IL: People in the Gulf of Mexico were not warned that the air was going to be bad and they had clean air in much of the area right before the spill. It is a very different kind of situation than people who chose to go and try to make money in Mexico City. A lot of people in the Gulf live there because they enjoy the Gulf and they didn't want to move Los Angeles or New York City or the big American polluted environments -- they chose to stay where the environment is pretty clean.

In terms of the health implications for coastal communities I think there are two things. I have classified there being three different approaches by which atmospheric phenomenon related to the oil spill can cause health effects. One is the volatiles just breathing the stuff a long way from the incident site. A second one is aerosol, so when oil comes up on the beaches as the wave breaks there is aerosol generated in the air, and that can be breathed by people. The last one which we discovered is the rain. I will add a fourth one which is dispersants. Clearly, spraying dispersants near populated areas is a bad idea. If dispersants are aerosolized that is a bad thing as well. I do not have data on the dispersants so I will speak to what I do know. With regards to the volatiles there are two things the main thing is that volatiles can go a long way on the wind. I did some simple calculations of quantities and exposures in coastal communities. What I saw according to OSHA rules absolutely no problem. If one assumes the volatiles can be health effect modeled as gasoline exposure there is a potential - the dosage rates were high enough for there to be problems. When I did it for healthy adults it seemed worth looking at, but who knows. The big worry is pregnant women and the elderly -- at risk populations. In that regard, at-risk populations, the levels seem to suggest there could be really severe concern for the health-related impacts. What that implies is that it really needs to be studied and looked at. The [published] literature is for people exposed long term to gasoline.

The other way is the aerosols. The aerosolization are really tiny droplets smaller than a hair but still pretty large, and they can not stay airborne for very long before they will fall back down to the ground. Maybe a couple of miles inshore. So you would expect people right near the beach would be at risk from aerosol related problems. But once you got 5 to 10 miles onshore it would go back to people just breathing and smelling fumes rather than the aerosol component. Aerosols and their effects are a little uncertain, exactly what it is going to do. We know that aerosolization in past spills always cause a lot of people to get sick. In this spill, probably the same. They are droplets that are large enough that if they get into your lungs your body can potentially remove them, or maybe not because they are tar so it may get stuck in there. I do not know of literature in detail on this in the U.S., there may be overseas. If you breathe in aerosols of oil do you cough them out and get rid of them within a month or do they stay in your body for years? That is a very important distinction.

What you would expect to see is that people within close proximity to the beach -- with a mile or two -- would have symptoms different from people ten miles from the beach. And when I say beach it is also shoreline.

The last one is the rain. That is a completely new phenomenon that has not been reported. People at California Oil Spill who have done testing on burning have never seen anything like that. But you don't have 102% humidity in California. There is no precedent in past oil spills to consider to know that this is a problem and what its effects are.