Earlier this month, Rep. Carolyn Maloney – one of the members of Congress who fought to protect 9/11 cleanup workers, and who is continuing that advocacy for workers cleaning up BP’s oil disaster – called on OSHA to explain how it would enforce the government’s respirator guidelines. Maloney also pressed the agency in charge of worker health and safety for more details on how it’s protecting workers in the Gulf.

Elana Schor, who’s been doing yeoman’s work on reporting about data in the BP oil disaster, published a new piece with Greenwire and the New York Times in which she reveals that OSHA and NIOSH have access to worker health data from BP and its coverup firm, CTEH, but are so far refusing to release the data.

“BP has either been blocking blood panels or they have been taking blood panels and not letting really anyone see what the blood panel works look like.”

— Riki Ott the marine biologist and author of Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill on Virtually Speaking July 8, 2010.

Yesterday I went to GRITtv and spoke with host Laura Flanders and Louisiana author Jordan Flahrety about BP’s exploitation of working people in the Gulf Coast. We discussed just a few of the many problems facing fishermen, recovery workers, and residents of the Gulf that are all at the mercy of BP.

CTEH is the company contracted by BP to monitor air levels as they related to recovery worker safety in the Gulf of Mexico. The firm, which has a sordid history of covering up corporate environmental disasters, just released new data with BP yesterday that shows disturbing levels of toxic dispersants in 20% of offshore recovery workers and 15% of near-shore workers. But these just aren’t any toxic dispersants. It’s the same chemical blamed for chronic health problems in Exxon Valdez recovery workers that is now poisoning at least one-fifth of BP’s offshore recovery workers.

Hundreds of workers in the Gulf Coast cleaning up BP’s oil disaster have reported symptoms of nausea, vomiting, nose bleeds, and headaches, but those “almost all have been heat related,” according to Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA Jordan Barab.

Barab – a former worker health and safety blogger at Firedoglake and his blog, Confined Space – says that despite widespread assumptions that workers are sick from exposure to oil, “we haven’t really found that yet.”

The government command for the BP oil disaster announced last night its “interim guidance” for recovery worker health and safety, including the (limited) use of respirators. The report was actually released by OSHA and NIOSH, the CDC’s workplace safety group, almost one week ago.
These recommendations come after more than 28,000 people signed Firedoglake’s petition to BP & OSHA demanding workers have access to respirators.

A fisherman’s wife sees behind the scene’s PR tricks of BP. CNN could have revealed these same tricks to viewers, but fish don’t discover water. They are oblivious to the standard deception that an “uneducated housewife” reveals. The media need stories like this because they don’t see their job as pressing the corporations. However they will reporting on other people pressing the corporations.

Who is allowing BP to just burn oil at the surface of the water? You guessed it, the Minerals Management Service, which authorized burning up to 12,000 barrels.

Despite clear evidence of illness from exposure to oil and dispersants, BP refuses to provide respirators to people cleaning up its disaster. Why? Because BP is afraid of the PR impact from images of people wearing this critical safety equipment in pictures and on TV. BP even threatened to fire workers who choose to wear their own. Firedoglake is joining with workers’ rights advocacy group American Rights at Work to petition BP – and government agencies like OSHA and the Department of Labor – to make BP provide respirators to protect cleanup workers in the Gulf of Mexico.