtoc-sized. In most spills, the volatile compounds evaporate. The sun breaks down others. Some compounds are dissolved in water. Microbes consume the simpler, "straight chain" hydrocarbons -- and the warmer it is, the more they eat. The gulf spill has climate in its favor. Scientists agree: Horrible as the spill may be, it's not going to turn the Gulf of Mexico into another Dead Sea.

But neither is this ecological crisis going to be over anytime soon. The spill will have ripple effects far into the future, scientists warn.

"This spill will be lasting for years if not decades," said Doug Inkley, senior scientist at the National Wildlife Federation.

Some of the immediate effects of a spill are obvious -- witness the gut-wrenching images of soaked and suffocating seabirds in the gulf. But some types of ecological damage are hard to measure and can take years to document. Many of the creatures that die will sink to the bottom, making mortality estimates difficult. Damage to the reproduction rate of sea turtles may take years to play out.

The Exxon Valdez spill of 11 million gallons killed as many as 700,000 sea birds and 5,000 sea otters initially, but even 21 years later, populations of sea otters in areas of Prince William Sound haven't recovered. The Pacific herring population collapsed after the spill for reasons that remain in dispute among scientists. Two intensely studied pods of killer whales in the sound suffered heavy losses in the spill and have struggled since. One of the two pods has no more reproductive females. It is doomed to extinction.

And the oil?

"It's still sitting there," said Stan Rice, program manager for habitat studies at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Auke Bay Fisheries Lab. "It's still liquid, you can still smell it and touch it."

The degradation of oil slows over the years. The microbes move on, as the large and complex compounds that remain, known as the asphaltenes, are too hard to digest. What's left tends to be dense, tar-like, largely inert and attractive only to people who like to pave roads.

By 2003, there were still 21,000 gallons of oil in Prince William Sound, Rice reports in a recently published study on the lingering effects of the Exxon Valdez spill. The oil can be found by someone scraping three to six inches below the surface of the beach. Rice writes that an oil spill will be "over" when the oil itself is gone, the litigation has been settled and there are no continued negative effects in the environment.

"The Exxon Valdez spill does not meet any of these three criteria," he wrote.

Limited research funding


The oil drifting north from the Ixtoc spill not only wiped out hundreds of million of crabs on Mexican beaches but, also far to the north, managed to killed 80 percent of the segmented worms and shrimp-like crustaceans that live in the sand of Texas beaches, according to Tunnell, a biologist at Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi. But the tiny animals have rapid reproductive cycles, and in about two and a half years they had recovered, he said. Poor government funding limited research on the broader ecological impact of the spill, however: "We don't have any comprehensive, good scientific studies of what happened."

There are on record since 1970 about 1,700 spills from tankers in which at least 2,100 gallons of oil were discharged into water. Scientists have been monitoring the effects of some of them for decades, including a 189,000-gallon spill that occurred off Cape Cod in September 1969.

Five years after that spill, fiddler crabs in the oiled marsh were sluggish and reproduced poorly. In many cases they dug burrows too shallow to protect themselves over the winter.

Astonishingly, many of those problems remained 35 years later, when a graduate student, Jennifer Culbertson, surveyed the marsh. She found that the fiddler crabs reacted slowly to startling motions, apparently the result of a narcotic effect of oil that still formed a visible layer four inches below the marsh surface. (A similar clumsiness has been seen in juvenile spot fish when they chew on sediments contaminated with compounds from oil.) When the crabs burrowed down and hit the layer of 40-year-old oil, they veered horizontally.

"The marsh is still waging chemical warfare several inches below the surface," said Christopher M. Reddy, a chemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts who helped supervise Culbertson's research.

Making it worse


Beaches get scrubbed by waves and storms, but marshes can develop tar mats lasting decades, Tunnell said. He said the beaches are a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of sensitivity to oil spills, but the marshes are a 10. Attempts to clean a marsh will backfire. After the huge Amoco Cadiz spill of 68 million gallons off Brittany in 1978, French authorities scraped the top off the oiled marshes. It was a mistake: Most never came back.

Although many scientists and officials have warned that the marshes are in danger, one scientist who has studied oil spills in Louisiana marshes said that these wetlands are generally able to recover if human intervention doesn't make the situation worse.

