The people who cleaned up the 200 million-gallon Deepwater Horizon oil spill say they are still dealing with the health and economic fallout.
In this aerial photo taken in the Gulf of Mexico, more than 50 miles southeast of Venice on Louisiana's tip, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig is seen burning, April 21, 2010.
“It was a horrible thing,” he says, squirming uncomfortably in a tattered chair among piles of paper, soda bottles and food wrappers in the battered trailer home that he shares with his stroke-stricken 86-year-old father in Moss Point, Mississippi. Soon after spraying the chemical, DuFour says one of the workers started screaming and had to be taken to the hospital. DuFour says the skin on his legs blistered with a “thousand ant bites ... it looked like cherry-colored lipstick went around my eyes and went around my nose and it just burned so bad.” DuFour says he soldiered on, determined to finish the job even as people fell sick around him.
DuFour’s dream is to get enough money to get his dad “squared away” with a new home and better care, and maybe try his hand at gold prospecting in nearby Alabama. “There are so many things that I haven’t done that I still want to do.” Meadows says he and his father-in-law were doused with dispersants from planes flying over their boat one day that summer, trying to repair a rope-ensnared propeller. His father-in-law developed kidney disease soon afterward and died in 2013. Meadows thinks his father-in-law is one of the many victims of the BP spill never counted in any official tally.
Meadows is still seeing doctors, but he’s unsure he’ll ever get any sort of permanent relief, nor any additional financial help from BP. “The oil companies are big,” he says, “nobody don’t want to go against them.” Miller said his skin started tingling and burning. “It made our eyes dry up in our sockets … I passed out here on the floor,” he said. Everyone on his boat, he said, was “delirious.” Miller said Coast Guard personnel were in the area, but did nothing to intervene.
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