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When most kids in Arabi, Louisiana, were spending their summer vacations sleeping and playing baseball, George Barisic was on the job. Barisic started when he was 10, apprenticing on his father’s fishing boat, a wooden fishing boat, launched the same year he was born. In his family, children work. “As long as you can swim,” Barrish laughs. “Those were the rules.” If you get seasick, as Parrish sometimes does, that’s life as a fisherman.
They were coming out of a channel into larger waters and chasing shrimp along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico to the border with Texas. Eventually he and his brother took over the management of the boat. Like their father, they meant shrimp from May until Christmas. They also started oyster farming in protected waters about four hours away by boat. Now, the 65-year-old, with sun-sculpted wrinkles and a neat mustache of salt and pepper, no longer gets seasick. But fishing has never been easier.
“My old man was tough, but I’m glad he was tough on us. Other than that, I don’t think I would have lived through everything I survived,” Barisic says. Hurricanes, stagnation, his boat on fire. But none of those prepared him for the catastrophic oil spill, nor the cleanup that followed.
On April 20, 2010, an explosion at BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig killed 11 people. When the platform sank, the wellhead tube on the sea floor ruptured, causing up to 7.8 million liters of oil to spill into the Gulf of Mexico over the next three months. A huge oil slick pollutes the coast from Texas to Florida, especially in Louisiana. Barisich had to stop hunting and his health deteriorated.
In April 2010, an explosion rocked the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, causing a fire and spilling up to 7.8 million liters of oil. Photo via Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo
“I was a healthy son of a bitch before,” he said, in a Louisiana tie. “I can operate my boat by myself. Right now, I need one or two haulers. I have half my ability to breathe.”
Barisich is angry with BP over the oil spill and the subsequent use of a commercial product called Corexit. Corexit is one of the most popular dispersants, a class of chemicals designed to break up oil slicks in the ocean. During the Deepwater Horizon cleaning process, 6.8 million liters of Corexit were dumped into the bay.
Even before 2010, scientists were raising concerns about Corexit’s safety and effectiveness. A decade later, there is more evidence against dispersants like Corexit, but it remains a key tool for oil spill responders in jurisdictions around the world.
For oil spills at sea, cleanup crews rely on four main technologies: contain and slow the spread of the oil using booms, collect what they can with boats that strip oil from the surface or absorbent pads that absorb it, burn the oil on water, or flood it with chemical dispersants. The choice of use depends on many factors, including the type of oil, weather and sea conditions, proximity to sensitive habitats, and available resources. Business crews often use more than one technique at a time. Each has its pros and cons, but none are as controversial as chemical dispersants.
In the Gulf, crews used dispersants to break up surface spots and reduce the chances of oil contaminating coral reefs or swamps or affecting animals living on the surface. Usually applied from the air, chemicals are mixed into the floating oil by wind and waves, breaking the cohesive spot into tiny droplets that spread through the water column in parts per million or even per billion.
But it’s a trade off. Dispersants contain chemicals that are considered toxic and also affect natural oils such as those found on human skin. The dispersed oil is likely to affect ecosystems below the surface and on the sea floor.
That’s why organizations and companies tasked with marine oil spill preparation carefully plan where and when to use dispersants, says Matthew Somerville, a member of the executive committee of the international nonprofit Spill Control. For example, a regional clean-up plan may include advice to avoid using dispersants near coral reefs, placing fish, bird nests, migratory marine mammals, or in current-carrying situations toward sensitive areas, and applying them only in appropriate weather conditions when they can be effective.
The advice stems from the checkered history of dispersals. The first documented use of a chemical blend, an earlier version of Corexit, was after 1967 Tory Canyon Leaked off the coast of England. Until then, scientists had concerns about toxicity in the marine environment, prompting governments to develop new guidelines for use and push for less harmful formulations. However, over the years, dispersants have crept into the toolkit of most spill response organizations around the world.
Within days of the Deepwater Horizon spill, crews sprayed dispersants on the growing patch of boats, helicopters and planes. But because oil was flowing from the seabed, BP asked for permission to apply Corexit at the wellhead. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and US Coast Guard approved the idea, and in a pilot effort, cleanup crews injected the dispersant 1,600 meters below the surface of the water in an effort to disperse the oil before it hit the surface.
Many describe spraying chemical dispersants as the scene of a disaster – a gesture that was ineffective and potentially dangerous. Photo by Benjamin Lowe/Getty Images
Over the course of the spill, an estimated 7,000 cubic meters of dispersant went into the bay, about a third of that volume at the wellhead, according to a report on the spill and cleanup. Barisić and other Gulf Coast residents say dispersants have also been sprayed near shore and near boats. (BP denies the allegations.) “They kept saying they weren’t,” Barisić says, but he fished immediately after the spill, and when the fisheries closed, he worked on cleanup efforts and was on the water every day.
