BP's Bullying

Take a moment to watch this short clip about BP dumping oil-spill waste in Mississippi.

  

          Disparities in exposure to environmental toxins continue to become evermore prevalent, especially with the 2010 BP oil spill in the gulf.  To the privileged public, BP was doing an amazing cleanup job and the waste seemed to just disappear.  What a perfect and fair world we would live in if that were true.  However, 61 percent of the waste was dumped in communities of color.  I’ll admit that I too assumed the oil had miraculously vanished and everything had been restored to how it was before the accident.  The majority of the oil did vanish from the gulf, but it reappeared in the backyards of people of color.  These are the same communities that were hit the hardest by hurricanes Katrina and Rita and that live in poverty—there are no resources available to them to reconstruct their shattered lives.

            Conclusions of possible health effects that may result from the waste of the oil spill can be drawn, but there is little data to support these conclusions because the companies that are responsible for the oil spill have been allowed to keep that information private.  However, it is thought that exposure to benzene and other oil chemicals can create many risks to reproductive and maternal health. 

            Three out of the five approved dumpsites in Louisiana for the oil waste are located in primarily black communities.  The African American communities located along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast were some of the communities that were hardest hit by hurricane Katrina, and dumping the highly venomous waste from the oil will only add more hardships in their recovery efforts.  It’s pretty obvious that there is a blatant disregard of concern for the health and recovery of these impoverished communities.  The billion-dollar company, BP, sure can afford to clean up their mess without dumping their waste on those who are given no voice.  

Article referenced:  http://colorlines.com/archives/2010/08/environmental_racism_surfacing_in_bp_spill_waste_management.html

Video URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD2gJSM_sLY 

~Eve Hansen