BP oil dispersants causing widespread sickness to Gulf coast residents

[Ennui]

Injected with at least 4.9 million barrels of oil during the BP oil disaster of last summer, the Gulf has suffered the largest accidental marine oil spill in history. Compounding the problem, BP has admitted to using at least 1.9 million gallons of widely banned toxic dispersants, which according to chemist Bob Naman, create an even more toxic substance when mixed with crude oil. And dispersed, weathered oil continues to flow ashore daily.

Naman, who works at the Analytical Chemical Testing Lab in Mobile, Alabama, has been carrying out studies to search for the chemical markers of the dispersants BP used to both sink and break up its oil.

According to Naman, poly-aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from this toxic mix are making people sick. PAHs contain compounds that have been identified as carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic.

Fisherman across the four states most heavily affected by the oil disaster - Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida - have reported seeing BP spray dispersants from aircraft and boats offshore.

"The dispersants are being added to the water and are causing chemical compounds to become water soluble, which is then given off into the air, so it is coming down as rain, in addition to being in the water and beaches of these areas of the Gulf," Naman added.

"I’m scared of what I'm finding. These cyclic compounds intermingle with the Corexit [dispersants] and generate other cyclic compounds that aren’t good. Many have double bonds, and many are on the EPA's danger list. This is an unprecedented environmental catastrophe."

source

The article is MUCH longer than what I've quoted and covers a number of individual cases where people are having bloody diarrhea, vomiting, bleeding from various orifices - ears, vagina, anus - and other terrible symptoms associated with exposure to oil dispersants and their byproducts.

This isn't a small-scale, case-by-case thing, this is hundreds of people in all four of the Gulf states primarily affected.

I'll just say this: I hope BP has to account for its actions. The way they have handled the spill and its cleanup is repulsive and as far as I'm concerned we shouldn't even allow them to remain in existence as a corporation. It's obvious that they just tried to sweep all the oil "under the rug" so to speak and get it out of the public's mind before it totally destroyed their company, rather than actually addressing and fixing the environmental catastrophe they created. It makes me madder than hell. Hopefully this will get a lot more media attention in coming weeks and months so BP is held accountable for this demonic bullshit.

Rather than actually fix the problem (which would probably bankrupt the company, but oh ****ing well, that's accountability) they instead elected to pretend to fix it while frantically trying to make it look fixed by dumping even more toxic shit into the ocean which has done nothing but compound the massive environmental damage caused in the first place.

 

[Mr Stabby]

Its scary that the people that own America are either grossly incompetent or just don't give a **** about anyone but themselves.

 

[Ennui]

BP (which stands for British Petroleum) was actually originally a British company and is headquartered in London, and has its primary listing on the London Stock Exchange - the NYSE is its secondary listing.

Your point still stands though, not only because the American division of BP is the largest but also because it's largely true that the businesses and individuals that "own" America don't give a **** about anyone or anything but themselves.

 

[CptStern]

BP now stands for Beyond Petroleum. they changed it to sound more environmentally friendly ...ya I choked on the ironical irony too

 

[DEATHMASTER]

BP (which stands for British Petroleum)

So what your saying is...NUKE THE UK TERRORIST NATION!

 

[No Limit]

I didn't know bleeding vaginas were the work of BP. Those ****ers!!!

 

[VirusType2]

BP now stands for Bleeding Pussy

FIXED

 

[Raziaar]

There's still going to be people saying that all the oil is gone and the effects of the dispersant are nearly non existent because of the dilution. Those people are morons.

 

[Danimal]

I made a couple of posts about this ages ago and got laughed at.

This only fuels my intent.

 

[Robbo]

Dr Ott said: "People are already dying from this… I’m dealing with three autopsy’s right now. I don’t think we’ll have to wait years to see the effects like we did in Alaska, people are dropping dead now. I know two people who are down to 4.75 per cent of their lung capacity, their heart has enlarged to make up for that, and their esophagus is disintegrating, and one of them is a 16-year-old boy who went swimming in the Gulf."