Wilma Sopra, technical advisor for the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, a nonprofit that advocated affected communities during the Deepwater Horizon clean-up, says Barisich isn’t the only one experiencing health issues in the aftermath. Supra has documented dozens of illnesses associated with oil spills and Corexit. The most common were respiratory problems, confusion, kidney and liver damage, and skin and muscle problems, but there were also reports of seizures, paralysis, and rare types of cancer. “Many families who live in coastal areas are sick, and a lot of the cleaners are suffering, too,” Sopra says. “They can’t work. [Some have] They lost their cars and homes. It destroyed hundreds of families.”
Sorting out the causes is difficult. Many of the people who said they were exposed to the dispersants were also exposed to the oil. Dispersants have toxic effects on their own And They exacerbate the toxic effects of the oil, as they enhance skin penetration, says Supra. For some symptoms, disaster shock can also be a factor.
Researchers have conducted thousands of studies on spillage, clean-up, and its aftermath. Only a small percentage of the effects on human health are considered. Some still associate Corexit with illness and death. A paper published in the magazine Environmental Health Perspectives In 2018, it was found that people who were exposed to dispersants and oils were more likely to suffer from coughing, wheezing, and shortness of breath. A separate study of US Coast Guard personnel, published in 2019, found that oil spill workers were more likely to develop long-term illnesses if they were exposed to dispersants. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health reported in 2018 that dispersants reduced the risk of cancer caused by oil toxicants like benzene, but increased the volatile organic chemicals people breathed in by 10 times.
At the same time, there are growing concerns that Corexit is not doing what it is supposed to.
In 1989, Exxon Valdez The oil tanker is known to have ran aground in Prince William Sound in Alaska, spilling 42 million liters of oil. After a few days of the spill, the cleanup teams tried to use dispersants when spilling, but stopped when they were clearly not working.
However, many cleaners say the chemicals have left a legacy of the disease. Studies have tracked high rates of liver, kidney, lung, and nervous system problems among staff and volunteers who worked on the spill and were exposed to the dispersant.
The disaster and the botched cleanup led the US Congress to create two Citizens Advisory Councils for the waterways where ships carry most of Alaska’s oil, Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet. The groups make recommendations on preparing for the Alaskan oil spill and regularly hire experts, such as independent spill specialist Merv Fingas, to review the research. Concerned that the use of dispersants was still a tool in cleanup operations, the group hired Fingas in 2017 to review related research.
Failed cleaning efforts after Exxon Valdez The tanker ran aground in Prince William Sound in Alaska, spilling 42 million liters of oil, creating Citizens Advisory Councils for the waterways where ships carry most of Alaska’s oil, Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet. Photo via RGB Ventures / SuperStock / Alamy Stock Photo
Of more than 200 studies, Fingas found that 78% of them showed that chemically dispersed oil was more toxic to marine life than oil left to naturally degrade. Among those who examined the biodegradation, 67 percent showed that adding the dispersant actually reduced the ability of microbes to eat the oil. Only 22% of the studies showed positive results. According to the Fingas report, all of these were funded by the petroleum industry.
Only in rare cases are distractions useful, says Jeffrey Short, a consultant who worked with litigants battling BP after the Deepwater Horizon event. “They have a role to play,” he says. “The right dispersant, with the right oil, with the right wind conditions, in the right place – it works just fine.” But dispersants only work on fairly fresh oil. Oftentimes, just the dispersant getting to the spill within the first couple of days is impossible. And the weather window for effective application is small. Short says their use most often is “response theater,” something exhausted cleaning crews can do to prove they’re trying everything.
As long as oil is drilled and transported at sea, there will be pressure to include dispersants as part of spill cleanup plans, Short says, because no other tools do what they do. Grand View Research, a marketing and consulting firm, expects spending on global oil spill preparation to grow from US$153 billion in 2020 to US$178 billion by 2025. In short, he notes, researchers are looking for dispersal alternatives, including mud that catches oil and drown it to the bottom of the sea. Nothing is ready for marketing.
A recent court case may add some momentum to efforts to improve or discontinue dispersants. Rules in the US state that the EPA must keep the federal Clean Water Act in line with the latest science. But the Environmental Protection Agency hasn’t updated its rules on dispersant use since 1994, long before the Deepwater Horizon. A coalition of environmental groups and individuals, with the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, as the lead board, sued to change that. In August 2021, a US federal judge ruled in their favour. The EPA must now review the science and create new response rules by May 2023.
Prosecutors believe the new plan will look radically different from the 1994 plan, says Claudia Polsky, director of the Environmental Law Clinic. They believe that distractions will become the last resort in the cleaning process.
Those most affected by the Deepwater Horizon water spill hope this is true. Many coastal residents still have health problems, beaches remain toxic, and marine species decimated by the spill have not recovered. George Parrish is back at fishing and oystering, but the crops are only a fraction of what he harvested prior to 2009. “I call Corexit the dummy solution to pollution,” Parrish chuckles, before getting serious. “There has to be a better way.”
