AFTER 18 ROUNDS OF chemotherapy, Samuel Castleberry is tired. If it were up to him, he’d still be working his trucking job. The 59-year-old was making a decent living and felt fit. But in June 2020, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which has spread to his liver. Now he gets out of breath wheeling his garbage can to the kerb at his home in Mobile, Alabama.
Floyd Ruffin, 58, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2015. Before his prostate was removed, he had dreams of having more kids.
Chemist Terry Odom, 53, lies awake at night at home in San Antonio, Texas. She worries that she also has cancer. She can’t figure out why her health is deteriorating and has emailed dozens of doctors and researchers looking for answers. “You feel like you might die before your time,” she said.
A single event unites the three of them. Thirteen years ago, they helped clean up BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the largest ever in US waters. They rushed toward the toxic oil to save the place they loved, joining forces with more than 33,000 others to clean up the coastline. Now they have active lawsuits against BP, saying the company made them sick.
Since the cleanup, thousands have experienced chronic respiratory issues, rashes and diarrhoea – a problem known among local residents as “BP syndrome” or “Gulf coast syndrome”. Others, like Castleberry and Ruffin, have developed cancer.
The valour displayed by cleanup workers was comparable to the heroism of first responders during the 9/11 terror attacks, who ran to the World Trade Center to save people and breathed in toxic dust and fumes, said the Alaska toxicologist Riki Ott, who became involved in advocating for oil spill cleanup workers after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. “What resident and professional oil spill responders do is exactly what professional firefighters and emergency responders everywhere do: put their lives on the line to protect ours,” she said.
But while those who responded to the deadliest single terror attack in American history have been rightly cemented into public
