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Estimates of Inhalation Exposures to Oil-Related Components on the Supporting Vessels During the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Estimates of Inhalation Exposures to Oil-Related Components on the Supporting Vessels During the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Tran B. Huynh, Caroline P. Groth, Gurumurthy Ramachandran, Sudipto Banerjee, Mark Stenzel, Aaron Blair, Dale P. Sandler, Lawrence S. Engel, Richard K. Kwok and Patricia A. Stewart
Annals of work exposures and health, v 66(Suppl 1), pp i111-i123
01 Apr 2021
PMID: 33791771
url
https://academic.oup.com/annweh/article-pdf/66/Supplement_1/i111/43904921/wxaa113.pdfView
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open
url
https://doi.org/10.1093/annweh/wxaa113View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

Life Sciences & Biomedicine Public, Environmental & Occupational Health Science & Technology
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill response and clean-up (OSRC) involved over 9000 large and small vessels deployed in waters of the Gulf of Mexico across four states (Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi). For the GuLF STUDY, we developed exposure estimates of oil-related components for many work groups to capture a wide range of OSRC operations on these vessels, such as supporting the four rig vessels charged with stopping the spill at the wellhead; skimming oil; in situ burning of oil; absorbing and containing oil by boom; and environmental monitoring. Work groups were developed by: (i) vessel activity; (ii) location (area of the Gulf or state); and (iii) time period. Using Bayesian methods, we computed exposure estimates for these groups for: total hydrocarbons measured as total petroleum hydrocarbons (THC), benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, and n-hexane (BTEX-H). Estimates of the arithmetic means for THC ranged from 0.10 ppm [95% credible interval (CI) 0.04, 0.38 ppm] in time periods 2 and 3 (16 July-30 September 2010) to 15.06 ppm (95% CI 10.74, 22.41 ppm) in time period 1a (22 April-15 May 2010). BTEX-H estimates were substantially lower (in the parts per billion range). Exposure levels generally fell over time and differed statistically by activity, location, and time for some groups. These exposure estimates have been used to develop job-exposure matrices for the GuLF STUDY.

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Domestic collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Public, Environmental & Occupational Health
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