Thirteen years after Deepwater Horizon explosion, documents reveal company’s response and ‘scorched earth’ legal strategy
If it were up to him, he’d still be working as a truck driver. The 59-year-old makes a good living and feels good. But in June 2020, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer that had spread to his liver. Now he’s huffing and puffing, pushing a trash can to the curb near his home in Mobile, Alabama.
Floyd Ruffin, 58, grew up surrounded by horses in Gibson, an unincorporated community in southern Louisiana. He was also diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2015, which made it difficult for him to ride a bike. Before he had his prostate removed, he dreamed of having more children.
Terri Odom, 53, lay awake at night in her home in San Antonio, Texas. She worried that she, too, had cancer. As a chemist, she was used to finding answers, but she couldn’t figure out why her health was deteriorating. She emailed dozens of doctors and researchers, searching for answers. “You feel like you might die early,” she said.
Disaster brought the three together. Thirteen years ago, they helped clean up the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill — the largest oil spill ever recorded in U.S. waters. They dove into toxic oil to save the places they loved, joining more than 33,000 people cleaning up our coastline. Now they’re suing BP, claiming the company made them sick.
After the cleanup, thousands of people developed chronic respiratory illness, rashes, and diarrhea — a condition locals call “Gulf Coast Syndrome” or “Gulf Coast Syndrome.” Others, like Castleberry and Ruffin, developed cancer.
The courage shown by the cleanup workers has been compared to the heroism of the rescuers during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, who rushed to the World Trade Center to save lives but inhaled toxic dust and fumes. Ricky Ott, an Alaska toxicologist, became involved in advocacy for oil spill workers after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989. “The local community and professional oil spill responders are doing what professional firefighters and rescuers do all over the world: risking their lives to protect ours,” she said.
But while those who responded to the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history remain etched in public memory, the coastal workers in some of the country’s poorest areas — those who gave their lives in the wake of the worst industrial disaster in a generation — are relegated to the background, unrecognized and forced to fight their own battles.
On April 20, 2010, a drilling rig contracted by BP in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico exploded, spilling more than 200 million gallons of oil.
Eleven workers died that day, but some believe the spill’s death toll may have been much higher — and underreported — because workers involved in cleaning up the spill soon began developing illnesses they said were linked to exposure to toxins in the oil and Corexit, the chemical BP used to clean up the spill.
For 87 days, as oil gushed from the sea floor, low-wage workers in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida collected tar balls from beaches, collected oil with booms, decontaminated boats and burned oil in the water. They also rescued wildlife, including birds, turtles and dolphins, that had been damaged by the oil.
Some were Vietnamese fishermen who lost their jobs when shrimping was banned in Gulf waters. Others were Cajun construction workers and black cowboys. Most depend on the Gulf for their livelihoods. About 30 percent of these contractors, who work on spill cleanups for weeks or months on end, have annual household incomes of less than $20,000, according to demographic data compiled by the National Institutes of Health.
According to a BP safety briefing, many cleanup workers do not need to wear respiratory protection because toxic components of the oil have evaporated or broken down in the surf. Plaintiffs’ attorneys argue that despite a federal government recommendation that BP conduct biomonitoring by measuring toxin levels in the blood, skin, or urine of cleanup workers, BP has failed to collect evidence that toxins from the oil have entered the workers’ bloodstreams.
In 2010, BP launched a major PR campaign to reassure the public that the Gulf of Mexico would recover. With the smell of oil and Corexit still hanging in the air, BP was already mounting a legal defence against the workers it claimed were cleaning up the environmental damage caused by the spill, according to new evidence first reported by the Guardian.
There are no class-action lawsuits for cleanup workers and coastal residents who became ill years after the spill. Under previous settlements, they must sue BP separately to recover compensation for permanent injuries, and many of those cases are subject to court orders barring them from seeking punitive damages.
BP declined to comment on detailed questions from the Guardian, citing ongoing litigation. A district judge ruled that Nalco Holding Co, which made the drug Corexit used in the BP oil spill, was not liable for medical claims arising from its product’s use in the spill because its use had been approved by the federal government, according to court documents. Ecolab Inc acquired the company in 2011 but later sold it to a subsidiary, Corexit Environmental Solutions LLC. (In response to a Guardian inquiry, Corexit Environmental Solutions said it had never been involved in any decisions about the use of its products in the Gulf of Mexico.)