"The vegetation itself generally recovers in a year, although sometimes it may take three or four," said Irving A. Mendelssohn, a biologist at Louisiana State University. Only if oil sinks in deep, or if repeated oilings kill off new shoots, does the marsh die, he added.

That's not just a biological change but a geological one, points out LSU professor Edward Overton. "Biological stocks can be replenished a lot easier than land loss," he said.

Every oil spill has unique features, from the geography to the chemical makeup of the oil, which can vary dramatically in toxicity. The Deepwater Horizon spill has the distinction of being the deepest blowout in history. Also unique has been the huge quantity of chemical dispersants sprayed on the surface and at the leak on the seafloor. There's little scientific understanding of how the dispersants might affect the deep-water ecosystem.

Coral reefs, only recently studied, can take centuries to develop in the cold, oxygen-poor depths; there are several such reefs directly beneath the oil slick. Deep plumes of oil have been reported in preliminary research by scientists on research vessels. As bacteria feast on the oil they could deplete the oxygen levels further, creating unusually deep "dead zones."

"If you're a creature that can't move, it's not good," Overton said.

In the years to come, scientists will study this spill in the same way they have studied the Exxon Valdez disaster. The gulf ecosystems may survive, but they'll likely have changed in certain details, according to LSU biologist Kevin R. Carman.

"Undoubtedly, life will get a foothold," he said. "The question is how different it will be."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...05/AR2010060503987_2.html?sid=ST2010060503052

 

[Pathfinder]

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez, etc.

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez, etc.

Only tiny fraction of oil spilled will ever be recovered

About 7 to 10 percent of the oil was actually recovered from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.

By Agence France-Presse
Sun, May 23 2010 at 8:03 PM EST


"The oil is out there and it's out there to stay," said Lisa Suatoni, a marine biologist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
"There's a dismal record of cleanup associated with oil spills. Generally less than 1 percent of spilled oil is ever cleaned up."

Despite a massive cleanup effort, experts warn that only a tiny fraction of the oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from the wreckage of a BP-leased rig will ever be recovered.

Even in the case of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill ? when billions were spent in a years-long effort to sop up the oil from a rocky and sandy shore and skim it off the relatively calm waters of Prince William Sound ? only about 7 to 10 percent of the oil was actually recovered, Suatoni said.

While a significant percentage of the Valdez oil was dispersed by natural processes, the shoreline is still littered with pockets of oil which sank into low-oxygen areas where its toxicity was preserved.

Which means every time an animal burrows in the wrong place or a big storm shifts things around on the beach, more oil can bubble up.

The very nature of the Gulf of Mexico spill makes significant recovery impossible, said Tony Wood, director of the National Spill Control School at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi...

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wi...raction-of-oil-spilled-will-ever-be-recovered

 

[Pathfinder]

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez, etc.

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez, etc.

Exxon Valdez experts: Gulf oil spill response off to a bad start



Published: Friday, Jun. 11, 2010

Richard Mauer - McClatchy Newspapers



ANCHORAGE, Alaska ? With their futures dark and confused, desperate residents of the Gulf of Mexico are turning to veterans of Alaska's Exxon Valdez oil spill for clues about what they're facing. The word from Alaska, whether it's about cleaning up, economic recovery, despondency or lawsuits: Expect years of deep trouble, but there are ways to cope.

"Here's a life-changing and terrible event, and the less people know about it, the more concerned they get," said Stan Senner, who served as science coordinator for the federal-state agency that was set up to study and recover from the 1989 Alaska oil spill. "No one wants to hear bad news, but even worse is just simply not knowing the news."

Senner, now the director of conservation science for the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, an environmental group, is among dozens of Exxon Valdez experts who've been trekking around the Gulf, attending community meetings, boating through marshes threatened by oil and lobbying officials to avoid mistakes made 21 years ago in Alaska. Other Alaskans who've remained home are taking phone calls by the dozens from the area.

Senner said that a key lesson learned from the Exxon Valdez was the need for "complete transparency on the part of the government in what they know and what they're doing to find out what they don't know."

The Gulf spill has gotten off to a bad start, he said. "There's an amazing lack of information about what is being done and what the government knows," he said.

For Rick Steiner, a retired University of Alaska marine science professor who spent years studying Prince William Sound, where the spill occurred, and advocating reduced reliance on petroleum, the battle was lost the moment oil got away.

