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Rick DuFour has worked the most dangerous oil cleanup jobs in the Gulf of Mexico. He was there when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded 40 miles off southeastern Louisiana 10 years ago, killing 11 men and spewing more than 200 million gallons of Louisiana crude out of its well a mile below the sea. Much of it poured onto the shores of four states; DuFour was one of the first in line to clean it up. 

Over three years, DuFour estimates he worked for 18 different companies, cleaning up a toxic mix of oil and chemical dispersants stuck like peanut butter to the bottoms and bows of ships, picking up oily tar balls on beaches and scraping tar mats as long as football fields from areas they sank just offshore. 

There wasn’t a cleanup job he didn’t sign up for, working for weeks on end in the blistering 100-degree heat and humidity, sucking in the noxious fumes that permeated the salt air. He saw hundreds of dolphins wash up dead on the barrier islands where he worked, many of them just babies. 

“It was a horrible thing,” he says, squirming uncomfortably in a tattered chair among piles of paper, soda bottles and food wrappers in the battered trailer home that he shares with his stroke-stricken 86-year-old father in Moss Point, Mississippi.

But DuFour, 61, says the worst of all was working at the Ingalls shipyards in Pascagoula, Mississippi, during the summer of 2010. DuFour’s job was to use high-powered hoses that spewed hot water and cleaning agents to wash off the oiled ships and equipment each day. Workers had to suit up in bulky masks and hazmat suits, covering every inch of flesh possible. Sometimes the men had to limit their work to just five minutes out of every hour to avoid heat exhaustion and chemical exposure as the sweat poured off them in buckets. 

One day, a company chemist approached the workers with a new compound called Chemical 7248, a special degreaser the Coast Guard now warns should be disposed of as hazardous waste. DuFour says the chemist explained the compound had been “Frankensteined” to clean up the specific type of oil gushing from BP’s well.

He remembers the chief safety officer told the men if they didn’t use the chemical, they could try a hammer and chisel to clean off the toxic gunk, a task no one wanted in the stifling heat.

Soon after spraying the chemical, DuFour says one of the workers started screaming and had to be taken to the hospital. DuFour says the skin on his legs blistered with a “thousand ant bites … it looked like cherry-colored lipstick went around my eyes and went around my nose and it just burned so bad.” DuFour says he soldiered on, determined to finish the job even as people fell sick around him.

But oil and chemicals finally took a toxic toll. After three years of working oil cleanup jobs across four states, exposed to countless cleaning compounds, oil dispersants and fumes, DuFour collapsed at home one morning in April 2013. He was rushed to the hospital in Ocean Springs, where he remained in recovery for nearly a year.

He was initially diagnosed with a condition similar to Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological disorder, and he lay mostly paralyzed in a hospital setting during his recovery. He describes the pain coursing through his body like “snakes were crawling up” his legs, torturing him as he was unable to move. 

DuFour eventually made it back to his trailer, but the pain never went away. He still can’t move well, and he can barely eat or grasp drinks with partially paralyzed hands. His eyes still burn, too, “like there’s tabasco” in them. A decade after the spill, DuFour is broke, nearly paralyzed and mostly homebound. DuFour ultimately received about $7,700 for the acute medical claim he filed in 2011, one of about 37,000 claims filed against BP in this category.

But his suit to pay for his chronic illness is not expected to go to trial in federal court until later this year. He hopes it will allow him to get enough money to get extensive physical therapy, something he estimates could cost over $1 million a year.  

DuFour’s dream is to get enough money to get his dad “squared away” with a new home and better care, and maybe try his hand at gold prospecting in nearby Alabama. “There are so many things that I haven’t done that I still want to do.” 

His lawyer, Craig Downs, represents about 3,000 individuals across the Gulf who have filed medical cases against BP. He says DuFour’s case is one of the worst he has seen. Nearly all of the thousands of chronic medical cases filed across the Gulf have yet to go to trial due to a complicated oil spill legal structure that focused on paying financial claims first. The chronic medical cases are slowly winding their way through the judicial system, but experts say there’s no guarantee they’ll turn out well for plaintiffs like DuFour who have racked up expensive medical bills.

