http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/08/invisible-contamination-how-the-bp-spill-might-be-poisoning-people-without-their-knowing-it/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=alternet_blogs_peekInvisible Contamination: How the BP Spill Might Be Poisoning People Without Their Knowing ItThis post originally appeared on Mother Jones.
Rip Kirby’s got the 365-nanometer UV flashlight and I’ve got the shovel. He’s a grad student in the University of South Florida’s geology department, and we’re standing on Pensacola Beach in the middle of the night digging a hole so he can show me the layers of tar buried beneath new sand the tide has washed up. Some of the tar mat is so thick that it’s visible to the naked eye. Other traces of contamination are so subtle that they can only be seen with Kirby’s ultraviolet light, which makes crude fluoresce an unnaturally bright orange.
We trek around Pensacola Beach with the oversize light, illuminating oil everywhere: on decks, driveways, boardwalks, handrails. Blobs of it, smears of it, perfect imprints of footprints glowing neon, far beyond the waves washing oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak ashore. “The problem,” says Kirby, who works with USF’s Coastal Research Lab, “is that they’re not using proper decontamination practices in the cleanup. What they should be doing is stopping the workers at the edge of the contamination area”—the shore within the reach of the waves—”and having them get totally cleaned up or stripped down before they walk away.”
He complains about the machines that drive around collecting sand in giant sifters that are supposed to collect the tar balls while redepositing the pretty white sand. “But the sifters are breaking up the tar balls and spreading them all over the place,” Kirby says. “This operation and the traffic are spreading the contamination everywhere.”
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And so, there are people everywhere, under the impression that they’re “fine,” picking up and spreading contamination, the full extent of which is visible only under Kirby’s UV light. One of the resorts has put up oil-washing stations on its beaches—not, according to the accompanying signs, for health reasons, but so you don’t bring it into the buildings. The pier is packed with tourists fishing. When I arrive there, someone has just caught a blacktip reef shark longer than me. I join the crowd to watch the fisherman wrestle it onto its side, pin it beneath his knees, and start stabbing it to death. Just a few yards further down the pier, another fisherman has snared another one, almost as big. He picks it up by the tail, and when I turn my face away before he can swing it face-first into a wooden post, I see that the guy watching next to me is also wincing.
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http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/07/07/oil.spill.valdez.workers/index.html?hpt=C1Critics call Valdez cleanup a warning for Gulf workersBy Drew Griffin, CNN Special Investigations Unit
Anchorage, Alaska (CNN) -- Two decades ago, Roy Dalthorp helped clean up the rocky shores of Prince William Sound after the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground, producing what was then the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
Today, with that record surpassed by the 11-week-old disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, Dalthorp struggles to breathe. He coughs, and his failing eyes sometimes tear up uncontrollably.
Dalthorp told CNN that he was "slowly poisoned" during the Alaska cleanup effort -- and he says some of those now working to clean up the BP spill off Louisiana and neighboring states are risking the same fate.
BP says it is working with federal health and environmental regulators to make sure cleanup workers are protected from the hazards of the Gulf spill. But observers like Rikki Ott, an environmental activist who studied the Exxon Valdez spill, said cleanup workers in the Gulf are showing "the exact identical symptoms down here that we had 21 years ago."
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