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Fire on the Water

December 26, 2017

Natural gas piped up from a severed wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico is flared off by a ship during the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. Responders had to don respirators or stop working entirely at times because of unhealthy air quality. New research has found that large amounts of chemical dispersants injected above the crippled oil well may have diminished health risks for emergency responders working at the site. The study found reduced the amounts of harmful gases in the air at the sea surface, including a decrease by about 6,000 times in the atmospheric concentration of benzene, which may have enabled crews to keep working and clean the spill sooner. (Photo by Dan Torres, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)