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Negative Human Impacts From Oil Spills

Media coverage of oil spills tends to focus on marine wildlife and natural pollution. As heavy and important as the toll oil spills take on ocean and coastal ecosystems is, however, the human dimension of such tragedies often receives inadequate attention. For the human inhabitants of coastal areas, oil spills can be just as traumatic as for the wildlife.

  1. Human Health: Indirect Exposure

    • Even long after an oil spill, many human residents of an area can suffer from indirect exposure to oil contaminants. Many of the dangerous compounds in oil have a tendency to bio-accumulate, meaning that most animals cannot break them down or excrete them and, instead, the chemicals build up in their bodies over time. Thus, these dangerous chemicals tend to persist in an environment, either in the waters or in sea and coastal animals like fish that are consumed by humans. Even low-level, indirect exposure to petroleum chemicals can cause headaches, rashes, nausea and light respiratory symptoms.

    Human Health: Direct Exposure

    • Direct exposure to petroleum chemicals can be extremely hazardous to human health. Moreover, patients do not need to directly touch the petroleum contaminants in order to suffer prolonged, direct exposure, as many of the hazardous compounds in oil vaporize into gasses in the sun and quickly disperse through the air to contaminate soil, plants, water and even directly enter human respiratory tracts. Oil contains benzene, arsenic and other heavy metals, all of which can be highly carcinogenic under prolonged exposure conditions.

    Socio-Economic Impacts: Communities

    • Disasters like oil spills tend to have an extremely negative impact on property values and general living conditions in an affected area. As property values fall, home and business owners are less likely to invest in improvements and the local tax base falls, provoking general deterioration in local living conditions. The quantity and quality of public spaces can also be adversely affected as environmental pollutants and the long-term results of the spill reduce the usability and amount of space available to the public.

    Socio-Economic Impacts: Jobs

    • Industries like tourism and fishing are seldom able to fully recover from the effects of a large oil spill. Oil spills can even have permanent effects on the environmental quality -- and market value -- of coastal and marine goods. Fishing bans after the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, for instance, not only completely stopped certain kinds of economic activities in affected areas for several months, but lead to long-term losses in capital investments in unused equipment and reductions in yields of certain kinds of fish. These economic contractions, of course, all represent losses of income and jobs in affected areas.

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