Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Worker Has Worries For Gulf Coast Workers Health

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Anchorage, Alaska (CNN) -- Two decades ago, Roy Dalthorp helped clean up the rocky shores of Prince William Sound after the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground, producing what was then the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

Today, with that record surpassed by the 11-week-old disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, Dalthorp struggles to breathe. He coughs, and his failing eyes sometimes tear up uncontrollably.

Dalthorp told CNN that he was "slowly poisoned" during the Alaska cleanup effort -- and he says some of those now working to clean up the BP spill off Louisiana and neighboring states are risking the same fate.

BP says it is working with federal health and environmental regulators to make sure cleanup workers are protected from the hazards of the Gulf spill. But observers like Rikki Ott, an environmental activist who studied the Exxon Valdez spill, said cleanup workers in the Gulf are showing "the exact identical symptoms down here that we had 21 years ago."

Dalthorp says his troubles started when the then-out-of-work oil worker joined the Exxon Valdez cleanup effort. For six weeks, he lived and worked aboard a ship that ran boilers to heat sea water. The 120- to 140-degree water was used to blast crude off the shoreline, and it left plumes of oily-smelling steam in the surrounding air.

"I had no choices, because I was behind on my house payments, and no health insurance," he said.

Soon he began to cough. Teams from the Environmental Protection Agency were monitoring the cleanup, but "nobody ever checked with us," Dalthorp said.

Tanker owner Exxon paid to study the effects of the spill on nearly every creature that came into contact with the 11 million gallons that were dumped into Prince William Sound -- except people.

"Clams and mussels, to fish and otters, to ducks and eagles, and even deer and bears," said Anchorage lawyer Dennis Mestas, who represented another worker who was involved in the cleanup. "But they never studied what this oil was doing to the workers -- to the human beings in Prince William Sound."

Mestas warns history may be repeating itself thousands of miles away in the Gulf of Mexico, with evidence of workers getting sick, and their medical records being controlled by BP.