In previous medical settlements, BP paid $65 million to 22,588 patients with short-term illnesses, an average of less than $3,000 per person, according to the claims administrator’s 2019 data. The company also spent more than $60 billion to settle economic and resource claims arising from the spill, as well as civil penalties under the Clean Water Act.
The multinational oil company is using a “scorched earth” strategy in every lawsuit, said attorney Jerry Sprague, who has filed about 600 health claims against BP. About 5,000 lawsuits had been filed as of January 2020, according to the Eastern District of Louisiana.
The firm hired experts to handle hundreds of cases, and in some cases, plaintiffs and their doctors had to spend hours poring over their medical records, tax returns and employment documents.
In court, BP argued that without biological evidence, workers and coastal residents could not prove that their illnesses were caused by the oil spill, even though studies have shown that exposure to the spill increases the risk of cancer and increases the incidence of long-term respiratory problems, heart disease, headaches, memory loss and blurred vision. Thousands of cases have been dismissed, according to plaintiffs’ lawyers. Only one known case has resulted in a settlement.
“This is by far the worst public health disaster I’ve ever seen,” said Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, which has produced several reports based on interviews with sick cleaners. “What’s particularly frustrating is that BP doesn’t care,” he said.
For this article, The Guardian interviewed more than two dozen former cleaners, many of whom had never spoken publicly before.
He led a flotilla of boats to stop oil from seeping into the estuary between Lafitte and Grand Isle in southern Louisiana, working 15 hours a day for months. “This movement is about making sure we protect the wetlands. We make sure that if a fisherman or a boater needs a job, we give them a job so they don’t lose their home. They don’t lose their car. They have food,” he said in a 2017 video recorded by his daughter, Bailey Stewart.
The following year, Frank Stewart was diagnosed with a rare form of myeloid leukemia. His condition deteriorated rapidly. His wife of 22 years, Sheri Kerner, sat at his bedside, using her laptop to try to understand what was ailing her husband. Her research led her to discover that Stewart had been exposed to a toxic mixture of BP oil and the drug Corexit.
On April 19, 2018, a day before the eighth anniversary of the BP oil spill, her husband died in her arms at home.
“It’s outrageous that they got away with murder,” Kerner said of BP, which she is suing over her husband’s death.
To get a fuller picture of the illnesses that clean-up workers and coastal residents say the spill has caused, the Guardian analysed 400 random claims against BP. Among those who filed a claim, the most common chronic health problem was sinus disease, followed by eye, skin and respiratory problems. Chronic sinusitis is the most common, in which the sinuses of the nose and head become inflamed, leading to nasal discharge and facial pain.
Most of the plaintiffs were cleanup workers. One is a lifeguard, and another lives near where the oil washed ashore in Gulfport, Mississippi. About 2 percent of the plaintiffs had cancer, but public health advocates say many more are likely to be diagnosed in the coming years.
“Your findings are very consistent with the Yale study published 13 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill,” Ott said. “I believe that oil spill-related cancer cases will increase in the coming years.”
It was dirty work. The air was thick with the smell of fuel, and the humidity and scorching heat left the men on the water exhausted, sweating and dehydrated.
Pabst remembers hauling 200 feet of soft rope out of the Everglades in his small shrimp boat, the air thick with the greasy, diesel-like smell of Corexit and oil. But Pabst, a broad-shouldered, broad-chested man whose family has been shrimping the Gulf Coast for three generations, takes pride in his work. The pay is generous. The cleanup is necessary to preserve his way of life for future generations.
“It was dirty, smelly, nasty work,” he recalled one recent morning over coffee near his home in Chalmette, in southeastern Louisiana. Working on the water, he goes through three packs of baby wipes a week wiping the sweat from his face that stings his eyes and gives him headaches during 11-hour shifts.
After that, headaches and nausea became chronic, and in 2017 he was diagnosed with ocular lymphoma, which he says was caused by months of exposure to toxins during the cleanse.
