Glynn Wilson

Boat Captain Sean Kelly, interviewed in Gulf State Park in Gulf Shores, Alabama (see video below)

by Glynn Wilson

GULF STATE PARK, GULF SHORES, Ala., April 24 — When British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20, 2010, killing 11 platform workers and pumping crude into the Gulf of Mexico by the millions of gallons, boat captain Sean Kelly of Seattle, Washington was traveling in Florida. Once the scope of the disaster became known after a few days, he got an opportunity to help by working the spill off the coast of Alabama.

“You want to help protect the shoreline and help the people that live here,” he said. “Whether its sucking oil over here or laying boom over there, you want to do your best to help.”

Little did he know that opportunity would ultimately cause such a major, devastating effect on his life and health. Kelly’s blood even now, a year after his direct exposure, shows higher levels of the petrochemicals associated with BP’s oil and chemical catastrophe than anyone doctors have tested thus far.

Thousands of people on the Gulf Coast are still suffering from the human health effects of the disaster one year after the event, a fact that we have been documenting since last September, when many news organizations would not cover the issue and some commentators were still calling the very idea of the story itself a “conspiracy theory.”

Kelly started by working in Perdido Pass in Orange Beach collecting oil from the surface and putting it in barges to try to prevent as much as possible from hitting the beach. After awhile he was then transferred to Biloxi and ultimately Bay St. Louis, where he worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day, laying miles and miles of boom to try to protect the coastline from the approaching oil.

After a couple of months, he was injured on the job and had to pull out in August, but not before he was directly exposed to the oil and chemical dispersants, getting his hands, legs and feet in the polluted Gulf water.

When he started suffering from some of the classic symptoms of nausea and rashes in his hands, he thought perhaps it was just related to heat exhaustion. Doctors told him it was a fungal infection.

“Ironically, 10 months later, I’ve taken everything they’ve prescribed, and still have it,” he said in an interview in Gulf State Park in Gulf Shores, Alabama.

While BP’s subcontractors made a show of protecting workers by issuing “protective gear,” which meant hard hats, life jackets and booties for their shoes, the contractors never provided workers with rubber gloves or respirators, perhaps because they did not want to suffer the insurance and legal liability of admitting there was a health problem from exposing workers to such hazardous substances.

“The protective gear boiled down to a hard hat, a life jacket and steel-toed boots,” Kelly said. “There’s a situation where BP said everyone has to wear protective gear, and if you were working on the beach with the cameras nearby that’s what you did. For subcontractors and everybody else, it was a little harder to get protective gear.

“There were more days than I can count when we had oil all over us,” Kelly said. “Just in the capacity of that job, that’s what you did. If you were pressure washing it off the deck, you were breathing it in. You would feel it covering your skin.

“When you are out laying boom, connecting anchors to the boom, your arms are in the water every day,” he said. “There really is no protective gear for that.”

It didn’t take long after he stopped working that the symptoms started coming. First came the nausea accompanied by severe stomach cramps. Then there was a painful numbness in his hands, followed by shaking in his hands and major pains in his joints. He suffered a rash all over his body that eventually bled so bad he had to sleep on towels.

It started, he said, with “severe, drop you to the ground stomach cramps. That was followed by “a painful numbness that would start in your fingers and spread up” his body, he said. Then there was the “uncontrolled shaking in the arms.” That spread up the arms and was followed by sever joint pain, then spread to his entire body, to his legs.

Then came the heart problems.

“Your heart jumps to 140, 160 (beats per minute),” he said, and “it would last for hours, and it was so irregular it wakes you up all night long.”

Then came the the brain fogs, headaches and vision problems.

“They’re wild, because all the sudden, everything just goes,” he said. “You can’t focus. You can’t think. Your body is shaking uncontrollably. I’ve got perfect vision, but your vision starts to go.”

There were times when he woke up laying on the kitchen floor after spending maybe a half hour unconscious and he had no idea where he was or how long he had been there.

Then came the infections.

“You get a tiny scratch and it swells up the the size of a golf ball,” he said.

The carotid artery in his neck is still swollen.

“Every day is a new day of these experiences,” he said.

A major problem in trying to get treated for his symptoms was finding a doctor that knew what to do. None of the doctors on the coast were prepared for such a drastic environmental health crisis, what Dr. Ricki Ott and others have called “chemical illnesses.”

“I talked to professional after professional after professional,” he said. “They had no idea.”

Unable to work, to function, to do what he does for a living, drive boats, he finally came back to the Gulf Coast and hooked up with Robin Young and Metamatrix and got his blood tested for Volatile Organic Compounds.

His test results show extremely high levels of hexane, number 3 methylpentane, isooctane, etc.

“All across the board,” he said.

One of the biggest problems Kelly sees is that while people and businesses along the coast can collect from the $20 billion government fund seized from BP if they can prove a loss of income, collecting for health problems is virtually impossible, he said.

“No one’s doing anything. Insurance doesn’t cover this,” Kelly said. “Everyone’s going to doctors with all these problems and they are just throwing antibiotics at them — and they are not working.”

Kelly recently started a detox program, including an intravenous treatment, but that itself has its side effects. When the chemicals are forced to the skin’s surface, the rash returns and starts to bleed, again.

Looking back on it now, he said while he knew there was a risk, he never expected this kind of problems.

“You know you are not supposed to touch the oil, they tell you that,” he said. “But the realities of what happened out there are different than what they tell you to do and not do. There’s a sense of urgency to get a job done so you just go do it.”

Now, he said, the first thing that needs to happen is for the sick to get adequate treatment.

“We need to get better, to heal,” he said.

Now, a year later, in his experience he says what he has found is that once you are exposed to the chemicals and have them in your system, “it makes you susceptible to everything down the road.”

Then the people who have been injured and can’t work need to be compensated financially.

Furthermore, he said, we still don’t know the full effects of oil mixed with Corexit.

“We’re just guinea pigs,” he said.

“Then we need to ban Corexit in this country. We need to stand unified on that,” he said. “We know from the Exxon Valdez what it did.”

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 28th, 2011 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Alabama's Gulf Coast, Big Oil, BP Oil Spill, Environment News, Glynn Wilson's Videos, Health News, LocustFork.Net, Science News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.