That does it. Starting after this bag, I’m giving up little chocolate donuts.
I never wanted to be in the Olympics anyway.
And I’ve done the obvious and goggle CNN Valdez,dead.
Dear thread
As an employee of Lockheed - we worked long and hard to clean up and learn from this oil spill.
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I am 51 and still alive and well.
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one of my workmates just died from Cancer / Same age as me
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Another has Leukemia
I suspect the oil was part of the cause.
I stumbled on this thread today, and was looking for facts. Not opinions.
Any real numbers on the death rate or causes?
And to close. I am very sorry for the lives of the residents of the prince william sound that were destroyed. the fishing cycles that are permanently damaged, and the death toll of the fish and wildlife.
This will never be restored.
P.S. still have some oil in a test tube sealed from 89- 1990.
Still looks like Hershey’s syrup. Not decaying at all.
RD
Going back in time, here:
This, out of 50,000 workers. So why didn’t he view 50,000 records? Presumably, because only 11,000 of those 50,000 workers had any health record at all. Some people seek medical attention because they feel sick, and some seek medical attention just for a checkup to make sure everything’s OK, and some people don’t seek medical attention at all, and hence have no health record at all. So really, that statistic isn’t saying that over half of the workers got sick; it’s just saying that over half of the people who sought medical attention were sick.
We still have the number of 6,722 out of 50,000 workers got sick. Is that significant? That depends on what the typical length of time was that a worker was on the job. If they were at it for a year, and in all that time only 13.4% ever got sick at all, that’s very different from if 13.4% got sick on their very first day.
And then, you have to control for other factors. For instance, those who took part in the cleanup were probably mostly people who had no other job at the time. That alone could lead to increased rates of sickness, if they couldn’t afford medical care prior to working on the cleanup. And then you also have to look at the severity of those illnesses, which we’re not told: There’s a big difference between, say, a rash that lasts a couple of days and cancer.
But in an update, George Coe died in 2015.
And Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
The Exxon Valdex spill was relatively small as big spills go. Ya’ll have just heard of it because this is a US based board and it was a US spill. There have been many far larger spills involving large clean-ups. Corexit is commonly used. If there were any truth to the idea that cleanup workers die like flies, it would be a well known problem by now.
I’m not saying I believe the accusations. But this isn’t a very strong counter-argument.
Corporations routinely expose people in third world countries to dangerous chemicals. And it doesn’t make the news in the United States. Especially if the effects are real but spread out over a period of years.
Tens of thousands of people may have been exposed to Corexit and experienced serious health problems. But it wouldn’t get noticed until six thousand Americans got sick.
How often is this line germane?
Once. Now. Here.
Bravo
The UK, Spain, France, Japan and Korea (to name a few off the top of my head) are not third world countries.
Further, unless you work in the industry you have no idea how well established are the international organisations that are involved in and study large spills. Even if you wouldn’t hear about it because it wouldn’t hit the public ear, I would hear about it.
So I think a fair conclusion is that the claim cited in the OP is unsubstantiated. This is, of course, a far cry from establishing that the exposures associated with such cleanup operations are safe. Independently of whatever statistical screwups are associated with such sensational claims, some sober facts are indeed established:
Exposure to crude oil itself is hazardous in many ways, including demonstrated alterations in hematological profile and liver function and the known carcinogenic properties of many hydrocarbons.
And Corexit itself has numerous toxic properties some of which were further confirmed following the Deepwater Horizon spill, including effects that are suggestive of carcinogenic properties which may take time to develop.
So though it seems likely that the claim in the OP is exaggerated beyond reason, a reduced life expectancy for this cohort seems entirely plausible.
Well, the next time the thread’s bumped it very well may be true.
What reason is there to expect a sealed container of crude oil to decay? It lasted for millions of years in a (sort-of) sealed cavity under the ground.
If you pour it out and expose to the elements, it will start to break down. i.e.
Volatiles will evaporate away - and will eventually react with something, or be broken down by sunlight, etc.
Less volatile fractions will oxidise and disperse by weathering.
Now, that’s not to say that the resulting components will be benign, of course, but they would disperse and probably eventually end up sequestered somewhere. Sealed in a glass tube though? There’s no exposure to anything that would effect a change.
During the Mancondo disaster there was the usual handwriting about Corexit. (There have actually been a number of versions, 9527 and 9500 are still available). Exxon Valdez seems to have used an earlier version: 9580. The actual content between versions seems to vary quite a bit, so it isn’t easy to say what the risks or issues may have been.
There is however a general rule used by cancer researchers. They hate small clusters. The problem being that any population will deliver clusters of any disease, and a large enough cohort will always deliver some that are actually just random bad luck. This is of course deeply unsettling for those that are affected by proximity to any cluster. It is very hard to be told that the cluster of bad things you see is nothing more than bad luck. Worse, there really is a chance it isn’t just bad luck, but overall experience had shown that such clusters almost always turn into nothing more than a waste of time to investigate.
What you need is a cluster of people who have exactly the same cancer. And that isn’t just “leukaemia” or “lung cancer.” There are many subtypes, many not at all related to one another. Actually tracking down all the workers on these various spills is probably a really good idea, and performing proper analysis of their medial histories of significant scientific value. But nobody has done so. And without that we really don’t know. There will always be people who know people that worked there that are getting sick. That is life. But whether there really is a causal relationship is another matter. And reports of such sickness or forums like this are guaranteed - because such reports are self selected.
The hardest problem is that most of these potential illnesses are only an increased chance of the illness. If it were a rare illness that was typically only caused by some specific chemical exposure (for instance mesothelioma and asbestos) it would be easier. But it isn’t.
Maybe someone could try to get as large a cohort of workers as possible from Exxon Valdez together to pool medical information. But you always have the problem of self selection, typically only those who are ill tend to join in. So you don’t actually get meaningful results. It is hard, but as everyone gets older, the chance of cancer or other ills increases. Whether that chance became greater from exposure to crude oil or Corexit (or both) is not an easy question to address, let alone answer.
As an individual who was in a decade long relationship with a Woman who’s family fished out of the Kenai peninsula I can with absolute certainty say that “Almost all” is a complete exaggeration.
While I do not have enough information about an increased risk of health issues, and with the realization that 1989 was almost 1/3rd the average humans lifespan ago I personally know dozens of individuals who participated in the cleanup. Keeping in mind that even after the dramatic increase in residents over that time period in the area but her hometown still only has a population of 880 “dozens” is a significant portion of the population there.
As many of that population is above 60 years old, even without an adverse effect like this mortality would be rising in the population.
I am not defending any actions by Exxon or downplaying the costs of this event but the OP title is absolutely not correct.
But once 6000 people get sick, if the cleanup chemicals had caused them serious illness, it would be to their livers or kidneys ? Which would be easily diagnosable ?
And the correlation between sickness and exposure ? The people who worked at mixing the detergents would be more exposed ? They’d have failed livers ?
Of 6000 people screened, and they were the more likely to be suffering, how many were found to be poisoned by the cleaup ? NONE. zero out of 6000, zero out of 11,000
and the other 40,000 didnt even see a doctor to get their yellow snot checked.