PERSPECTIVES FROM THE FIELD Gulf Oil Blowout: A Lesson Not to Be Learned by Experience

摘要

As voters, automobile drivers, and home owners with oil-burning furnaces, we must count ourselves among those responsible for the recent Gulf of Mexico oil blowout involving the Macondo mine and Deep-water Horizon oil rig. We may fail to realize how toxic gasoline and number 2 fuel oil are. As a toxicologist who has addressed oil industry risks to human health, I rarely if ever have had to consider quantities of released contaminants as vast as the Deep-water Horizon scale of release to the Gulf and to the planet. Deepwater may dwarf the air pollution that sickened so many volunteers after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. Climatologists rarely must consider individual releases of greenhouse gases, such as methane, on the Deep-water scale; and seismologists rarely must consider impacts on deep-sea oil wells. Yet, such impacts constitute just the tip of the ecological and human health risk icebergs, especially for people living and working on the affected Gulf Coast, and for its vulnerable ecosystems.