The Oil Spill: Nothing Ever Changes

The Spanish fishermen who helped to clean the Galician coasts after the sinking of the Prestige suffer from chromosomal alterations and pulmonary problems. On Tuesday, the Spanish press once again brought up two scientific studies, conducted simultaneously. Researchers have listed several hundred people whose DNA has been permanently affected, and who present a heightened risk of developing lung cancer and leukemia. When we know that 300,000 volunteers have come from all over Europe to help out Galician beaches and their wildlife, how much will they pay with their flesh? It took nearly eight years to even begin to take sanitary measurements of the catastrophe. The paradox is obvious: while thousands of oil tankers drill the oceans on a daily basis, the long term effects of oil spills on living organisms are conveniently unknown to us.

Once the beaches are cleaned up, the public powers prefer to simply forget, and welcome the arrival of tourists rather than toxicologists. As the industry offers them more sites to investigate, researchers are becoming more and more curious. Thus, an American team has already detected respiratory problems in some 300 active rescue workers off the coast of Louisiana. Based on past studies, scientists expect soon to see a surge in neurological, dermatological and genetic problems. All of it on an undocumented scale since the Deepwater Horizon oil platform leaked ten times more oil than the Prestige. Also in this case, the American government and its friends in the oil business prefer to feed us illusions. A month ago, Washington assured us that three-fourths of the hydrocarbons leaked into the Gulf of Mexico would have already been diluted or even eliminated due to the effect of natural microorganisms and chemical products discharged by BP. A few days later, researchers at the University of Georgia nevertheless announced an inverse ratio! And other specialists warned about the potential toxicity of dispersing agents that were generously spread by oil companies.

These warnings evidently will not prevent the 20,000 fishermen and marine workers in the affected regions from getting on with their lives. With waning emotion, BP has announced that the damaged well, which took nearly three months to finally repair, could still be used after all. As for the moratorium on deep-water drilling, Washington has already planned on lifting it at the end of the year. Looks like nothing will ever change…