DemocracyNow.org covers the Spill: the damage, BP's dodge & BP's depressing history--can't we get Beyond Petroleum?

The below comments were made by Riki Ott, a marine toxicologist and former salmon fisherma’am (!) in Alaska, on the Democracy Now broadcast FROM May 3, 2010 (this past Monday's show). She wrote the book “Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Spill.”

The killing will not stop in 2010. The cloud of oil that is dispersed as dissolved droplets under the giant slick, this is killing everything in the water column. So clams, they all have a component that a life- part of their life-cycle is in the water column. Shrimp in the water column, the eggs, the young larvae. And all this is being wiped out. So it’s not just a fishery that’s closed this year, it will be closed, probably for the next couple of years because, where will be the shrimp that should have been born this year and survived and become adults? I mean, they just probably will not manifest. They won’t show up. They won’t survive.

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I’ve had my friends e-mail me from New Orleans and say it smells like a big- worse than a gas station right now. This is not a good thing. The classic symptoms of overexposure to crude-oil fumes are headache, nausea, dizziness, and something that looks like a cold or flu-like symptoms. We called it the Valdez Crud in Alaska and I’m very sure we’re going to see this with the cleanup workers. But also just in the communities. Exxon Valdez, we saw this phenomenon. Exxon got away with not reporting cleanup workers’ health problems. There over 6,722 workers reported upper respiratory illnesses, I discovered in toxic tort lawsuits. And there is an exemption to the Occupational Safety and Health Act that says these industries don’t have to report colds and flu. So instantly, all this coughing and these cold and flu-like symptoms become colds and flu instead of probably what it really is which is a chemical-induced illnesses. This is work related. So we really need to close that loophole in OSHA.

This- Oil spill cleanups are considered hazardous waste cleanups under OSHA regulations. Workers should be wearing full face protection, they should have what’s called “haz-wopper training,” hazardous waste operator emergency response, um, training. This is like forty hours of training. This is serious, and it’s not just a headache and a little cough now. Your body gets overwhelmed by these chemicals. You go home and you don’t get better. If it’s a cold or flu, you get better. But I have had cleanup workers from the Exxon Valdez who I am still in touch with tell me, “You know, I thought I had the Valdez Crud back to 1989. I didn’t think I would have for fourteen years or twenty years. We’re talking about people who are left untreated, they are disabled, a hundred percent disabled. Who’s paying for that? Taxpayers. Not Exxon. We’re talking about people who have died.

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This whole oil spill or oil leak- I’m going to call it a leak because we do not know how much is going to spill. This is like deja vu. Exxon came to our community and similarly- all the other twenty-two oil communities in Alaska, with a similar paper asking people to waive their rights to sue. The judge upheld this. Anybody who signs that paper is giving away probably hundreds of thousands of dollars potentially. Potentially. As we know in Exxon Valdez, that our case got knocked way back down and people recovered about seven to ten percent of what they actually lost. So, absolutely do not sign that.

via democracynow.org

Read about BP lobbying to get laws and decisions made in its favor.

Read about BP's role in the 1953 coup in Iran.

Does anyone doubt that oil companies are amoral? I can't imagine how it's possible...

Please check out DemocracyNow.org for great coverage of the GoM/BP oil spill, in text, audio and video forms. Read, listen, watch, learn.

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