"You can respond with thousands of people and thousands of boats and millions of feet of boom and skimmers, but you're not going to be very effective," said Steiner, reached by phone near Barataria Bay in Louisiana, where he's been working with environmental groups and volunteers.

"The damage will be done," said Steiner. "There's really no easy way to rehabilitate oiled wildlife, no easy way to restore an oil-injured ecosystem, and there's certainly no easy way to make lives whole that were turned upside down by these things. Those are lessons we learned the hard way in Alaska, and they're lessons that are being learned here, very poignantly."

In some cases, seeing the Gulf spill has rekindled the smoldering anger that many Alaskans still carry from the Exxon Valdez.

"We didn't learn much in 21 years," said John Devens, the mayor of Valdez when the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef on March 24, 1989. "BP seems to be making exactly the same mistakes Exxon made."

Steiner, Senner and others note that there are substantial differences between the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the BP gusher in the Gulf. For starters, the Exxon Valdez held a defined volume of oil.

<!-- CLOSE: #story_body_remaining -->McClatchy Newspapers 2010



Read more: http://www.bradenton.com/2010/06/11/2355464/exxon-valdez-experts-gulf-oil.html#ixzz0qm0QqnUE

 

[Pathfinder]

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez, etc.

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez, etc.

<TABLE cellSpacing=2 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0><TBODY><TR><TD vAlign=top align=left width=125></TD><TD vAlign=top align=right width="100%"><FORM></FORM></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>

[FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF][SIZE=+1]Health of Exxon Valdez cleanup workers was never studied[/SIZE][/FONT]

<!-- Story Photo -->

[FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF][SIZE=-1]By KYLE HOPKINS[/SIZE][/FONT]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]

