By J. DeVoy
Because otherwise you’ll die. No, really. Almost every member of the Exxon Valdez cleanup crew is dead, believed to be caused by – or at least strongly correlated with – exposure to crude oil and dispersants. The toxic soup brewing in the Gulf of Mexico, a mix of that same crude oil and dispersants with methane and benzene, a known carcinogen.
My first thought was that volunteers in the Exxon Valdez incident were already extremely aged, namely retirees with enough time to go painstakingly scrub oil off of rocks with toothbrushes. But the life expectancy of those who helped clean up that spill is only 51 years, scuttling that theory. More likely than not, this stuff is not only disgusting, but lethal as well. It’s possible that entire regions of the country will be uninhabitable if this hurricane season pushes these chemicals inland.
