A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [54]
BP says workers who want to wear masks are “free to do so”—as long as they receive instructions from their supervisors on “how to use them.”
A spokesman for the shrimpers’ association insists that BP has told workers they are not allowed to wear masks: “Some of our men asked, and they were told they’d be fired if they wore masks.” Environmental groups offering free masks to workers have been told by BP that they can’t do that. If you wear a respirator you have bought with your own money, if you wear a respirator someone has given you—you’re fired.
And here’s why: oil is not their problem. Their problem is that they are eating. At least, that’s what BP says. BP’s CEO and chief harlequin Tony Hayward actually says, “Food poisoning is clearly a big issue.” He adds, “It’s something we’ve got to be very mindful of. It’s one of the big issues.” He himself seems to be suffering from foot-in-mouth disease.
“Headaches, shortness of breath, nosebleeds—there’s nothing there that suggests foodborne illness,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. “I don’t know what these people have, but it sounds more like a respiratory illness.”
The fisherman’s wife has better data. She says there’s no way her husband and the other men had fallen victim to food poisoning—they were on eight different boats and didn’t eat the same food.
The director of Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals says, “It’s hard to understand if nausea or dizziness or headache is related to the oil or to working in 100-degree heat.” (I wonder why BP didn’t think of that.) Wearing respirators could help unpack that. No, never mind; we’re told that respirators could add to heat stress.
There’s another reason the suffering workers aren’t using respirators. But get ready for some tortured logic: the head of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) says the toxins in the Gulf air aren’t concentrated enough to require workers to wear respirators. Based on that, BP says there are no health threats to workers. After public-health advocates criticize both of them, OSHA’s head tells C-SPAN that he wouldn’t advise using his agency’s “out-of-date” guidelines. Confused? It can take your breath away.
Who else can’t breathe? A Dauphin Island Sea Lab study finds a dramatic decline in dissolved oxygen near the ocean bottom at sites twelve and twenty-five miles off Alabama. The study’s senior scientist, Dr. Monty Graham, announces, “Oxygen is dropping out offshore. We got minimum dissolved oxygen values of 1.7 micrograms per liter.” Dissolved oxygen levels below 2 micrograms per liter are considered too low for almost everything that depends on oxygen for normal living. The values found are less than a fifth of normal. Dauphin Island Sea Lab director Dr. George Crozier says, “This is the kind of unexpected consequence that I warned BP representatives of on May 3rd, after they announced the successful application of dispersant at 5,000 feet.”
And yet—. Other scientists will find the oxygen depletion rather moderate. And a federal panel of about fifty experts recommends continued use of chemical dispersants, saying populations of the underwater animals likely to be killed have a better chance of rebounding quickly than birds and mammals on the shoreline.
That’s probably true, if you decide to be unconcerned about turtles, whales, and dolphins, and if you write off the possibility of effectively capturing floating oil. And at the heart of the matter are two things: dispersants are easy; dispersants make things look better. Plus, no one really knows for certain what would happen here with or without dispersants. There’s a lot of guessing on the details.
On the final day of May, engineers begin trying to fit a new “top hat.” The dome weighed 100 tons; this cap weighs two tons (further evidence that