The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) is developing a voluntary roster of response workers to create a record of those who have participated in cleanup activities and a mechanism to contact them about possible work-related symptoms of illness or injury, as needed. The Unified Command and BP support the roster and the goal of identifying all workers, including volunteers, involved in all response/cleanup activities. Workers have the opportunity to be rostered during training and at established staging areas (locations to which trained workers report for duty each day) in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. NIOSH also is rostering response workers online through a secure web site. NIOSH has provided the secure link to multiple federal agencies and BP, and has asked them to refer workers to the web site to complete the rostering form electronically.
As of July 15, 2010 over 38,778 workers have registered on the NIOSH roster.
NIOSH has requested that all cleanup workers and volunteers register for the following reasons:
"We know that workers may be potentially exposed to things in an oil spill cleanup: such as oils, volatile organic compounds, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, diesel fumes, heat, noise, and heavy lifting.
"We know that training will help provide information to workers about these exposures, and we are interested in what training workers receive.
"We want to gather information from workers involved in cleanup, so that after cleanup is over, we can see if workers experienced any symptoms related to the oil spill work. Oil spill exposures may cause some workers to experience symptoms like skin rash, throat irritation and cough, and back pain. We do not know if these symptoms will occur or if they do, what will be the extent of these symptoms. We want to learn as much as we can in order to reduce symptoms now and in the future.
"Documenting symptoms in this incident may provide information that NIOSH can use to protect the health of workers in this clean up and in future clean-up efforts.