[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF](07/01/10 04:12:01) [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]You'd think that more than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, scientists would know what, if any, long-term health dangers face the thousands of workers needed to clean up the Gulf of Mexico spill. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]You'd be wrong. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]"We don't know a **** thing," said Anchorage lawyer Michael Schneider, whose firm talked with dozens of Alaska cleanup workers following the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in preparation for a class-action lawsuit that never came. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]In New Orleans last week, U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin delivered a similar, if more subtle, message to a gathering of health experts meeting to talk about how to protect people working on the massive BP oil spill still gushing in the Gulf of Mexico. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]"Current scientific literature is inconclusive with regard to the potential hazards resulting from the spill," Benjamin said. "Some scientists predict little or no toxic effect ... while other scientists express serious concerns about the potential short-term and long-term impacts the exposure to oil and dispersants could have on the health of responders and our communities." [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]That lack of published, peer-reviewed study of the Exxon Valdez cleanup workers has made protecting the growing number workers in the Gulf of Mexico all the more difficult and has Alaska watchdogs warning that BP and government regulators are repeating mistakes that made people sick a generation ago. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]"We don't have the good answers that we could have had from the Exxon Valdez to either know that there are problems or to reassure people that there were not," said Mark Catlin, an industrial hygienist who visited the cleanup in 1989 and says some Gulf workers aren't receiving enough training to protect themselves. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]Critics have questioned whether the Obama administration has left too many decisions about the health and safety of the oil spill workers to BP's discretion as a growing number of workers complain about exposure to toxins. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]In June, McClatchy Newspapers reported that records released by the state of Louisiana showed that BP wasn't recording most worker complaints of illness after exposure to oil. While Louisiana records described at least 74 oil spill workers complaining of becoming sick, BP's own official recordkeeping noted just two such incidents. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]That followed a McClatchy story that said BP's plan to protect workers, which the Coast Guard approved on May 25, exposes them to higher levels of toxic chemicals than generally accepted practices permit. [/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF][/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]The plan also doesn't require BP to give workers respirators, to evacuate them from danger zones, or to take other precautions until conditions are more dangerous. BP's plan also fails to address the health impacts of more than 1 million gallons of dispersants used so far in the cleanup. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]Catlin was part of a Laborers International Union team of specialists who shortly after the Exxon Valdez spill warned Alaska's state labor department that spill workers could face lingering kidney and nervous system damage from prolonged exposure to oil and called for long-term monitoring of worker health. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]No formal follow-up study apparently was ever undertaken, however, or if it was, its results weren't published, three of the original reports' authors said. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]In the years since, Alaska workers have reported ailments ranging from flulike symptoms to chemical sensitivity to neurological damage. [/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]Exxon has consistently maintained that there's no evidence spill workers experienced any adverse health effects as a result of the cleanup. [/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF][/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]Spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said she isn't aware of any long-term study the company conducted on its own. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]"The challenge is largely due to the fact that cleanup workers tended to be transient, temporary workers, which made any medical follow-up difficult," she said. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]Sandee Elvsaas, who was director of the spill response operations for oil services firm Veco Corp. in the village of Seldovia, disputes that. She said she still has names of workers she sent out to spray beaches and boats fouled by the spill and who got sick. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]"The people from the village are still here. ... We're here. They just haven't come to ask," Elvsaas said. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]"Terrible rashes and headaches and vomiting. They were nauseated. ... [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]These were not the same people I sent out," she said. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]A 1993 study conducted on the mental health fallout of the spill on workers and communities and published in the American Journal of Psychiatry concluded that people living in Alaska communities touched by the spill were more likely to suffer generalized anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]No similar studies have been published on physical ailments, however. Fred Blosser, a spokesman for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said NIOSH hasn't done any research on long-term health effects on Exxon Valdez workers. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]Riki Ott, a biologist, activist and fisher from Cordova, Alaska, who's written two books about the Exxon Valdez spill, said the link between respiratory problems and exposure to oil and chemicals used in the cleanup was explored in an unpublished 2003 pilot study by a Yale graduate student. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]The phone survey of 169 workers concluded that those who performed jobs with high oil exposure or exposure to oil mists, aerosol and fumes were more likely to report symptoms of chronic airway disease than workers with less exposure. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]Based on the findings, Ott has told Congress that roughly 3,000 former cleanup workers are likely suffering spill-related illnesses. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]Studies of other oil spills report similar trends. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]A report on the 2002 oil tanker Prestige spill in Spain concluded "participation in cleanup work of oil spills may result in prolonged respiratory symptoms that last one to two years after exposure," according to the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]Exxon's own internal medical reports, which surfaced in court documents years after the spill, showed an unspecified number of spill workers made thousands of clinic visits for upper respiratory illnesses. Exxon later moved to seal the records. NIOSH had the legal authority to subpoena the records but never did so. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]Eula Bingham, an assistant secretary of Labor for occupational safety and health during the Carter administration, was part of the union team that visited the cleanup site in 1989. Bingham, now a professor of environmental health at the University of Cincinnati, said she worries about the apparent lack of a plan to protect volunteers from toxic exposure in the gulf. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]"I think there are community people going out and scooping up the tar balls and doing some work that probably will never get paid by anybody," she said. "Who is looking after them? Who is measuring how much exposure they have to these toxic chemicals?" [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]One thing regulators learned from the Exxon Valdez spill and health concerns raised after the World Trade Center cleanup is the need for a database of workers whose health can be tracked in the future, said Blosser, the NIOSH spokesman. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]"You need basically a way of knowing who was working at the site and information for contacting those workers over time," he said. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]When BP chief executive Tony Hayward appeared before Congress on June 17, Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., pressed Hayward on what he called BP's failure to provide a roster of spill workers despite multiple requests. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]"The equivocation in your answer is something that is not reassuring to those workers ... who potentially have been exposed to these chemicals in ways that can impact on their health," Markey said, according to a transcript. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]Blosser said BP provided the worker information last week. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]Basic worker health information could also play a role in future court cases against BP. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]About 50 lawsuits were filed against Exxon over the Valdez spill, said Bergman, the company spokeswoman. She said she didn't know how many were settled out of court, though a separate case involving insurance companies revealed one worker was paid $2 million. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]Schneider, the Anchorage lawyer, said his firm interviewed dozens of workers after the spill. Erin Brockovich - the environmental activist portrayed by Julia Roberts in a 2000 biopic - had gotten involved. There was talk of a class-action lawsuit. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]"There wasn't a class of participants that stood up. Just folks who had been around the project and the process - many of whom had claims that they had became ill and stayed ill after working on the oil spill," Schneider said. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]Most complained of respiratory problems, he said. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]Ultimately, the lack of independent proof, including a proper study of workers' health that could show the employees got sick directly because of the spill, scuttled the lawsuit. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]"If you're the oil industry, you may or may not have this data. Lord knows, you're not going to want to publish it," Schneider said. [/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF](Hopkins reports for the Anchorage Daily News.) [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][FONT=VERDANA, ARIAL, HELVETICA, SANS-SERIF]http://www.adn.com/2010/07/01/v-printer/1349172/health-of-exxon-valdez-cleanup.html[/FONT][/SIZE]

 

[Pathfinder]

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez, etc.

