Gulf oil spill: Air pollution a new health concern

Public outrage over the BP oil spill fouling the Gulf of Mexico has focused on water pollution. But an air pollution health threat may also be serious, according to UCI researchers.

A team of UCI scientists, including Nobel laureate F. Sherwood Rowland and Chemistry department Chairman Donald Blake, has detected concentrations of toxic chemicals such as alkyl nitrates, methane, hexane and butane compounds that can irritate or burn skin and eyes or cause dizziness, according to studies.

So far, air samples from about 400 canisters the group collected on a recent trip to the oil spill do not show levels above government safety thresholds. But the concentrations are higher than those found over heavily polluted urban areas, such as Los Angeles, Mexico City or Oklahoma oil tank farms.

The blown-out well is 50 miles off Louisiana and is gushing oil into the gulf at a rate between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels a day. Several cleanup workers have been hospitalized with respiratory complaints.

UCI researchers say it is unclear whether the noxious gases in the air around the spill are the result of oil, of chemical dispersants or of other sources. More funding and government coordination are needed, they said.

The scientists have submitted their findings to the Environmental Protection Agency and to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA followed up with a monitoring flight, but the results have not yet been released.

The UCI team is collecting more samples with an eye toward publishing a peer-reviewed paper in the near future.

--Margot Roosevelt

Photo: A dispersant-carrying plane passes over an oil skimmer as it cleans oil from the explosion and collapse of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Credit:Patrick Semansky/Associated Press

Comments

[best answer]

The ties between British Petroleum and Goldman Sachs run deep. Peter Sutherland, the chairman of Goldman Sachs International also served as chairman of BP right up until last year, according to a 2009 bio on the site of the Trilateral Commission says.

[Tungsten Carbide Band]

The Government is fully committed to pollution, capital, operation must be full.

[avatar singh]

another english prapganda to absolve british company .

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/76746a66-82db-11df-b7ad-00144feabdc0.html

UK scientists at odds with US over effects of oil spill

By Fiona Harvey and Clive Cookson in London

Published: June 28 2010 18:41 | Last updated: June 28 2010 18:41

The long-term effects of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are likely to be small, a group of leading scientists said on Monday, but some of the clean-up methods may be doing more harm than good.

Their views contradicted those of the White House, which has described the oil spill as the “worst environmental catastrophe” to hit the US, and has ordered BP to make greater efforts to clean up the spill.
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The scientists, from prominent British universities, said much of the outcry about the oil spill was informed by politics, rather than science. However, they acknowledged that the spill was having severe short-term effects on the livelihoods of people in the Gulf.

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the ties between British Petroleum and Goldman Sachs run deep. Peter Sutherland, the chairman of Goldman Sachs International also served as chairman of BP right up until last year, according to a 2009 bio on the site of the Trilateral Commission says,

“Peter Sutherland is chairman of BP plc (1997 - current). He is also chairman of Goldman Sachs International (1995 - current). He was appointed chairman of the London School of Economics in 2008. Before , he was the founding director-general of the World Trade Organisation. He had previously served as director general of GATT since July 1993 and was instrumental in concluding the GATT Round .

In deregulation, oil giants like BP take obscene risks and rake in undreamed-of bonanzas. BP, the third largest oil company in the world, has an annual profit of $14 billion; it made $17 billion last year, and $9 billion in the first quarter of this year alone. BP’s top CEO before Tony Hayward, Lord John Browne (at $11 million a year the highest paid CEO in the UK) was so addicted to profit that he cut safety costs at all costs. BP has long been known as the top-ranking safety violator globally. Last year BP racked up over 700 violations, that is, over 10 violations per day. BP’s Regional Oil Spill Response Plan for the Gulf was so makeshift it included references to walruses and sea-otters, neither of which inhabit the Gulf.

[Merle Savage]

Crude oil continues to invade the Gulf; as BP, the US Government, and other official agencies monitoring the toxic crude, continues to FIDDLE. That is what I called the Dance of Deliberate Deception. No one will come forward with the intestinal fortitude, and declare the obvious - that crude oil is toxic to breathe. I have been told by OSHA that a medical study cannot be conducted until after 6 months of exposure. WHAT? There have been 21 years since the exposure of the crude oil in Prince William Sound, and no one is listening. So, after 6 months of workers in the gulf breathe in the crude oil, a study can be conducted? That leads me to believe that the government is holding up the rug, while BP sweeps known reports under the same rug, and the other agencies conduct the Dance of Deliberate Deception on top of the rug.

Read this alert - stand with me and demand honest answers for the Gulf residents, and cleanup workers who will be suffering from the toxicity of the crude oil, if this political dance is allowed to continue.

My name is Merle Savage, a female general foreman during the Exxon Valdez oil spill beach cleanup in 1989. I am one of the 11,000+ cleanup workers, who is suffering from health issues from that toxic cleanup, without compensation from Exxon.
http://www.silenceinthesound.com/stories.shtml
Keith Olbermann & Merle Savage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJAwc7QV_QA
Esquire Magazine:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/gulf-oil-spill-health-effects-062110