Gulf Coast residents petition BP over unresolved oil spill issues
26th November 2018 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
With hundreds of representatives from regulatory agencies, mega corporations and other entities involved in the petroleum industry gathered two weeks ago for the Clean Gulf 2018 conference and exposition inside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, grass-roots activists attempted to present a petition to BP officials attending the conference inside the building.
The petition brought by the group of protesters – which included Gulf Coast residents, small businessmen and women, environmental activists and workers who helped clean up the disastrous 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill – had 100,000 signatures, said Jonathan Henderson, an environmental organizer and lobbyist based in New Orleans.
The petition, as well as an ensuing press conference on site, was designed to bring attention to several issues still lingering from the BP spill and resulting cleanup eight years ago.
The issues addressed included the failure of the federal government and the petroleum industry to implement more than 35 recommendations put forth by the bipartisan National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling created in the wake of the disaster by the Obama administration; the co-sponsorship of the annual Clean Gulf gathering by industry giant BP and by NALCO, the company that produces the controversial oil dispersing chemical Corexit; the tens of thousands of people who filed health complaints in the wake of the spill and cleanup effort who have yet to receive a fair day in court; and the cost-prohibitive conference registration fee of $900, which Henderson said prevented many Gulf Coast fishermen and coastal residents from attending the gathering, which was held Nov. 13-15.
Without the voices of the average people who have been most severely negatively impacted by the 2010 spill and cleanup, Henderson said, what could have been a productive, inclusive conference was turned into an event that effectively silenced those voices.
“Look who was excluded [from the conference],” Henderson told The Louisiana Weekly last week. “With a $900 registration fee, most fishermen aren’t able to afford that, and many didn’t even know [the conference] was happening. All of that information wasn’t getting to the community that was most impacted [by the spill].
“In this situation, there are so many issues to hear,” Henderson said, “but they weren’t getting through. I just didn’t feel it was right to let BP get away with that.”
Henderson said that after several years engaged in lobbying and other gulf-restoration efforts that focused in large part – and very appropriately – on the negative environmental and economic impacts of the 2010 catastrophe wanted to shift gears and zero in on advocating for those people whose health was decimated by the spill and cleanup.
Henderson noted that out of the 37,000 claimants who filed for financial reparations from the massive court settlements that came out of the disaster, only about 40 have actually received any money for chronic conditions, such as cancer, blood disorders, skin contamination and respiratory illnesses.
In addition, because so many of those chronic medical conditions often develop slowly and don’t present symptoms for several years, thousands of people – including cleanup workers – are being shut out of compensation because their illnesses didn’t appear seriously until after the court-dictated filing deadline of April 2012. None of those cases have been heard in a courtroom yet.
“It’s eight years later, and now we’re seeing an uptick in diagnoses [of chronic conditions],” said Henderson. “A lot of people ended up being excluded [from the settlement] because they didn’t file their claim in time, but many didn’t get diagnosed before April 2012.
“That’s where we are today,” he added, “and we still have an unknown number of cases out there.”
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who has become a leading advocate for numerous social justice issues, was scheduled to attend the Nov. 14 press conference but was unable to due to illness. However, he issued a statement as part of the press release announcing the press event.
“I did not spend decades defending my country and our institutions of democracy only to come home and watch a foreign-owned company spray chemicals on our workers and not be held accountable,” Gen. Honore said.
“We spend billions of dollars defending people in places like Syria from chemical weapons but allow British Petroleum and a handful of lawyers to hijack our justice system. It is un-American for a person who was knowingly injured by a big corporation which was found to be grossly negligent to be denied their day in court while the lawyers make off with hundreds of millions of dollars.”
One of the worrisome factors in the spill saga is the effects of Corexit, a chemical that is sprayed on water-bound oil to help break up the spill and make the oil easier to clean up.
Record amounts of Corexit, which is produced by the Texas-based company NALCO Environmental Solutions LLC, were used in the cleanup effort following the Deepwater Horizon disaster, despite reports that the chemical was potentially dangerously toxic.
Concerns over Corexit have continued to grow. In March of this year, Newsweek ran an article examining the long-term negative effects of Corexit in which it cited the results of a study by the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences into the impact of the chemical on the legions of Coast Guard members who helped with the post-spill cleanup, a source of concern for the USCG.
“I can tell you Coast Guard members were terrified of the concept of dispersants,” Rear Admiral Erica Schwartz, the Coast Guard’s director of health and safety, told the magazine.
The USUHS study was preceded by a September 2017 report by the National Institutes of Health, which presented research linking the variations of Corexit to cases of negative medical impacts on cleanup workers. The NIH concluded that “workers with potential exposure to either Corexit™ product were more likely to have reported adverse symptoms at the time of the spill.”
The NIH report added that its “findings suggest associations between exposure to dispersants, specifically Corexit™ EC9527A or Corexit™ EC9500A, and adverse acute health effects at the time of the OSRC as well as with symptoms that were present at the time of study enrollment one to three years later.”
“While symptoms are not disease, many people who worked on the oil spill underwent a stressful experience,” NIEHS Director Linda Birnbaum, Ph.D., said in a press release. “Some of them are continuing to not feel well, and we don’t know what factors are contributing to it. The ongoing GuLF STUDY research is important for shedding light on the potential health impacts associated with an oil spill.”
Henderson said the negative effects of Corexit and other chemicals present during the cleanup continue to dog cleanup workers, fishermen and residents of the Gulf Coast, making his mission of spreading the word about such experiences, diagnosing as many cases as possible, and seeking justice for those impacted.
“If we can catch these things early enough, [victims] might be able to prolong their lives,” he said, “but if we wait, it could be too late.
“It’s important that we have victims speaking to victims,” he added. “If we can do that, it will be more impactful.”
This article originally published in the November 26, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
