TJ Johnson remembers the day he and his cousins were sprayed. Bobbing in two small boats four miles off the Alabama coast, they were using plastic nets to scoop out thick, noxious crude that had gushed to the surface after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded 40 miles off the Louisiana shore. Nobody had protective gear on, and no one worried much about the slimy, foul-smelling oil that stuck to their boats and piled up in the garbage bags they used to collect it.
Suddenly out of the darkening sky a prop transport plane appeared, trailing a silky mist. As the plane flew over, TJ says, the mist floated down, burning their eyes and skin and causing several men to choke and gag. They poured water on themselves to clean the toxic liquid off their skin and headed back to their port in Bayou La Batre as fast as possible. TJ says they were all coughing, and soon developed headaches and rashes.
“The plane probably didn’t see us because it was getting dark,” TJ says. “But that’s just the way it was out there. We were getting sprayed all the time.”
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