“It’s a tragic story,” Downs says. “The oil industry as a whole doesn’t want people to know how dangerous oil spills are. They don’t just kill animals. And we’re just starting to see a rise in cancers now.” 

Click the link to read the whole story on HuffPost.

As a child growing up in Lebanon, Ralph Chami would stare out at the ocean, mesmerized by the Mediterranean and the mysteries of the sea. He wanted to be an oceanographer, but there were no marine science careers to pursue in his country. Eventually he and his family fled war-torn Beirut, and he earned his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University in the United States, ending up as an economist at the International Monetary Fund. But the seas continued to draw Chami, beckoning him like a starfish to coral.

Three years ago, Chami volunteered on a whaling research mission in Baja California, Mexico, with his friends Michael Fishbach and Heather Watrous of the Great Whale Conservancy, a small nonprofit. While having dinner, their conversation turned to the important role that whales play in balancing Earth’s natural carbon and oxygen cycles, scientific phenomena that Chami had never heard of. After that, he says, “Life was never the same again.”

Whales, it turns out, dump critical amounts of nutrients and minerals from their waste streams as they dive and surface during their global migrations. Their iron- and nitrogen-rich poop sustain vast blooms of phytoplankton, the microscopic plant-based building blocks of the sea that supply at least 50 percent of the world’s atmospheric oxygen, while consuming 40 percent of all carbon dioxide produced. Then, when whales die, they sink to the sea floor, sequestering their huge stores of carbon far from the atmosphere, where it no longer contributes to climate change. This carbon-oxygen marine cycle is known as the “whale pump.” Given its importance, Chami began to wonder: What exactly is the value of a whale to global carbon markets?

Click on the link below to read the rest of this article on Undark magazine’s website.

Every Breath You Take: The Economic Case for Marine Life

Posted to AAAS website September 16, 2019

CLIMATE AND HEALTH

Located on the shores of Lake Superior, Marquette is a thriving city and county facing dramatic environmental changes that will impact the health of local residents.

A warming climate and variable lake levels are contributing to flooding, pollution runoff and infectious diseases that officials say will present increasing challenges to the community. Over the past five years, Marquette officials have worked closely with scientists from federal and state agencies as well as local stakeholders to develop a series of climate and health guidebooks that will allow them to better prepare for the future.

With its stunning natural beauty by the shores of Lake Superior, low cost of living and proximity to good medical facilities and a state university, Marquette, Michigan has made several lists of top U.S. cities in which to retire. Local officials and residents agree. Clean air and water and the towering forests of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula make Marquette a healthy place to live.

But local, state and federal officials say health threats are not far off. Scientists reporthigher temperatures, greater flooding and increased water- and vector-borne illnesses will pose rising threats to residents in Michigan and the Great Lakes area. The Great Lakes and the Midwest could attract more people as southern and western regions of the U.S. are impacted by climate change. That could put even more stress on local resources. “Marquette has a large hospital and a university and has amenities that people are looking for,” says Brad Neumann, a Michigan State extension service expert who is working with the city and county to plan for climate change impacts. “A big part of the conversation is how this place can be more resilient, so we don’t diminish our resources [as more people move here].”

For full article click below

As the Great Lakes Warm, Marquette Plans for a Healthier Future

Posted to AAAS September 16, 2019

EROSION AND RELOCATION

Alaska is facing some of the most imminent threats from climate change in the United States, with fast-rising temperatures, thawing permafrost and massive storms.

The small Inuit village of Napakiak is under immediate threat of flooding from the rising Kuskokwim River, and community leaders are consulting with engineers and scientists to determine how and where to move. Homer, a fishing and tourist center of more than 5,000, adopted one of the state’s first climate action plans and is continuing to try to adapt to a world with more dangerous storms and threatened fisheries.

