Almost Every Cleanup Worker From The 1989 Exxon Valdez Disaster Is Now Dead

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/warn...dez-disaster-is-now-dead-2010-6#ixzz2PWNAGejR

Does give one pause, doesn't it?
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Oil is a natural substance, but it does contain various volatile aromatic hydrocarbons (such as benzene and naphthalene) which are thought to be potentially carcinogenic.

 

Yes, mainly about how tabloid trash media take a legitimate and very serious concern that should be investigated and considered calmly and intelligently and spin it in to a mess of panicked speculation and unsupported accusations. Of course, you can't sell much advertising on the back of boring old academic research.

 

Frankly I'm doubting this. The video linked has been yanked by YouTube (apparently quite a while ago). A search of the CNN website found this, which contains no such claim of deaths, but does say most cleanup workers got sick.

Looks like a great exaggeration to me.

 

Yep one breath of Benzene at concentrated levels is like smoking 250,000 cigarettes at a time. Very powerful stuff.

I don't believe the cleanup did this though. I've worked oil spills and they are nasty, but as long as you use PPE correctly you should be fine with most crude.

 

it's hard to determine a link, the cleanup was 25 years ago so a good number of those people would be expected to be dead by now anyways of various causes...but then again these are proven carcinogens, toxin awareness and safety precautions back then and are no where near what they are now...

 

What did all these people die of? The link didn't say.

Alaskans have the nation's highest suicide rate. That is thought to be related to the long periods of darkness.

If you cannot say what they died of, how do you go about making a linkage between working on the oil spill and death?

Typical lack of intellectual rigor I expect from environmental extremists.

 

And the CEO gets an 8% raise...

Exxon CEO's compensation rises 8 percent to $27.2M
Apr 12,`13 -- Exxon Mobil Corp. gave its CEO $27.2 million in total compensation last year, an 8 percent increase as the oil giant posted its second-highest profit ever.

 

"...Benzene at concentrated levels..."

Taxcutter says:
Yup. But those "concentrated levels" are far beyond explosive mixture limits.

 

Actually Benzenes exposure limit is VERY VERY VERY low (1ppm PEL) as compared to other things that would naturally be dangerous such as H2S (20ppm PEL) simply because it is a known carcinogen.

This stuff is bad crap. I use to deal with it and I still worry about it every day.

 

You know gasoline has benzene in it, don't you?

 

Yes, but it only makes up about .5% of the total mass of gasoline. Even so, what does that matter? I wasn't saying we needed to ban anything.... Was simply saying that the Benzene could have been one of the things that caused the deaths if they did in fact occur.