Is there anything more fun than the "cautionary tale"? Of course there is. Hell, the very notion of the "After School Special" was based on the "cautionary tale", and those were never any fun. However, sometimes they are necessary, and unfortunately, this is one of those times.For those of you volunteering to help clean up oil coming ashore, do not assume BP will protect you from the harmful affects of exposure to crude oil, and the chemical dispersant that is mixed in with it. Merle Savage volunteered to help clean up the Exxon Valdez spill, and this is what she got for her trouble:
Merle Savage has a wheezy, guttural smoker's cough. But the 71-year-old former Alaska resident and author of Silence in the Sound never smoked a day in her life. She did, however, spend four months as a general foreman during the Exxon Valdez oil spill recovery project in 1989. And she has a message for anyone working at the BP oil disaster sites: "You've got to use your common sense. Breathing crude oil is toxic." Savage moved to Alaska in 1988--just one year before the Exxon Valdez oil spill ravaged Prince William Sound. After the spill, Savage decided to take action. She was assigned to clean oil-coated rocks on the beach, but says that Exxon never provided legitimate safety training. And since Exxon never told her that breathing crude oil was toxic, she didn't think twice about spraying hot water onto the oily rocks.
Read the rest here.
Thanks Mothy for the tip-in!
Photo by Deepwater Horizon Response
No comments:
Post a Comment