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'Gulf Coast Syndrome'
A year after the BP disaster, some Southerners say they're coming down with mysterious and frightening illnesses
http://www.csindy.com/colorado/gulf-coast-syndrome/Content?oid=2171419
by Alex Woodward
"This is the best-hidden secret perhaps in the history of our nation."
Dr. Mike Robichaux speaks into a microphone while standing on a truck bed in the shade of a massive tree in his yard in Raceland, La. He's wearing a blue polo shirt and jeans, and his white-gray hair is parted neatly. The former state senator, known affectionately as Dr. Mike, is an ear, nose and throat specialist in Lafourche Parish and self-described "too easygoing of a guy." But today, he's pissed. "Nobody is fussing about this," he says. Robichaux invited his patients and dozens of others to speak about their situations. Outside of neighborhood papers with names like the Houma Courier, the Daily Comet and Tri-Parish Times, their stories exist solely on blogs and Facebook — unless you visit Al Jazeera English, or sources in Germany, Belgium and elsewhere in Europe.
<Snip>
A Swiss TV crew asks me why U.S. media aren't talking about this. It's a good question.
"We wanted to be proactive and go out there and get it cleaned up as fast as we can, and do whatever it takes," remembers charter boat captain Louis Bayhi, who worked for BP in the early days of the disaster. When his crew made it to shore, he went through a triage tent where doctors asked how he was feeling — but his complaints of headaches were brushed off as seasickness, he says. Months later, Bayhi still hasn't been paid the $255,000 he says he's owed for his work in Vessels of Opportunity, a BP-administered program wherein private boat-owners assisted with cleanup efforts. He's visited hospitals for severe abdominal pains, but he doesn't have health insurance, and no insurance provider will take him on, he says. He lost his home, and he and his family — his wife and his 2- and 3-year-old daughters — now live with his wife's grandmother. The family visited Grand Isle beaches in August, where his kids swam in the water and played in the sand.
<Snip>
Hazmat suits
Many cleanup workers and coastal residents blame the dispersants and an oil-dispersant mix for their illnesses. Sprayed by planes and pumped into the Gulf, more than 1.8 million gallons of the dispersant Corexit were used to break up the oil — though the product is banned in the U.K., and in May 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency provided BP with a list of less harmful dispersants. BP stuck with Corexit. Douglas Blanchard, a third-generation fisherman ("I got my degree on the back deck of a shrimp boat," he says), was hired to handle dispersants, but he says he wasn't allowed to use a respirator. "They never gave us no nothing to breathe, no protection," he says. "It was a bad smell — it'd burn your nose, your eyes, your throat, headaches. Take pills like they're candy, all day."
He was flown via helicopter to a medical center just south of Lake Pontchartrain, where he says he was scrubbed with soap by workers clad in hazmat suits. "Afterward, they told us it's not harmful," he says. "We made good money, but the money's not worth it." Tate Cantrell also remembers bringing a respirator on board his boat before handling dispersants, and says he and his crew would be fired if they were caught wearing them. He says he now has trouble breathing. "It feels like an elephant on your chest all the time, like your lungs want to collapse," he says. "I made a little bit of money, but everything I have now I'm trying to sell just to stay alive."
So why is this not on the laMe Stream media?
We need to spread the word on this and give this story wings! |
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- It somehow seemed apropos.....