Each spring and fall, Napakiak City Council member and Alaska Native Walter Nelson watches the Kuskokwim River move closer to his town.

A warming climate has altered the flow of Alaskan rivers, as ice melt speeds up and they are not frozen as long as they once were. Violent storms, also fueled by a warming climate, add to the changing characteristics of the Kuskokwim River as it flows by the tiny Alaskan village of Napakiak before emptying into the Bering Sea. Every year, a rising torrent chews out bigger swaths of riverbank, encroaching upon this small community of about 360 people, mostly of Inuit descent, driving the town into what experts call a “managed retreat.”

In 2019, strong spring storms took out the town boat landing, threatening the only school in town and forcing the community to move its city garage and fire station further away from the river. The town cemetery has already been flooded and relocated, Nelson says, and residents are now investing in metal caskets so they can be moved more easily in the future.

“Every year we have to move some buildings,” Nelson says. “The erosion rate is accelerating, and the funding is hard to get to do anything about it. But we can’t just let the buildings fall into the river.”

Click below for full article

Alaskan Communities Adapt to Dramatic Climate Change

Ship Island Excursions has survived hurricanes, global recessions, a world war and a host of economic challenges since the ferry company began taking passengers to the barrier islands that dot coastal Mississippi in the 1920s. But this year, a new threat has emerged: an explosion of blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, that has shut down virtually all of Mississippi’s beaches since July 4.

No one knows when the algae will disappear, and many wonder how many businesses that operate in the region will survive the hit.

“Beach vendors have been wiped out,” said Louis Skrmetta, operations manager for Ship Island Excursions. “I’ve never seen something so dramatic. It’s very similar to the BP oil spill. … People are frightened to just walk in the sand.”

Read more on The Huffington Post.

As fishermen deep in the Louisiana bayou, Kindra Arnesen and her family have faced their share of life-altering challenges in recent years. 

First came Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 monster storm that devastated her small fishing community in Plaquemines Parish before roaring up the Gulf Coast, killing more than 1,800 people and destroying $125 billion in property. Five years later, BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded 40 miles offshore, spewing nearly 200 million gallons of crude. The fisheries have not fully recovered more than nine years later, nor has her family.

But this year may be worse. A historic slow-moving flood of polluted Mississippi River water loaded with chemicals, pesticides and human waste from 31 states and two Canadian provinces is draining straight into the marshes and bayous of the Gulf of Mexico — the nurseries of Arnesen’s fishing grounds — upsetting the delicate balance of salinity and destroying the fragile ecosystem in the process. As the Gulf waters warm this summer, algae feed on the freshwater brew, smothering oxygen-starved marine life. 

And as of Wednesday, an advancing storm looks likely to turn into a tropical storm or hurricane by the weekend, with the potential to bring torrential downpours and more freshwater flooding.

Read more on The Huffington Post.

Federal officials charged with regulating the use of the toxic chemicals have been dragging their heels.

NINE YEARS AGO, I traveled down to the bustling Louisiana bayou fishing town of Venice, where the road south along the Mississippi River comes to an end. I joined colleagues from the Natural Resources Defense Council, a national environmental policy group, to investigate the blowout of the titanic Deepwater Horizon rig some 40 miles offshore. The bayou area had turned into a veritable war zone as an army of Coast Guard, National Guard, state police, and oil cleanup personnel converged to address the fallout from the massive rig explosion that killed 11 workers and busted a drilling pipe a mile below the surface, allowing 200 million gallons of reddish-brown crude to spew into the sea.

I can remember riding offshore with local fishermen and seeing their expressions turn from curiosity to fear as we found the thick, nauseating slicks floating toward shore. They realized their livelihoods would be turned upside down by the powerful explosion. It was America’s greatest oil spill disaster, a catastrophe that left a tarry trail of toxic oil and dead marine life across four states. And for many people who live in the region, the calamity is still not over.

