- Rashes.
- Skin lesions.
- Irritating eyes.
- Dizziness and vertigo.
- From Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida.
This spill covered 68,000 square miles.
There was actually a very sophisticated cover-up
of the health effects.
And they're using that lack of information
to now expand oil development to 95% of all U.S. waters.
- [Lucy] In 2010, a BP operated oil rig
exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 people
and spewing 795 million gallons of oil into the water.
During the clean up, the use of chemical dispersants
caused severe health consequences
that are still impacting people in the region.
This new documentary uncovers the health crisis it caused.
- [Man] When you live in a small community of 4,000 people,
and there's a funeral every weekend,
there's a problem.
- Hell no it's not okay down here.
I mean, you go to 22 funerals in 22 months.
All these little kids running around down here
that I know personally, with rashes
and upper respiratory problems
and one was just diagnosed with a blood disorder.
One little dude's still got bald spots all over his head.
We still got kids having nose bleeds on a regular basis.
Let me see your hand.
No it's not okay.
It's definitely not okay.
What baby?
- I wanted to play when I woke up but my nose was bleeding.
- I'm not an educated woman by any means.
If I can sit down and figure out, within a few weeks,
that there's gonna be medical repercussions,
you know, come on guys.
I know what I'm dealing with now.
See then I was very naive.
I thought oh we have representatives
that represent us and I can go to them
and they're gonna fix it,
bull shit.
(dramatic music)
- [Lucy] I sat down with the filmmaker and scientist
who revealed the extent of this health crisis
in the new documentary, The Cost of Silence,
which premiered at Sundance.
Describe what happens during the clean up
that would create health effects.
- So a spill this size,
they don't have the ability mechanically to clean it up.
There were stories of beaches
where they were just covering the oil with sand.
So they started spraying the oil with chemicals,
called dispersants, in massive volumes.
Ended up being almost two million gallons.
And we started getting calls about health
and they were across the region.
People with health effects, strange health effects,
rashes, irritating eyes, coughs that wouldn't go away.
- Across four states with people
all having the same symptoms.
I saw this progression from cold and flu-like symptoms
to wait, I've taken all these rounds of antibiotics,
my doctor says this or that, it's not going away.
Leading me to believe it was not biological causation,
it was chemical.
Now the medical doctors down there were anticipating
that they would see cancer clusters within 20 years.
Well the cancer clusters started within two.
The Coast Guard and the federal government
sprayed oil on oil, to basically get the oil off the surface
into the water column,
where it wouldn't be seen by the media.
That's a so-called cleanup these days.
Birds, let's talk about birds.
Well dispersants strip oil.
It's stripping the natural oils off of feathers.
It's stripping the natural oils off of everything.
- The real question that people
strangely weren't focusing on,
was what happens when you mix these two chemicals?
Now they're finding that the mixture of the chemicals
creates a substance that's up to 52 times more toxic
than the oil.
- [Lucy] A decade later, the oil spill
is still causing health and environmental concerns.
- The worst concerns I have about exposure down there now
are when the hurricanes come,
they stir up deeper into the water column
and they pull up everything that sort of got deposited
in the impacted zone, and that is still coming ashore.
When it gets stirred up
it also goes back up into the air again
so there's a lot of repeated exposures.
The problem with that is once your body
gets exposed to these chemicals,
your body recognizes when it's in a dangerous situation
so it learns, oh my god, this is really bad for me,
and so you overreact the next time that you're exposed.
- And this exact same chemical spill response plan
is the plan, pre approved.
- Right so it this was to happen again,
the same plan is ready to go?
- It's going to go, yeah.
With no public comment, no consultation, no notification.
So if you live in a coastal community
where there's off shore oil now, or in the future,
there's a spill, the planes will be flying
and they're not gonna ask you
and they're not gonna tell you.
They're not gonna need permission.
They're just gonna do it.
(somber music)