Friends, Al Jazeera (see News Links) has an excellent but frightening article on the aftermath of the B.P. oil spill which you should read after this post.
With at least 4.9 million barrels of oil spilt during the 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.
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. The following excerpts will give you some idea of the escalating tragedy.
Trisha Springstead, is a registered nurse of 36 years who lives and works in Brooksville, Florida. “What I’m seeing are toxified people who have been chemically poisoned,” she said, “They have sore throats, respiratory problems, neurological problems, lesions, sores, and ulcers. These people have been poisoned and they are dying. Drugs aren’t going to help these people. They need to be detoxed.”
Chemist Bob Naman described the brownish, rubbery tar balls that are a product of BP’s dispersed oil that continue to wash up on beaches across the Gulf: “Those are the ones kids are picking up and playing with and breathing the fumes that come off them when you crush them in your hand. These will affect anyone who comes into contact with it. You could have an open wound and this goes straight in. Women have a lot more open mucus membranes and they are getting sicker than men. They are bleeding from their vagina and anus. Small kids are bleeding from their ears. This stuff is busting red blood cells.”
Dr Ott said: “People are already dying from this… I’m dealing with three autopsies’ 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.”
As this drama continues to unfold, one can only wonder at what the eventual human cost will end up being. Of course it’s not only the human cost but the environmental cost and the damage to other life forms which may well go on for years if not decades.
What this tragedy demonstrates once again is that humans, in their rush to make a buck, take risks. Do you know how many oil rigs there are in the oceans of the world? Each one poses a risk! Then, when something blows up, they take other risks like spraying toxic dispersants onto toxic oil.
We humans, at least the greedy corporate ones, are unbelievably stupid. They are puncturing the floor of the oceans all across the world to get at oil which, environmentally, we shouldn’t be using in the first place given global warming. Yet extraction goes on unabated.
It is true that we humans don’t know what we do and, even if we do know, we don’t care. How many catastrophes have to occur before we wake up to ourselves?
Perhaps when the earth become uninhabitable!
just count the number of nuclear tests since the 1950′s to see how insane humans are…….
this is but a drop in the ocean (pun not intended)
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Last night on the PBS show “Frontline” they examined the horrific and reckless history of BP. Their crimes go way beyond the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and dozens of people have died and many more have been injured over the years due to their corporate negligence. A survey done of oil company accidents showed that BP had far more accidents than all of the other companies combined. After their Texas City refinery explosion in 2005 in which 15 people were killed they came out with the usual corporate crap about working to make safety the number one concern and then they went right back into the same behavior. Oil spills in the Prudhoe Bay, Alaska area due to pipes that hadn’t been pigged (inside scrubbers are called “pigs”) for more than a DECADE! and that were suffering from rust and lack of overall maintenance. Their multi-billion dollar deep water drilling platform “Thunderhorse” rolled over and nearly sank in a storm, not because of the wind and waves but because BP engineers had made careless mistakes installing safety valves that should have prevented the rig from taking on so much water. And now the Gulf disaster with the same history of reckless cost cutting and lack of oversight and safety procedures. This corporation is guilty of extreme negligence and criminal behavior. They should be sued for tens of billions at least. What is the reaction by the Congress? Well, there is legislation to ban BP from deep water drilling for at least 7 years. The Frontline report stated that this had little chance of passing in the Senate. Obama is lifting the ban on deep water drilling and these Earth raping gangsters can go right back to their profit taking. The report states that, after so many serious accidents and damage to ecosystems and many thousands of people and their livelihoods, that not one BP executive has been brought up on any charges at all! I also heard that the $20 Billion dollar fund that BP said would be offered to compensate the families and businesses in the Gulf region has been largely a PR facade and that very little has been paid out. If ever there was proof of the strangle hold that corporations have over the political process it is this one. A British corporation that Obama deferred to after the blowout when he should have instructed various departments of our government to take over. Our president directly told BP not to spray their highly toxic dispersant and BP did it anyway and they got away with it! I feel like a bystander at a train wreck with the cop saying “Nothing to see here, folks, just move on.” Except that the wrecked train is my country and the cop is the media. And all the while some top execs at BP in London count the ocean of money flowing from the wells and figure out new ways to get the media to spin their lies. It is sickening.
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Coco, you are right of course. Perhaps global warming is the least of our problems!
Bruce, corporations are more important than people in the capitalist system. People are expendable it seems. This toxicity could develop into an even bigger problem that the spill has already been. Thousands of people could be badly affected or die. If that happens, Governments ‘might’ do something other than serve the Corporations!
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