exxon valdez spill 21 years ago. with this bp spill, she says, once again, out-of-work fishermen are lining up for cleanup jobs that she says will put them in harm s way. i feel like bp is forcing them into this situation where bp holds all the cards and bp is letting these workers get sick. back in alaska, roy dalthorp s coughing had ans never stopped, he now has skin rashes. his health is literally crumbling. i m going blind. you think you were poisoned out there? yes. yes. silently poisoned. and that s what s happening to those people down in the gulf. drew is joining us now. drew, health officials are monitoring cleanup workers here in the gulf.
ship where he worked 16-hour days and that is when the cough began. nobody ever checked with us, nobody. they never did a follow up on us, never asked if we ever had any consequences of it. they could have cared less. i m serious. there was no follow up. exxon told us it doesn t know how many cleanup workers became sick. dalthorp never filed a lawsuit or a claim. he could never prove the work he did on the valdez made him sick. exxon did pay to study the health effects of almost every single creature that came in contact with oil in prince william sound. every creature, but one. from clams and mussels to fish and otters and even deer and bears, but they never studied what this oil was doing to the workers, to the human beings in prince william sound.
reporter: silently poisoned. and that s what s happening to those people in the gulf. now, john and kate, bp and the federal officials insist that is not going to happen down in the gulf. that they are monitoring the air there. but a congressional committee is now getting involved in this. the house energy and commerce committee which has been holding hearings on bp now has sent a letter to exxonmobil, asking exxonmobil to dig boo its files from 1989 and fork over any health records it has on the cleanup workers and how they may have been exposed to dangerous chemicals or if indeed all of these workers did get sick back in the exxon valdez trying to learn from past mistakes. in the current oil leak, federal officials are monitoring for any signs of illness. but did no one monitor what was going on with the workers during the valdez clean up?
refusing to do that. the next day, they began to turn overall of this information and there was, as a result, an increase in the transparency. but i think we re going to have to monitor this situation on an ongoing basis because nobody knows better than you, there are physical harms here, but there are also mental health consequences to this event because people s lives are being affected in a way that could change the whole course of family s histories. it really is remarkable. being down here, congressman, for the reasons you just mentioned. that s exactly what we ll be talking about today, the physical and mental toll it s taking. congressman ed markey, thank you for joining us. thank you for having me. there you have it. the live chat is up and running. ac360.com. just ahead, my conversation with the head of bp, medical response team in the gulf and the number of cleanup workers they re treating.
alaska attorney dennis mestis represented one of the few workers who did sue, but in the process found out that hundreds of workers involved in the cleanup had fallen sick. and you found all of this out years later, based on on one worker that i represented. who is still sick? who is still sick to this day. even exxon was forced to concede, eventually, that gary stum pch stubblefield, was a very sick man. he traveled from alaska to an exxon office in houston where stubblefield s medical records and thousands of others were being held, records exxon asked a court to seal for privacy reasons. of 11,000 cleanup workers, 6,722 had gotten sick.