Thousands of people today are still feeling the effects of a job they received from British Petroleum (BP) four years ago to clean up oil and dispersant along coastal land from Florida to Louisiana. Allen Lindsay of Lindsay & Lindsay, P.A. said he has over 400 clients waiting to this day for compensation from the medical benefits class action settlement against BP, and granted final approval on January 11 last year.
Lindsay said cleanup workers suffered a variety of health effects including blindness, neuropathy, leukemia, dry-eye syndrome, and rash. He said BP didn’t warn the workers about the dangerous nature of the chemicals, including the dispersant Corexit, they handled. Lindsay said the dry tar balls had little to no effect, but workers needed to break up the larger mats of sludge. This process, he said, sent noxious gases into the air as workers handled the chemicals. “They didn’t know Corexit or crude oil could poison them.”
The other problem, Lindsay said, was workers may not have associated seemingly minor health problems with cleaning up the oil and so didn’t seek medical attention right away, or tried to fix their breathing, skin, and eye problems with over the counter solutions. This is a problem for receiving any benefits from the settlement because, Lindsay said, without earlier notice BP declared any claims with a diagnosis after April 16, 2012 would not qualify for Specified Physical Condition payments, the maximum being $60,700 for cleanup workers, and would have to file separately. “Thousands of people have been left out of the settlement because they were diagnosed too late,” he said. A memo to the court under Judge Barbier, who effectively upheld the April 16 deadline said, “Almost no class member will recover under Level B1 of the Specified Physical Conditions Matrix.”
Filing individually doesn’t mean claimants won’t see compensation for conditions they’ll be suffering possibly the rest of their lives. However, Lindsay said more lawsuits mean more time to handle them all.
“It’s all about dragging it out. Time is not on the side of the little man,” he said. On April 20, 2010 the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig led to the deaths of 11 workers on the rig and sparked one of the largest environmental disasters in an age. To handle the oil on the beaches, BP hired thousands of workers to clean up the oil by hand.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: BP cleanup workers still awaiting compensation