89 bioremediation
by Riki Ott, PhD - Copyright 2005. (Dragonfly Sisters Press 2005)
The Valdez Crud
p 108-109 August 1989 p 110 - 111 ... He said, "There was definitely a fine mist associated with our spray operations.
It was so fine that it just floated in the air. We wore a down turned face shield, a respirator, a helmet, Tyvek suits, rubber gloves and rubber boots with Duct tape around the cuffs. The face shields didn't really protect you from getting the mist around your eyes & upper cheekbones and between your nose and mouth. There was no seal."
In between shifts, Lange was sent to get his blood drawn at VECO clinics.
He recalled, "The doctors used a very large, shafted needle because they didn't want to damage the blood cells. They were using smaller needles at first, but those must have been damaging the cells. I've never seen a needle that big in me before or since." Once when his blood was drawn, his vein exploded and blood splattered everywhere. The memory of those big needles haunts him and he still can't give blood without almost passing out. He worked through August, 1990. It was his last summer on Exxon's cleanup
Lingering Symptoms (1990- 2003)
In fall 1989 Lange started having trouble thinking. He described it as 'feeling kind of clouded'
p 102-103
Chapter 6. A collection of Stories - Inipol p 97
Don Moeller & his Crew
Acute Exposure (1989): Task Force I p 101
Another one of the several hundred people on Task Force 1, Evan Lange (2001), a bright observant Alaska high school graduate, who commented on the daily routine. " I don't think the average person realizes what it was like out there. If your hands got oiled in the morning, you had to live with that until you returned to your decontamination barge that evening. So everything you did on the beaches - going to the bathroom, eating lunch, taking a break - you had to do with oiled hands. It's almost unreasonable to think that somebody working in those conditions could keep from being contaminated - could keep the oil off their skin, off their faces, out of their eyes. I'm sure people did everything they could to keep the oil away from their food, but we sat right their on the oily rocks to eat our lunch. The oil was definitely a source of contamination even for people who did everything right in terms of taking precautions to prevent from becoming oiled."
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p 464-465:"Evan Lang" (alias) lives with his family in Fairbanks, Alaska
He is a mechanical engineer who enjoys building houses, flying,
and hunting. His health is stable; however, he is still slightly anemic with low hemoglobin and red and white blood cell levels. He intends to someday revisit many of the cleanup sites in Prince William Sound with his family; and he believes he will find evidence of the spill to show them.
Evan, have you continued under a doctor's care?
These are charts I worked up for you before:
How is your health now?
I didn't realize you had low white blood cell counts
How are the platelets?
Depression?
Sorry you have had to deal with this all these years
... what a frightening situation...when you're young you think you can trust your employer and the money looks good not to mention you never think anything bad is going to happen to you"
