VALDEZ, Alaska — The toll of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill is a sadly familiar one: 250,000 dead birds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals–all victims of the oil tanker that ran over a reef late one April night and drained 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound.
There are others whom almost no one talks about, although unlike the birds, most of them are still alive. They are the people who scraped oil off the beaches, skimmed it off the top of the water, hosed it off rocks. Workers who stood in the brown foam 18 hours a day, who came back to their sleeping barges with oil matted in their hair, ate sandwiches speckled with oil, steered boats through a brown hydrocarbon haze that looked like the smog from hell.
After that summer, some found oil traces in their lungs, in their blood cells, in the fatty tissue of their buttocks. They got treated for headaches, nausea, chemical burns and breathing problems, and went home. But some never got well. Steve Cruikshank of Wasilla, Alaska, has headaches that go on for days. Two years ago, he was hospitalized when his lungs nearly stopped working. “The doctor said, ‘I’m going to give you the strongest antibiotic known to man, and you’re either going to survive or not survive. I don’t know what’s wrong with you.’ What’s wrong is, I haven’t felt right since that oil spill.”
John Baker of Kelso, Wash., has had nosebleeds “like gushers” that won’t go away and growths in his lungs. “They say generally that people who work in underground mines and stuff get this kind of thing. But the only thing like that I ever worked on was the oil spill.”
The lungs of Tim Burt of Seldovia, Alaska, were coated with oil while he was steam-cleaning oil tanks. As his lungs began to fail, he got wrenching headaches. None of the painkillers was strong enough. ” ‘Just kill me,’ he’d say. ‘I can’t stand the pain anymore,’ ” recalls his sister, Sandy Elvsaas. Burt died in 1995 of a drug overdose. “He figured he had nothing to lose. He was dead already.”
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scientific proof don’t we?
and when we have it, then we need to prove those people who died were worth something.
and then we need to prove it is cost effective to keep them safe while cleaning up messes.
and then we need to prove that there is something that can be done about the damage to their bodies before we even try to treat them.
i am official over my species. we are mostly okay, but the numbers of us who are pure shit are enough to wreck everything.
i’m for dolphins being in charge.