[00:00:00] :  this. This this show is brought to you by safety FM. Warning. The following broadcast contains adult language, adult content, frank safety discussions and stories that might sound unbelievable. But believe me, every one of those stories is true. We didn't start the safety war, but we are going to fight to win it for our families, for our communities, for our workplaces and for our lives. The safety word starts now. Hi, this is jim proposal again. Your podcast host for safety wars. Something came across my desk yesterday. Me more accurate across my computer screen. This article comes from the National Institutes of Health. The title of the article is oil spill cleanup. Workers were likely to have Asthma's NIH study. This is the byline and NIH study finds chemicals from deep water horizon disaster associated with more squeeze. That's wh E E Z E Hold disclaimer here or I should say not a disclaimer, but I'm just letting you know, I was involved in the training of a lot of spill cleanup workers, roughly 10% of the population here. And my extended family was one of the companies we own. One of the companies that supply cleanup workers, roughly around 10% of them give or take That did this whole deepwater horizon cleanup back in 2010. I'm also part of, personally, I'm also part of the follow up golf study where they are polling workers who were there who were registered, uh, every year I get a call asking me how I'm doing health wise. And a lot of the questions that are asked are like, do I have healthcare? Uh, how's my general health, height, weight and all that stuff. It's all self reported here. I encourage anyone who was involved with the gulf oil spill cleanup to be part of the uh study because we don't know where this is going to go. One of our, one of the things that's going on here is that oil spill cleanup workers are more likely to have asthma these studies and everything else are coming out. So, let me just read from the study. I am going to go and have some comments on here because I think this is a huge externality here with a couple of things that no unintended consequences. Uh, as to how the job was managed by the state of florida here. Not so much BP, but uh, some of the other things that went on here. So researchers with long term follow up study, this is a direct well golf study found that workers involved in cleaning up the nation's largest oil spill where 60% more likely than those who did not work on the cleanup to be diagnosed with asthma were experienced asthma symptoms. 123 years after the spill. This ongoing study led by the NIH Yes, part of the National Institutes of Health is the largest study to look at the health of work of workers who responded to the 2000 and deep water rise in oil spill in the gulf of Mexico. This is the first study. This is a quote. This is the first study to ever look at specific chemicals from oil spills and link them to respiratory diseases. Said Dale Sandler PhD, chief of the N. E. I. H. S. Epidemiology branch and lead researcher for the gulf study. If you are an oil spill cleanup worker in the gulf experience and reason or other asthma like symptoms would be good to let your health care provider know. You worked on the oil spill. Researchers analyzed data from 19,000 plus oil spill response to cleanup workers and another 5500 plus people who had completely required safety training but did not work on Latino. I was in the latter part of this. None of the park incidents had been diagnosed with asthma before the spill. The non workers were considered an unexploded comparison. That was big. The researchers estimated worker exposures to specific oil spill chemicals. They then looked at the relationship between the doctor diagnosed asthma or asthma related symptoms, the types of jobs the cleanup workers held in the resulting exposure through total hydrocarbons. Researchers also assessed associations of outcomes for the subgroup of chemicals in crude oil, including benzene, xylene, ethyl benzene and xylene for those in the industry that's V. Techs and and head right and all these chemicals and vertex H. Right. These chemicals are classified as hazardous air pollutants according to the U. S. Clean air Act and are linked to other health effects in the gulf study. Researchers found that the relative risk for asthma symptoms increased with increasing levels of exposure to individual tax chemicals as well as tax H mixture. The more worker was exposed to these crude oil chemicals including total hydrocarbons. The individual be tax age chemicals and mixture. The more likely they were to have as well symptoms, said Kaitlin. Lawrence PhD, a staff scientist and the N. I. E. H. S. Seven female branch and lead author of the study, published in Environmental International. She noted that social levels vary depending on the person's cleanup jobs and how long they worked jobs starting from administrative support and environmental water sampling to mopping up crude oil from aboard a sea vessel or shore line vessel to decontaminating equipment of our long wildlife. The paper reports that 983 that's 5% of the cleanup workers reported asthma and asthma symptoms, while only 196, meaning about 3% non workers reported the asthma outcome. Workers that were involved in operating, maintaining or refueling. The heavy cleanup equipment had the highest incidence of asthma. For this study. Asthma is defined as reporting a doctor's diagnosis of