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The Exxon and BP oil spills: a comparison of psychosocial impacts

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Abstract

We address the research question: ‘Did the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill have similar psychosocial impacts as the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill?’ We answer this question by comparing survey results from a random sample of Cordova, Alaska, residents collected 18 months after the Exxon spill with a random sample of residents in the Alabama coastal counties of Baldwin and south Mobile 1 year after the BP disaster. Analysis revealed similarly high levels of psychological stress for survivors of both disasters. For residents of coastal Alabama, the strongest predictors of psychosocial stress were exposure to oil, ties to renewable resources, concerns about their economic future, worries about air quality, and safety issues regarding seafood harvests in oiled areas. Differences between south Mobile and Baldwin counties were related to the former community’s economic ties to renewable resources and Baldwin County’s dependence on tourism for economic sustainability.

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Notes

  1. The BP oil spill adversely affected counties and parishes throughout the Gulf coast. Our selection of Alabama coastal counties was guided by two factors. First, Louisiana communities with ties to shrimping and other renewable resources also have economic ties to the oil industry and were affected by the moratorium on off-shore drilling, which made comparisons with Cordova problematic. Given that the spill affected fishing and tourism industries along the Northern Gulf of Mexico, Alabama provided an ideal opportunity to examine these differences. Second, we were aware that research teams from various universities were documenting impacts in other coastal communities (e.g., LSU, UNO, MSU, and UF) and we avoided them to reduce assessment fatigue among the residents (see, IASC 2012).

  2. See for example, Baum et al (1992), Couch and Kroll-Smith (1985), Cuthbertson and Nigg (1987, 1991), Edelstein (1988, 2000), Erikson (1976, 1994), Freudenburg (1984,1997, 2000), Freudenburg and Gramling (1992), Freudenburg and Jones (1991), Gill (2007a), Kroll-Smith and Couch (1990, 1993a, b), Picou et al. (1997), Ritchie and Gill (2007), Vyner (1988).

  3. Dauphin Island is located in south Mobile County, and this community also resembles a beach economy. The small portion of the 2010 sample from Dauphin Island did not allow a reliable test to determine if it significantly differed from the rest of the county sample.

  4. No such increase was reported in regions that did not experience the oil spill.

  5. The refusal rate was 61 %.

  6. For south Mobile County, the population data for Bayou La Batre was used rather than all of Mobile County. The majority of south Mobile County falls within Bayou La Batre; therefore, it is a better representation of the overall population.

  7. (1) I thought about it when I did not mean to; (2) Pictures about it popped into my mind; (3) Other things kept making me have thoughts about it; (4) I had to stop myself from getting upset when I thought about it; (5) I tried to remove it from my memory; (6) I had trouble falling asleep or staying; (7) I had waves of strong feelings about it; (8) My feelings about it were kind of numb; (9) I had a lot of feelings about it that I didn't know how to deal with; (10) I had dreams about it; (11) I stayed away from reminders of it; (12) I felt as if it had not really happened; (13) I tried not to talk about it; (14) I tried not to think about it; and (15) Reminders of it brought back feelings I first felt about it. Intrusion combines items 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, and 15. Avoidance combines items 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, and 14.

  8. Ken Feinberg was the government-appointed administrator of the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster Victim Compensation Fund through the Gulf Coast Claims Facility.

  9. Note that our data were collected before the successful 2011 tourism season.

  10. All models were tested for multicollinearity, and no problems were detected. All VIF values were under 2.2.

  11. A few of the recreancy variables (trust in Ken Feinberg in two models, trust in the Federal Government in one model, and trust in the Alabama government in all models) have significant positive relationships with the dependent variables, contradicting the hypothesized direction of the relationship. To further unpack this relationship, we calculated interaction terms for all the recreancy variables with the county of residence variable, because there is reason to believe that trust in institutions may vary by county (and in all models people in south Mobile Country score significantly higher on the stress scales, when controlling for the other predictors). When the interaction terms were entered into the equations reported in Table 6, the significant positive effects of Ken Feinberg and the Alabama government disappear. However, we found a significant difference between south Mobile County and Baldwin counties in trust of the federal government. The coefficient for Baldwin was positive while it was negative for south Mobile County indicating that residents of south Mobile County who had trust in the federal government reported being less stressed. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to explicate how and why the differences between counties operate, we recognize this is an important finding and recommend further research addressing these issues.

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  1. Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA

    Duane A. Gill, Liesel A. Ritchie, J. Steven Picou, Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling, Michael A. Long & Jessica W. Shenesey

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  1. Duane A. Gill
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  2. Liesel A. Ritchie
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  3. J. Steven Picou
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  4. Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling
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  5. Michael A. Long
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Correspondence to Duane A. Gill.

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Gill, D.A., Ritchie, L.A., Picou, J.S. et al. The Exxon and BP oil spills: a comparison of psychosocial impacts. Nat Hazards 74, 1911–1932 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-014-1280-7

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