I think I might wait and see before deciding wether I believe this or not. Some of it sounds like fear moungering without any evidence to back it up, which people would naturally believe since they currently hate BP.
Despite that if they are using illegal chemicals this needs to be delt with quickly... and made very public.

 

[Warped]

2 gigantically ****ed up Wars, crushing economic defeat and possibly the worst man-made disaster since Chernobyl, plus the Tea Party, this country has gone to shit and beyond!

 

[Stigmata]

I've been waiting for this to pop back up again. Corexit and all those other similar dispersants work primarily by splitting oil surfaces. Guess how many of your body's cells use a membrane of oil to separate their contents from the outside environment? (Answer: Enough for you to die if these membranes are destroyed)

(the real answer is All)

 

[Sulkdodds]

I'll just say this: I hope BP has to account for its actions. The way they have handled the spill and its cleanup is repulsive and as far as I'm concerned we shouldn't even allow them to remain in existence as a corporation. It's obvious that they just tried to sweep all the oil "under the rug" so to speak and get it out of the public's mind before it totally destroyed their company, rather than actually addressing and fixing the environmental catastrophe they created. It makes me madder than hell. Hopefully this will get a lot more media attention in coming weeks and months so BP is held accountable for this demonic bullshit.

Rather than actually fix the problem (which would probably bankrupt the company, but oh ****ing well, that's accountability) they instead elected to pretend to fix it while frantically trying to make it look fixed by dumping even more toxic shit into the ocean which has done nothing but compound the massive environmental damage caused in the first place.

Unfortunately this is just the way oil companies operate. This incident was not anything special, but merely a natural result of business of usual; only because it happened immediately off the coast of the USA did it come to widespread attention, or did governments even think of taking action.

In Nigeria, the secret is out that this is how things work: more oil is spilled there every year than was lost in the Gulf up to May this year. The local population depend on old methods of sustenance, farming and fishing and hunting, getting their water from the land, so oil spills destroy the environment on which they depend; life expectancy in rural communities has fallen to 40 over the last two decades. Guess who lobbies, both in Nigeria and in the US, for lax regulation? Could it be Shell, dominant operator in the region?

BP's general behaviour is along these lines. As oil begins to dry up the world over they have turned to more contraversial sources plucked from the trail of war or genocide:

It is now producing oil from the Rumaila field in Iraq, as a result of a contract agreed in controversial circumstances. It has recently started shipping liquefied natural gas out of the Tangguh project in West Papua. The licence was provided by the Indonesian government, which brutally annexed the country to which the gas belongs, and committed genocide there. If West Papua achieves independence, BP will have a lot of explaining to do.

It is pouring money into deepwater oil off the coast of Brazil, and ultra-deepwater drilling off the coast of Angola. Having previously refused to invest in Canadian tar sands on the grounds of ecological risk, in 2007 it reversed this position, plunging into the world’s biggest environmental battleground. Its pipeline across Alaska keeps leaking oil into sensitive habitats. Its pipeline between Azerbaijan and Turkey was built with the help of land seizures and a contract which effectively grants BP executive power over the Turkish government. For how long will that be allowed to stand?

As this article shows, people have been warning about the effects of BP's behaviour for years and years; their investors, the only people who really have any power over them, have always ignored the dangers. Of course BP boasted of the same "ability to take on and manage risk" - the same cavalier reification of bloody, chaotic and uncontrollable circumstance into manageable statistics that led the banks to proclaim until 2008 that 'risk' was a devil they had under control, not one who might at any moment escape its bounds. But, pushing that parallel further, Monbiot claims that 'managing' risk invariably just means hiding it, or outsourcing it to the third world. What they designate as 'profit' is actually the money they would need to pay for the catastrophes they cause if anyone ever forced them to account. These companies don't make real profit - only spoils.