asthma or for non never smokers. Self reporting reason or whistling in the chest all for most of the time because the gulf oil, the gulf study population, socio economically vulnerable but less than half reporting access to medical care. We included non doctor confirmed asthma cases to minimize any under reporting of true asthma cases in the population that will be missed due to the lack of access to health care. And it goes on and on and on. And there's those are one of those. So some of my thoughts with the Gulf oil study, it was one of the spill happened about a week later. I get a phone call from a family members saying, Hey, Jimmy, I need you down here to get 40 hour hey swap for training. And he said, I want legitimate training for the people down here. And I saw how many he said a lot. So my brother john God rest his soul. And I jumped in my ford expedition loaded up with training materials and a 700 watt P A system down. And we've got a church in uh Panama city to actually host a seminar. We literally trained my company that I was working for. Then my own partial owner with, we literally trained about 4000 people, 5000 people. So a lot of people here and I got enrolled in the study as one of the control group that was trained but never actually did work. I think I did maybe three days worth of work on the spill was mostly administrative and safety audits and that sort of thing. Now you can say, well, Jim, what do you have to comment on here? I wanted to comment on the last paragraph here is because about a lot of the folks being socio economically vulnerable with less than half reporting access to medical care. Now during the beginning of the clean up, there were, and this is the inside story and I think uh this is some of the stuff that goes into and doesn't go into at the beginning of the spill. We were sent down professional responders. A lot of these are eight hour refreshers in our house offer refreshers and professional responders that were able to produce a legitimate 40 hours certificate and then go and uh what the and then it couldn't meet in an eight hour refresher. We didn't get our refresher. We went through all of this for many days. My brother and I was constantly going and training and what ended up happening was about, oh I have to say, I don't know how long a week, I'm sorry. A month into this, Someone had said, look, we have a lot of folks on in florida that don't have jobs you're bringing in outsiders to do these jobs and therefore we have to use florida work and what did they use, I forget what it was called, but it's along the lines of a workfare. Workfare, not welfare to work sort of thing or we're gonna bring in a lot of these folks what ended up happening, we ended up having to the people who are coming in. A lot of them uneducated. A lot of, I do not even a high school diploma. You haven't seen that with all different sorts, very disadvantaged folks and the french in one sense, we're going to get up to work in the professional safety, community communication and planning are just a few keys to your program success. The question many practitioners have is where do I start dr J Allen, the creator of the Safety FM platform and host of the rated R safety show has built a global foundation to help you along the away go to safety FM dot com and listen to some of the industry's best and most involved professionals including Blaine Hoffman with the safety pro sam Goodman with the hop nerd. Sheldon Primus with the safety consultant jim proposal with safety Wars, Emily, L Rod with unapologetically bold and many others as individuals, we can do great things. But as a team, we become amazing, dial into safety FM dot com today and surround yourself with a powerful force of knowledge and support we go through and the guys show up, okay, Mr Bozell were from blah blah blah agency, blah blah blah company. And what we're gonna do is we want to know if you're actually doing a safety training because we're getting a lot of people cheating on here. And if you remember the context of this, this was when the uh Ocean training providers, which outreach training providers were getting caught in new york one in particular giving out fake training cards and then they changed the whole thing, the whole the criteria for training the way you did training and everything else. And what they ended up doing was having us uh the gulf oil spill between that and the gulf oil spill, all the falsification training, there was a huge crackdown on training. So the people show up and they said, well, mr puzzle, how do we know you're doing training? I said, well look, you're welcome to sit in for as long as you folks like the training. And I said, I have two trainers for me and my brother john, and we're doing most of the work for extended family and such and such a company and we go and do the training? They said, well, what proof do you have, do you do the training? I said, well, here are the sign in sheets. Right? Real good sign in sheets. Here are the uh quizzes that we had throughout the project throughout the training class. And I said, we have the final exams, we have a field exercise, uh we have to do everything, we're supposed to, we limit the class to about 40 people, which is in accordance to what the OSHA guidelines for outreach training, but I have two trainers here and they said, okay, what else? They said, look, we have a lot of folks out here that have all this stuff, How