Jorey Danos is one of them. A construction worker from the Louisiana town of Thibodeaux, Danos worked on the armadas of small boats — the Vessels of Opportunity — paid to help clean up the seemingly unending waves of crude. Above them, transport planes flew, spraying thousands of gallons of Corexit, a chemical oil dispersant designed to break up floating oil patches and sink them into the sea, so they would not pollute the marshes and shorelines. Danos says the planes sometimes flew near his boat, their mist making it hard to breathe. He says he was not issued a respirator. Boils broke out on his neck and he developed headaches. Eventually he suffered from seizures that forced him to stop work.

Danos is one of thousands of workers and residents who reported health complicationsfollowing exposure to dispersants during the Deepwater Horizon cleanup. Yet, in the decade since the oil spill, government agencies have set no major rules governing the use of the toxic chemicals. And with President Trump rolling back drilling safety regulations and pushing for new drilling in areas like the East Coast and the Arctic, the matter has taken on new urgency: The next big oil spill may be just around the corner.

To read more, see article posted on Undark magazine

On Valentine’s Day I am thinking of love, and I’m worried about consumption. Love because it’s the foundation of existence, what drives us to do what we do. Consumption because it will lead to our demise, an addiction that will alter life as we know it. And it is everywhere in the world around us. 

For the past 40 years I’ve worked as a journalist on topics ranging from pesticide poisoning in Mexico to gunrunning in Africa. I’ve revealed pieces of truth lurking in dark corners, and battled the frustrations of dead ends and denial. I have been harassed, fired, accused of exaggeration, and hounded by people who never wanted to see my stories see the light of day. Through the hard times I have sometimes thought about leaving journalism, especially as the modern digital age has devastated and squeezed local reporting to the point that few local voices are heard anymore. The media is being attacked like never before. Why would anyone want to do this? 

But this week, the answers came to me from two young aspiring student journalists who contacted me separately, asking about stories I had worked on decades ago. They want to know how have things changed, and how they could get involved in journalism. Stay true to yourself I said, tell a good story, and get out and meet the people you are reporting on. We may live in the millisecond world of Twitter, a digital diaspora seemingly devoid of context. But journalists will always have a market for stories that tell a good tale, a yarn people can relate to. The youth of the world will inherit our environmental mess, a crisis that’s greater than ever. But they are smarter than I was at their age, and we must help them tell the stories in the future. For all of us. 

Which gets me back to my thoughts of the day. I love what I do because I believe in it. I work on environmental stories because they matter, to my kids, the people I love, for my hound dog who is my faithful companion. Love really is about truth. Though journalists get dinged for getting things wrong, most really are trying their best to get it right. In a time of fake news and political puffery, I believe even more in the mission of the media. We are the message, and we have an obligation to report the facts as they are. 

And consumption? Well that is the driving force of what’s afflicting our future. We live in a nation that consumes a quarter of the world’s resources, with a fraction of the population. At some point in the not-too-distant future, Mother Earth will be unable to sustain it. The science is clear; fisheries are rapidly being depleted, animals and insects are dying off in record amounts, forests are withering, our rivers and groundwater continue to be polluted by chemicals that put us all at risk. 

But it is climate change that will push us all over the edge. We are already seeing what’s in store. As our political leaders feed us false hopes of a consumer-driven future, we face a destructive path if we don’t change. We live in the petri dish called Earth. We should learn from Native Americans who understood that long before Europeans came: respect Mother Nature or suffer the consequences. The increasing droughts, floods, fires, melting glaciers and oceans of plastic are stark reminders they are right. 

Can we change? Absolutely. We have the solutions, the technology to get us out of the carbon-burning hell we are leaving for future generations. But we won’t change without the political will to get there. At some point, we will have no choice. It will be too late for millions of coastal residents and populations who lack the economic resources to weather the impending disaster. 

Call me old school, but the world has proved we were right in our protests of the 60s. Embrace love and consume less on this Valentine’s Day. Find a way to focus on your passions while leaving a lighter footprint on the earth. We owe our kids no less.