The Safety of Responders

The National Contingency Plan overlooks the need to respond to widespread concerns about human health impacts. For smaller oil spills, the response effort is generally carried out by trained oil spill response technicians, but given the scale of the response to the Deepwater Horizon spill and the need to enlist thousands of previously untrained individuals to clean the waters and coastline, many response workers were not screened for pre-existing conditions. This lack of basic medical information, which could have been collected if a short medical questionnaire had been distributed, limits the ability to draw accurate conclusions regarding long-term physical health impacts.

The long-term health impacts of oil spills remain largely uncertain, but research conducted in the wake of other disasters provides some insight. A survey conducted one year after Exxon Valdez found that cleanup workers classified as being subjected to "high exposure" were 3.6 times as likely to have a generalized anxiety disorder and 2.9 times as likely to have post-traumatic stress disorder as members of an unexposed group.