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez, etc.

Exxon Valdez expert Riki Ott tells Florida to dig in for a protracted legal, environmental battle

By Travis Pillow 7/26/10 11:00 AM

With a degree in marine toxicology and a few summers’ experience working on a salmon boat, Riki Ott was uniquely qualified to help the fishing communities of southern Alaska battle a giant oil company after the Exxon Valdez spill threatened their way of life.

She did not realize the fight would last for decades. The lawsuits have only recently been settled, the Prince William Sound is still recovering and people who made their living fishing its waters are still struggling to pay off debts from the years when their fishing licenses were nearly worthless.
Since early May, Ott has been touring the area around the Gulf of Mexico, to share the lessons she learned during more than 20 years of advocacy and to bring together victims of a disaster that can turn neighbor against neighbor.

She spoke to the public twice in Tallahassee and, as well as in Crawfordville and Apalachicola. She also met with fishermen, environmentalists and members of the Leon County Commission.

snip

http://floridaindependent.com/4721/...n-for-a-protracted-legal-environmental-battle

 

[Ronan Kelly]

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez, etc.

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez, etc.

An investigation is currently underway of areas polluted by the Ixtoc I disaster in 1979. The lead investigator's blog here;
http://ixtoc1expedition.blogspot.com/2010/06/ixtoc-i-expedition-30-years-later.html

-snip-
The Ixtoc I spill remains as the largest peacetime oil spill in history, and since it occurs in the same body of water, the Gulf of Mexico, as the BP Deepwater Horizon, many comparisons have been made [The BP spill will likely surpass the Ixtoc spill in total volume during July 2010]. Repeated questions include "what did we learn from the Ixtoc spill that is applicable to the current spill? What happened to the oil, the environment, the fisheries, and the people/communities? Are there any residues of the Ixtoc oil remaining??


Since there were no comprehensive or long-term studies conducted after the Ixtoc blow out and oil spill, the Harte Research Institute (HRI) for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi plans a series of expeditions to address these questions. HRI will revisit selected sites where Ixtoc oil/tar has been observed along the shores of the southern Gulf of Mexico over the past three decades by Dr. Wes Tunnell, Associate Director of HRI. Since the Ixtoc spill, Dr. Tunnell has made repeated trips for research and education with his classes to various shoreline habitats (12 total) around the southern Gulf from La Pesca, Tamaulipas, to Celestun, Yucatan. During July and August of 1980, he specifically traveled the southern Gulf shorelines looking for Ixtoc oil on sandy beaches, rocky seashores, and coral reefs. In addition, he was able to revisit study sites on the coral reefs of Veracruz annually after the spill with his Coral Reef Ecology class field trips to Enmedio Reef until the mid 1990s. On HRI sponsored expeditions in 2002, during a Sustainable Seas Expedition to the Veracruz reefs, he was able to relocate the Ixtoc tar mats tracked through time.


Today, 30 years after his first expedition to the southern Gulf this second series of expeditions, scheduled during June and July 2010, will reveal the status of oil and tar on sandy beaches, rocky shores, and coral reefs, in addition to perhaps mangrove habitats north of Campeche. We will also interview fishermen and coastal communities in the areas impacted to see how their lives and jobs were changed or altered, and how long the effects lasted.

 

[Pathfinder]

Re: Long Term effects from other spills - Exxon Valdez, Ixtoc I etc.

Oil in Gulf of Mexico: Biologists Cite Need for Critical Data to Determine Ecological Consequences

ScienceDaily (Feb. 4, 2011) ? Twenty years after biologists attempted to determine the ecological damages to marine life from the Exxon Valdez oil spill, scientists dealing with the BP disaster find themselves with the same problem: the lack of critical data to determine the ecological consequences of human-induced environmental disasters, a University of Florida researcher said.
...

"It is sad to see that we are in the same place now," said Bjorndal, adding that not much has changed since the Valdez oil spill when it comes to getting the data needed to assess and restore a marine ecosystem after an environmental disaster. She hopes it will provide an impetus for action.

Full text:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110203163809.htm