do we know you're doing? And I said, well you see that plant back there in the back of the classroom, they said, yeah, I see that we're in a church during the training. I see right behind the cross there, you got you said yeah, so what do you think those are? They said we see a video camera and said, yeah, every one of these classes is videotaped, video recorded. Really, really yeah, they're all videotaped and video recorded ended up, they said, okay, thank you very much, Mr poza, we really appreciate it. They sat in with me for four or five hours, then they said, well, can we address your class? And I said, you know, absolutely, and he said, you know, we had some questions for you also. So the guy did something a little bit ballsy, you see, I since I'm training in a church, right? I, you know, I try to mind my manners. Of course, no dirty language, though, nothing like that. But one of the subtle things that even the minister commented on was this, he said, how come you're not teaching from the pulpit, we got a nice pulpit and you're bringing your old sound system, why aren't you at the pulpit preaching? I said, well look, it's improper for me, a layperson at election erI and I'll use your election erI to go up to the pulpit and start speaking like I'm speaking from God, all right, it's just not proper to do this. I said to the guy, I, you know, it's just not right. All right, that I'm speaking from the pulpit with a safety training. I said, I'm not God, I'm not a minister. I'm not nothing like that. I'll do it from election area from before. Like I normally do, he says, you know, you have some humility. It's like a good thing. You know, we don't see that all the time. We've got people coming here, they think they can take over the place. So sure. So the auditors went right up for that whole bit and they started to go and they started to tell people about this and about this and about this very, you know, it was one of those things I said, you know what I'll call the guy jerry. I said jerry. I had a couple of questions here for you. I said, what kind of air monitoring are you doing out there? Well, we got some air monitoring people. I said, are the results available? Okay. I didn't get that. Oh, okay. I said, okay, well, what about this? What about I started asking some pointed questions before, you know it? The show was over boys. They left there. They couldn't get out of their freaking quick enough. And uh, what did it end up doing here? A lot of the folks at the end of the job, a lot of them made career changes. Uh, a handful. Really? As a shame. Out of thousands of people, we uh only a handful actually made the careers, they straighten out whatever problems they had in their life, whatever they were doing on public assistance and things of that nature. A lot of them, we saw a lot of people get off drugs because they had drug testing here. They had all different types of stuff going on. And what ended up happening was a lot of these folks never really went up and straighten themselves out for lack of a better whenever we're able to get out of their situation, some of them might have been just, you have addiction issues, you might have had situations that are really impossible to get out of. But I like this article says socio economically vulnerable. That's their words, not mine. A lot of these folks are social and economically vulnerable. So the state of florida, there's the externality here forced the companies that were involved in the cleanup to take people who were had situations, they ended up going working the job for eight or nine months collecting unemployment because you need it. I believe three quarters or four quarters, something like that, of work 26 weeks. It's delicious. Two quarters. I'm not sure what the laws are in florida at the time. And then no follow up not being able to do this. Say you chose to use a socioeconomic group of people to do the cleanups. And now that socio economic, vulnerable group of people now have problems, right? They have this. There are other problems too that will probably come up in the long term study here with this. So what's my point here? Maybe? No, this is where this was might not have been a good policy in hindsight and immediate to try to get people off welfare and workfare, whatever Republican and public assistance try to get them in here. Were we really doing them a favor if they're now going to be forced to have basically have these long term health impacts, Someone has to pay for that for their care, their treatment and everything else. It's almost like you're trading one problem for another problem. Maybe we should look at the next thing. God forbid something like this happens. Maybe this might not be the most optimum population that we have here to use and to force people to use to do this might not. I always argue for the professional responders. The other thing is this the 40 hour training that we had to give because these were again, a lot of people literacy issues massive literacy issues, massive everything, but they have to get 40 hour trained and were forced to use that. So we had to significantly change our training, we significantly had to train to their level. A lot of the stuff that we were training on was like stem or steam depending on what part of the country you're from. Science, technology, engineering and math type things. So now we have to teach basic scientific concepts through a lot of these