Measuring the Human Toll in the Gulf
Fewer than 2,000 people live in Lafitte, Louisiana, and most of them make their living catching fish and shrimp. When NRDC public health scientist Miriam Rotkin-Ellman visited the small bayou community at the end of May, crude oil from the blown-out BP well in the Gulf of Mexico had begun to lap at its shores.At a meeting in a local senior center, Rotkin-Ellman met a woman whose family depended entirely on commercial fishing. The woman cried as she talked about her husband and son. They couldn't fish in the polluted water, so BP was paying them to go out in their boat and clean up oil instead. "She didn't want them to go, because she was worried about the health implications," Rotkin-Ellman says. "But they needed to put food on the table."
In the early weeks of the Gulf oil disaster, Rotkin-Ellman and other NRDC public health staff traveled to Louisiana to connect with the coastal communities -- many of the same ones NRDC had worked with five years before, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- to listen to their concerns and to make sure the federal government was adequately monitoring potential health hazards.
One of the first things Rotkin-Ellman found was that some of the authorities' assertions about health and safety didn't hold up. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said its air-quality testing had found nothing out of the ordinary, but residents complained their neighborhoods smelled like gas stations. BP said fishermen involved in the cleanup didn't need protective respirators, but workers reported headaches, irritated throats, nausea, dizziness, and shortness of breath. Some cleanup workers had already been hospitalized.
"Some of them had asked for respirators and hadn't received them," says Gina Solomon, an NRDC senior public health scientist and a physician who spent a week in the Gulf in May. BP insisted protective gear wasn't necessary for the levels of evaporated chemicals that the workers were breathing. But the company had only tested the air around large industrial ships, not near small fishing boats, where workers would be closer to the water's surface, she says. And there was another problem: many of the exposure standards BP used were set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) more than 20 years ago, when less was known about the chemicals. According to Solomon, OSHA's limits are not adequate to protect workers' health.
Yet information on what Gulf residents were being exposed to, and at what levels, was hard to come by. The EPA set up air-monitoring stations in Louisiana and along the coast, but some of the compounds public health experts were concerned about weren't even being measured. Nor had anyone analyzed wind patterns to determine if the stations were in areas most likely to be affected by air pollution, Rotkin-Ellman says.
The agency also sent out labs on wheels, called Trace Atmospheric Gas Analyzer buses, to sample and test air along the coast. Rotkin-Ellman rode along in one that was testing for potentially hazardous compounds from the chemical dispersants BP was spraying on the oil. The dispersants' manufacturer had given the EPA a full list of their ingredients, but because the list was protected by law as a trade secret, the EPA couldn't say what it was actually testing for. That made it difficult to evaluate the agency's methods, Rotkin-Ellman says. EPA scientists themselves hadn't been told where BP was applying the dispersants, so they couldn't be sure they were testing in the right places.After pressure from NRDC and other environmental and community groups, the names of the dispersant ingredients were released in June -- but most of the names came with little or no information on toxicity.
In mid-June, Solomon, Rotkin-Ellman, and NRDC environmental justice attorney Al Huang sent a letter to the EPA urging the agency to reform its monitoring practices and pass its data to affected citizens quickly and comprehensibly. The letter was co-signed by 24 Gulf community and nonprofit groups. The EPA responded by sampling air quality in more locations; testing for more compounds of concern; and presenting data more clearly on its Web site. Rotkin-Ellman and her colleagues will also keep talking with coastal residents and urging public officials to respond to their needs. Even though the oil has stopped gushing, she says, Gulf communities will still need help getting clear information as they figure out what to do next.