tagged w/ bp crud
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Thousands of People Along the Gulf Coast Suffer ‘BP Crud’
September 7th, 2010
The Untold Story of Human Health Effects From BP’s Oil Disaster
Editor’s Note: The Washington Post was given an opportunity for first, exclusive rights to publish this story today, but took a pass “because of the complicated nature of this story and our concerns that it’s too early to judge the real health effects.” Due to the time sensitive nature of this story, and because of tonight’s community health meeting in Orange Beach, we cannot hold it any longer for traditional news outlets. A special thanks to Spot.us for partial funding to cover travel expenses for reporting on this story.
Robin_Young1b.jpg
Glynn Wilson
Robin Young of Orange Beach talks about the health problems she suffered from BP’s Gulf oil disaster (see video).
by Glynn Wilson
PART ONE...
ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — Wherever disaster strikes, there’s always an associated crud.
There was the Exxon Valdez Crud. The Nine Eleven Crud. The Katrina Cough, and then the TVA coal ash cough.
Now, along the entire coast of the Gulf of Mexico, there is the BP Crud, afflicting workers and the general population from Louisiana to Florida.
When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, Robin Young, a 47-year-old director of guest services for a property management company in Orange Beach, Alabama, was gearing up for what promised to be the best tourist season on the coast in years. From the city of New Orleans to the Florida panhandle, communities were finally starting to feel like they were recovering from the devastation left in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Ivan.
Since suffering a debilitating bout of what locals are calling the “BP Crud,” however, like thousands of other people along the coast due to their exposure to the oil and chemical dispersants, she is now part of a growing community of activists along the coast who are worried about their health.
Just a few days after BP’s oil made landfall along the Alabama Gulf Coast in June, Ms. Young’s symptoms started with “a fiery, burning sore throat,” she said. Then came the horrible, constant cough, followed by an achy feeling much like a severe flu virus — and a lethargy that kept her in bed for two weeks solid. Her memory started playing tricks on her, and her motor skills and even hand-to-eye coordination went south.
She started communicating with other sick folks over the Internet, and attending local meetings with corporate and government officials. At one meeting early on, she asked for a show of hands in a room of maybe 400 people to see how many had suffered symptoms similar to hers.
“Half the people in the room raised their hands,” she said in an interview at her cottage right next to the Intercoastal Waterway, which was polluted with oil and chemicals at the height of the disaster. Clearly, this was not some isolated event unrelated to the oil rig blowout.
Her new friends, who soon started a nonprofit group called Guardians of the Gulf, tried to find a local doctor to help them. After having no luck, they eventually found an out of state toxicologist and a doctor who knew enough about a new area of occupational and environmental health to order blood tests.
They found Dr. Michael R. Harbut, a clinical professor of Internal Medicine and director of the Environmental Cancer Program at Wayne State University’s Karmanos Cancer Institute, board certified in Occupational and Environmental Medicine. And they found Metametrix, a lab to test their blood.
What they found in the blood tests was a stew of toxic chemicals directly associated with oil and gas production and the chemical dispersant Corexit, including ethylbenzene, xylenehigh and high levels of hexane, a hydrocarbon chiefly obtained by the refining of crude oil.
The long-term toxicity of hexane in humans is extensive peripheral nervous system failure. The initial symptoms are tingling and cramps in the arms and legs, followed by general muscular weakness. In severe cases, skeletal muscles atrophy and those exposed suffer a loss of coordination and vision problems, the very symptoms Ms. Young reported.
Town officials and even local doctors have tried to silence her and others who raise the health issue, worried that if news got out, it could hurt the local economy even more. But a group of local pharmacists started keeping diaries of people coming in with similar symptoms.
“There’s a core group of them that finally said, ‘Holy Cow,’ something’s going on,” she said. “They started listening to what we were saying. But we still couldn’t get a lot of help. We couldn’t get help from the local doctors because they didn’t know what to do.”
Early on, Ms. Young invited a crew from Bio-Cascade, air-pollution specialists out of New Jersey and Boston, to come down and test the air. She put them up in a house right on the beach.
On the third day John Vallier of Bio-Cascade woke up with a sore throat. He put the air monitoring machine on the deck and within 15 minutes it showed 110 parts per million of Volatile Organic Compounds in the air. The crew quickly packed and said they would help from outside the vicinity of the bad air coming off the Gulf. It was striking how scared they were and how fast they got out of town, Ms. Young said, while EPA was downplaying the threat coming from its own air monitoring stations.
Another member of her group who suffered similar symptoms but does not want to be identified by name called the local schools and confirmed that there were an unusual number of children out sick with what was diagnosed as “strep throat” and a “stomach virus,” at the end of summer and long before flu season is supposed to start.
Another woman, Robyn Hill of Foley, actually passed out while working for a BP contractor cleaning up the beach. When she was taken to the hospital by ambulance, the doctor tried to make her sign a form saying she suffered a heat stroke. She refused, and has now joined the cause to save the Gulf.
“It really fired us up,” Ms Young said.
CONTINUED...Thousands of People Along the Gulf Coast Suffer ‘BP Crud’
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