folks stuff. All the lines of here's a bottle of water and here's some oil you put the oil in the water and the oil floats. If you write. And to this level we have to explain to them toxicology and this is where this comes up with with the what they called the taxation benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, xylene and um hexane compound here. Alright. You're all of these things right? And they should have known this was going to comment on this probably on september 12th. Is they all have the same target organs? Alright. And they're basically the P. E. L. S. For each one of these are the exposure limits for all these has got to be lower significantly lower because you have the same target organs for this. So they should they should have known this now. What my question is, where did all of this up? No at the time the air monitoring folks, people doing the air monitoring, were they forcing them to do? They have engineering controls so they forced them to wear respirators. Because I could tell you a lot of the contractors out there were not wearing respirators and any of this stuff from what I observed they were picking because one exposure limits were low obviously for a lot of this stuff. If we have this many people with asthma maybe exposure limits are wrong maybe. So that had to be changed differently on how we manage this stuff. That's all I'm saying with this. So these are good studies long term. But here I wanted to give you some of the inside story, at least as far as I know from training end and the work practice. And and I have to question whether or not I still question were this, were these the right people for the job for this? We knew that a lot of them, once the job was over, they disappear for lack of a better word back into what they were doing, A lot of them, a handful ended up improving themselves, getting off of public assistance and everything else from the legal, I observed, and I don't know, I don't really know uh, what to say here other than forcing people into a situation may not be the best thing, especially people who may not be able to take care of themselves later on. May not follow up with doctors and things of that nature. Uh About one or two reports come out from the study every year. I'll give you updates as appropriate. But what I'm gonna say is this the next time this comes up, which these are some of the questions we need to ask. So in summary one, who are we gonna get to do the cleanups? Are they gonna be professional cleanup people? Where are we just going to force companies to hire people that may or may not be qualified. Uh, Second thing is this long term epidemiological studies now that we have the gulf oil spill as a model on how maybe not to manage some of these respiratory hazards. Maybe this is gonna be approach that differently approached differently approached better with some scientific basis and everything else. I think this was a learning opportunity too bad. The learning opportunity had to come at the expense of these workers. We can't let that happen again. That's not moral or ethical, may not even be legal. The other thing is, this was the september 11th situation for the collapse of the Twin Towers, which I observed from my rooftop in Hoboken New Jersey. There, uh, the managers there were told specifically by at least four or five people who I know that the air was no damn good. Everyone should be in respirators and the whole nine yards. Um, and some decisions were made or even ignore them basically. So here's the issue here we have against, I'm gonna say this is controversial. Sovereign immunity is an ongoing issue. Who's responsible for this? Who's responsible for making these decisions? Whose are we being held accountable? If possible? I don't think that any of the hearings or any investigations actually caused any of these questions to be answered. One thing that did come out of some of this. Associate September 11 was the community emergency response team better training for workers. But let's face it. People get emotional untrained first responders. Second responders, stuff happens where they things don't get enforced. They don't have a capability to actually respond to things for the proper PVV or anything else. It's not like you're working in at a construction job or general industry job or something like that. We're able to decide in the work area in a disaster. You have, what you have, what we need is maybe better planning and shows like ours for safety wars. This is Jim puzzle is your safety training old stale and Hackney is your safety trainer. Still preaching a warped version of behavior based safety. How about safety training that actually addresses your hazards in your workplace is and it's not standardized bologna from 25 years ago. Contact the safety ward's team at safety words dot com or call Jim postal at 845269577. To remember if you're receiving this message, you are the solution to unsafe workplaces. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the host and its guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. Examples of analysis discussed within this podcast are only examples. It should not be utilized in the real world as the only solution available as they are based only on very limited and dated open source information, assumptions made within this analysis are not reflective of the position of the company. 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