He then underwent several rounds of radiation therapy. He says the treatments left him feeling claustrophobic and with post-traumatic stress disorder, and he constantly worried about whether and when the cancer would return.
“You always wonder, ‘Is it worth the money I’m making?’” he said, adding that his case is still pending in federal court. “We made $10,000 every other week for three or four months (during the harvest). But sometimes we made more shrimping.
Last fall, Sprague’s attorney filed a motion arguing that BP was required to collect and store data on cleanup workers’ exposure levels, but the company failed to do so to protect itself from future lawsuits.
According to emails uncovered during the investigation, oil was still flowing into the Gulf of Mexico when three federal agencies — the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Research Council — submitted plans recommending that BP conduct biological monitoring of cleanup workers.
Biomonitoring is a method of measuring chemical exposure levels by repeatedly testing bodily fluids for toxins over long periods of time. Such monitoring can help identify the causes of acute and chronic illnesses. But instead of monitoring the health of its workers’ bodies, BP spent more than $13 million monitoring the air. John Howard, director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, wrote in an email to colleagues that air monitoring alone cannot identify all the ways toxins enter workers’ bodies.
Because air sampling does not reflect overall exposure, which may be more relevant for assessing long-term health effects, continuing our approach without including biomonitoring would (1) represent only a partial approach to determining exposure; (2) render us scientifically incomplete; and (3) prevent us from addressing the concerns of those now claiming in the media that harmful exposures are occurring despite negative air sampling results.
He also noted that the lack of biomonitoring also undermines researchers’ ability to conduct long-term health studies. Howard did not respond to a request for comment.
BP hired CTEH to conduct the air monitoring. In June 2010, two members of Congress wrote to BP highlighting the company’s decision to contract with a consulting firm that has experience working with companies to downplay the risks of major pollution incidents for which they are responsible.
Murphy Oil hired CTEH to conduct inspections in 2005 after its refinery was flooded by Hurricane Katrina, spilling 1 million gallons of oil into 1,800 homes in Meraux and Chalmette, Louisiana. U.S. Congresswoman Lois Capps and Senator Peter Welch wrote that hiring CTEH was “another mistake at the expense of public health.”
CTEH was recently hired by Norfolk Southern Railway, the operator of a train carrying toxic chemicals that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. While CTEH said its testing found no harmful chemicals in nearby homes, ProPublica and the Guardian spoke to several experts who said the testing was insufficient to confirm residents were safe.
During the investigation, Sprague’s firm found a series of emails from BP’s internal medical team, dated July 31, 2010, discussing the company’s air monitoring efforts. “While we document zero impact in most of our monitoring efforts, the monitoring itself adds value in the eyes of the public, and zero impact adds value in terms of protection from potential litigation,” wrote John Fink, an industrial hygienist at BP.
“You acknowledged that BP is monitoring the air not to detect hazards in the air, but to protect against future lawsuits,” Sprague said of the email. “Scientists say we should be doing biomonitoring. BP is ignoring that. How can that work when you know they’re going to monitor the air anyway to protect themselves from lawsuits?”
Memorabilia from the disaster lay scattered throughout Jory Danos’s one-acre home in the Cajun town of Golden Meadow, Louisiana. Jerry cans held brown seawater with bits of oil floating in them; suitcases were filled with legal documents and identification cards from four months of cleaning; his photograph was now faded and scratched.
Danos, 31, helped clean up the oil spill. Now in his 40s, he is retired and suffers from a number of chronic ailments, including chronic abdominal and stomach pain and memory loss, which he attributes to his deep-sea incident.
But his memories of the Gulf of Mexico operations remain vivid: pelicans drowning in oil and dolphins spewing oil and water from their blowholes. “It’s a disaster,” he said. “The end of the world.”
“This isn’t about the money anymore,” Danos said, sitting in his backyard and looking through torn-up pages of the case. “I want them to find them guilty, and I want them to explain why they had to use toxic chemicals that are known to be harmful to people.”
The documents show that BP did little to train cleanup workers on the toxic risks associated with the job. Downs Law Group, a Miami law firm that has handled more than 100 oil spill cases, recently released a BP training module that allowed it to claim that cleanup workers received little or no training on toxic hazards.