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Cleanup Boats Sent to Shore After More Workers Get Sick
All 125 commercial vessels working to clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have been ordered back to shore temporarily after four workers on three separate vessels became ill, according to a Deepwater Horizon Response press release.
It's unclear whether the crew members were working with chemical oil dispersants, which have been criticized for their toxicity. Our calls to officials in the region have not yet been returned.
The sick workers said they had headaches and chest pain, and were nauseated and dizzy. One was taken by helicopter to a hospital in Marrero, La., another was taken by boat and two were taken in an ambulance, according to the press release.
The current symptoms mirror those of other fishermen who were hired by BP to help clean up the spill, as we pointed out earlier this week. The dispersants BP is using to break up the oil have many health risks of their own. Earlier this month, the EPA told BP to stop using the chemicals and to switch to something else, but BP says there is no better alternative.
9 Comments so far
Show AllAnd what will happen when the first hurricane makes its way into the Gulf of Texaco?
The hurricane will get sick too.
Along with all the inland people it dumps its toxic Gulf water on.
Oh yes, and Obama said in his news conference today that our wonderful government is in charge of the clean up yet BP was told by the EPA to stop using the dispersant and they didn't do it???? Does that mean Obama lied or made a mistake or doesn't really know WTF he's talking about and he thinks BP is the government? And is the BP fascist government now going to take responsibility for the cancers the clean up workers will exhibit in a few years, along with illnesses contracted by those living along and near the gulf coast? And how much longer are we going to put up with this?
bp says, lucky your not a fish
it also mirrors the illnesses and poisoning of people and workers in the "clean-up" after 9/11 -- which was declared "SAFE AIR QUALITY"
by order of the US CORPORATE GOVERNMENT.......
of course americans STILL think their greatest "enemies" are the terrorists "over there that want to destroy our way of life over HERE".......
even if their REAL greatest enemies ARE HOME GROWN...and sitting in the corridors of their "lawful" centers of power, commerce and "american way of life"......
of course of course...NOT EVEN if americans actuallY SEE their fellow americans - such as with these clean-up workers - who have had to abandon their VERY LIVELIHOODS (or what's left of it) to do the clean-up.....getting ill and worse for thesmelves and their own families!
no - not EVEN THEN. americans are far too Comfortable with their notions that "enemies and threats to our way of life" are always "from over there".....
easily forgetting it's THEIR own "ways" that have LED to such disasters. and their own leaders are merely the SHIP CAPTAINS that they ALLOWED to take the helm.
it has taken 300 hundred plus years for what is known as the "american" - for all intents and purposes - in its place in the world as a nation and "people" to be what it IS today...inclusive of the consequences of what that "american character" and "american way" brings about.
it will take more than 3 years, or 30 years or even 3 generations for that same "character" to REALLY learn lessons it should have learnt a long time ago....given its claims about being the epitome of civilization.
where america as a nation is concerned - in other words,
americans will not learn.
they woudl FIRST have to divest themselves of everything they hold dearest about "being american" ....for that is the ROOT of what causes them to "make the same mistakes (not only of their own making but those made by others), over and over and over again".
americans believe that their exceptionality as a nation gives them the justification for , in fact, MAKING THE SAME MISTAKES , others have long ago already made and struggle to learn FROM .....
but making those mistakes "the american way" ...
which simplymeans :
BIGGER ANYTHING.
BIGGER wars, BIGGER profits, BIGGER mansions, BIGGER humvees, BIGGER COMPANIES, BIGGER BOMBS, BIGGER , BIGGER --- oil spills, BIGGER bail-outs, BIGGER this bigger THAT....
ESPECIALLY when they are MISTAKES!!
Dead bloated dolphins, oil-covered pelicans they have to force-feed pepto bismol, sick clean-up workers, tough words like "top kill," and a president who is actually a stupid man even though "liberals" were so proud to have a brighter man than ALfred E. Newman in the White House. What a tableau.
Don't fret, CD community - we'll all forget about this in another month, just like we forgot about Haiti and Guantanamo and Iraq.
Liberals don't like hearing the truth
Sorry to burst bubbles of the people who think they are fighting the good fight and rationally motivated compared to the repukes, but facts are facts. Results matter. Obama is the man he claimed to be no matter what liberals pretended him to be in order to stomach voting for him. The mafia still runs the same even when the boss is a nicer guy who more eloquently justifies the crimes he commits. Maybe liberal ideology similarly isn't so rational, but based on maintaining the current power structure for people who want social protections? Maybe people who go to the ivy league don't know shit compared to those struggling to survive?
The Democratic Party is a big tent for the wealthy which is why they can't possibly represent workers without cognitive dissonance setting in. We need a worker's party for these very rational reasons. All you self-proclaimed pragmatists can keep going on about how you martyr yourselves and bleed your hearts to death but real people are dying everyday thanks to this political system you so voraciously defend.
Maybe you are right Mcoyote. Maybe what we need now is a worker's party to challenge for power. Not a progressive party but a worker's party. If all goes well there will be some room in that tent for progressives.
A worker's party is a great idea. Of course it will be smeared as 'communist', 'marxist' or 'trotskyist' by the mainstream corporate owned media. A 'worker party' sounds too much like 'socialist worker party' and you know how the sheep have been trained to react to 'socialist'. It really is class warfare but we are trained (propagandized, brainwashed) also to believe there could never be such a thing in our current market self correcting capitalist utopia.