"In the decade since the record-breaking use of oil dispersants in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill response, science shows they’re dangerous, potentially deadly, and rarely useful. A new court case is forcing the US EPA to reconsider their use."
"When most kids in Arabi, Louisiana, were spending their summer holidays sleeping in and playing baseball, George Barisich was working. Starting when he was 10 years old, Barisich was an apprentice aboard his dad’s fishing boat, a wooden trawler, launched the same year he was born. In his family, kids worked. “As long as you could swim,” Barisich laughs. “Those were the rules.” If you got seasick, like Barisich sometimes did, that was life as a fisher.
They would motor out a channel to bigger water and chase shrimp along the Gulf of Mexico coast to the border with Texas. He and his brother eventually took over running the boat. Like their dad, they shrimped from May until Christmas. They also started oyster farming in sheltered waters about a four-hour boat ride away. Now a slim 65, with sun-carved wrinkles and a neat salt-and-pepper mustache, he doesn’t get seasick anymore. But fishing hasn’t gotten any easier.
“My old man was rough, but I’m glad he was hard on us. Otherwise, I don’t think I would have survived everything I’ve survived,” Barisich says. Hurricanes, recessions, his boat catching fire. But none of these prepared him for a disastrous oil spill, nor the cleanup that followed.
On April 20, 2010, an explosion on BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform killed 11 people. When the platform sank, the wellhead pipe on the seafloor ruptured, leaking perhaps as much as 7.8 million liters of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the next three months. A massive oil slick fouled the coast from Texas to Florida, and particularly Louisiana’s. Barisich was forced to stop fishing and his health deteriorated."
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