Oil boom sets off health fears
Arctic residents believe pollutants cause rise in respiratory illnesses
NUIQSUT, Alaska — The Arctic landscape is devoid of color during the frozen days of winter. There’s the white of the tundra, the white of sea ice and often the sky, and the darkness of cold, long nights.
So when a wall of coffeecolored smoke rolled toward the village of Nuiqsut in February, 2012, there was no mistaking that something was wrong.
Martha Itta, of the native Inupiaq village government, was at her desk when a colleague shouted “Check Facebook!” A worker on an oil well site 18 miles away, owned by the Spanish company Repsol, had posted a video.
“Rig’s having a blowout here. They’re evacuating the rig,” the worker said as drilling mud and smoke spewed into the air and onto the tundra. “Ain’t f—g looking so good.”
Itta scrambled, dialing any authority she could think of — the North Slope Bureau, the EPA — to ask if Nuiqsut should be evacuated.
“We weren’t getting any answers,” she said.
Nuiqsut’s air is monitored by ConocoPhillips Alaska, which owns major drilling sites on the outskirts of the village. But the monitor was down for routine maintenance at that time.
“Our community was pretty much in panic mode. We didn’t have any data — no air monitoring to show us what was out there in the air,” Itta said.
For many in Nuiqsut, a small, predominantly Native Alaskan village of single-family homes, government offices, a grocery store and a few schools for some 400 inhabitants, the Repsol blowout underscored a fundamental fear about life in the middle of an oil-drilling boom: Many residents say they got sick. And the explosion exposed a gap between their fear and the official response from state and oil-industry officials that there's no clear link between the growing number of wells and what residents say is a rise in respiratory illness.
Natalie Lowman, a spokeswoman for ConocoPhillips Alaska, says decades of the company’s air monitoring has shown “that the air quality of the North Slope (the northernmost municipality on the North American continent) ... is consistently better than national ambient air quality standards.”
Moreover, studies done by state and regional agencies, based largely on ConocoPhillips’ data, attribute respiratory health issues in the area to spikes in viruses, smoking, poor indoor ventilation and cars left idling for hours in freezing temperatures. Those reasons surely contribute, but Itta and other residents believe they are red herrings.
Itta wants a third party — someone without direct ties to the oil industry — to monitor the air in Nuiqsut. For the tribal administrator and mother of seven, it’s become personal.
A few months after the Repsol blowout, her 2-year-old son, Gerald, showed signs of respiratory distress. As his oxygen levels dropped, Itta rushed to get him more advanced medical care.
“He ended up having seizures and was on a ventilator,” she said.
Several times, she and Gerald flew from the gravel airstrip in Nuiqsut to Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow, Alaska). Once there, she recalled, his symptoms would clear up.
“He’d get really good,” Itta said. “They would send us back home, and then it would start all over again.”
Her doctor told her: “It’s something in the air he’s breathing.”
Itta isn’t just worried about oil explosions now. She fears every-day airborne pollutants from vast drilling operations that occasionally turns the sky a hazy green and leave black soot on snow. When that happens, noses run and asthma flares up, she and other villagers say.
Nuiqsut is a whaling community located in the midst of Alaska’s most prolific oil region along the state’s North Slope, a region poised for another drilling boom. Just 8 miles from town, more than 50,000 barrels of oil — roughly a tenth of the state’s oil production — is pumped daily from oil fields owned by ConocoPhillips. Repsol, Armstrong and Oil Search also have oil fields near Nuiqsut.
As the Trump administration clears the way for more Arctic drilling, major companies have made new discoveries of oil the state hopes will revitalize its struggling economy. Around Nuiqsut, three projects will come online, including one targeting an estimated 500 million to 3 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
Another oil boom worries residents, who say fossil fuel burning has already brought climate change to Nuiqsut’s doorstep.
Temperatures in the Arctic are rising twice as fast as the global average, changing the sea ice and impacting species that residents rely on for hunting. And it’s not just carbon dioxide. Emissions of short-lived climate pollutants, like black carbon, methane and ozone also exacerbate global warming.
The resulting tension, between oil development and local fears about public health, is similar to conflicts in pockets of the United States, from the Permian Basin in Texas to Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale. But here — 250 miles above the Arctic Circle, with no year-round road access— the situation is very different. Many basic services are hundreds of miles away, and more than three-quarters of residents still live off the fish they catch, the whales they harvest and the caribou they hunt.
Resident Rosemary Ahtuangaruak says numbers reveal the community’s health problems. As a health aid in Nuiqsut from 1986 to 2000, she saw the number of people treated for respiratory illness rise from one to 75 — an increase that far outpaced population growth — at the same time oil wells were established closer to the town’s inhabitants .
“One person would have trouble breathing, and another would be in before I had finished the first … Next thing you know it’s 7 a.m. and I haven’t gone home for the night,” she said.
To be sure, oil companies have made strides in decreasing emissions, but air pollution remains a byproduct of drilling.
Stacks that flare off gas like 24/7 pilot lights can emit volatile organic compounds. Larger flares spew black carbon, a short-lived pollutant. Methane can leak from equipment throughout the production process, and can cause headaches and dizziness, according to health researchers. Volatile organic compounds are linked to kidney and nervous system damage, respiratory problems and even some cancers.
How emissions and other pollutants interact in the Arctic’s extreme environment — and their precise impact on health — is only now beginning to be understood by scientists. There is “a huge gap of knowledge,” said atmospheric scientist Julia Schmale.
State officials acknowledge residents’ concerns, but when it comes to industrial pollutants and health, drawing connections between symptoms and causes is difficult.
Last summer, Barbara Trost, who manages air monitoring for the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, attended a public meeting and recalls being stunned by the fear being expressed.
“I get it,” she said.“I don’t think any one of us would want to live in an environment where we’re surrounded by industry.”
The financially strapped state can’t afford its own monitoring in Nuiqsut, Trost said, but she occasionally sees ConocoPhillips’ air monitoring data, showing pollutant levels of pollutants far below EPA standards. She knows the community doesn’t trust air monitoring by ConocoPhillips, but she says there is no reason to believe the data is inaccurate.
After the Repsol blowout, Sam Kunuknana said his thenwife and young daughter arrived home after a short walk from the town center. It was a cold, day — 33 below zero, with wind coming from the direction of the well, which still hadn’t been fully plugged. Both became sick, he said. His daughter’s temperature spiked, her ears hurt and she was in a lot of pain. The couple raced her to the local clinic and received a diagnosis of the flu or a cold.
ConocoPhillips’ monitor began taking continuous measurements after the blowout, following its scheduled maintenance. The pollutants monitored were at near-normal levels, the state reported.
Kunuknana said It took more than a month for his family to recover.
“To this day, I think my ex still has that cough,” he said.
He blames the blowout, and these days, he added, gas flaring and haze that settles over town some days makes it harder to breathe.
“When you talk about environmental justice, you talk about human rights, about future generations that will be dealing with industry as they move forward,” Kunaknana said recently at a forum where Nuiqsut’s concerns were discussed. “I don’t have a degree in anything, but I do understand what’s going on.”