Phyllis "Dolly" La Joie

(Author's note: the following story is based on a deposition obtained through federal court records in Roberts v. Exxon [1999]. Page numbers in parentheses refer to La Joie 1996-her deposition; other material is fully cited.)

In 1996 Dolly La Joie arrived at her deposition for her personal injury toxic tort lawsuit against Exxon and VECO with a large scrapbook, which she had painstakingly put together for her children and grandchildren. The scrapbook had color pictures from her six-week stint with the decontamination or "DECON" crew on the Greens Creek barge. Although both Exxon and VECO had forbidden cameras on the beaches, a Native man named Denty, who worked as a carpenter on the barge, had brought one with him and had been allowed to take pictures. He posted his pictures on a note board on the barge and filled orders for duplicates.

La Joie had carefully labeled all her pictures and mixed them with other spill memorabilia-news clips, magazine articles, and official Exxon and VECO safety and orientation pamphlets and cleanup injury charts. She often used her scrapbook as an aid for telling stories when she gave talks about her cleanup experiences. As she answered questions during her deposition, she paged through her scrapbook, lending dramatic images and a very real presence to her stories as did her labored breathing.

Acute Health Problems (1989)

La Joie had quite a history with the oil industry. In the early 1970s she had worked five years for Sohio Construction in the Prudhoe Bay oilfields at the construction facilities as an engineering aide. She described her job as "like being a librarian"(51), keeping track of all the building procedures, blueprints, documents, and papers and finding them for the engineers who were constructing the pipeline, the pump stations, the gathering centers, and ot her facilities. Sometimes she was sent out with her papers to accompany the engineers "to make sure they were building according to the specifications"(53). She pointed to the pictures showing where she worked.

She was proud of her work "up there, in a city in another world" (55), as she said, and proud of the industry. That was why, at fifty-eight, when she learned of the oil spill in Prince William Sound from the news, she packed her bags in her apartment in Hawaii and headed back to Alaska where she usually spent her summers with her grown children. She figured she was part of the industry that had taken the oil out of the ground and she might as well help clean it up (67), especially in the Sound-her old stomping ground.

In a whirlwind two days, La Joie was hired by VECO in Anchorage on 26 May 1989,bused to Valdez for an orientation class, loaded onto a boat with other new hires, shuttled to the Greens Creek barge anchored near Knight Island, and immediately put to work on the night shift in the DECON unit after two days with no sleep. She recalled being "absolutely, totally exhausted"(74).

La Joie "begged" to be a skiff driver. During the late 1970s she and her husband had spent years in the Sound, hunting seal under the state's bounty program and commercial fishing. The VECO foreman took one look at the petite wiry older woman and assigned her to washing duty on the barge. She recalled that "the women mostly got put in decontamination where ...[VECO] felt they'd be safer"(38) than out on the slippery oil-coated beaches, doing some of the "most dangerous, dirtiest work in the world"(41).

La Joie was one to make the best of any situation. The women on the evening shift of the DECON crew worked well together. Each evening the DECON crew gathered up the oily rain gear, rubber boots and gloves, hard hats, life jackets, and underclothing of the beach crews after they stripped for their showers. Using steam guns like the beach crews used to spray oily rocks, the DECON crews sprayed all the oily gear that couldn't go in a washing machine. As the night air cooled, clouds of hot oily mist and saltwater steam engulfed the DECO N crews as they worked outside. Clean gear was hung in the drying rooms, which were "conexes," an industry term for boxcar-shaped units designed to carry freight. When the DECON crews found the gear wasn't drying, she and the others asked VECO to order huge industrial heat blowers. The blowers kept the drying rooms hot and steamy, but at least the gear dried.

The women on DECON crews realized right away they were getting chemicals steamed into their lungs. When the Exxon lawyer asked her who told her this, she replied,"[N]o one had to tell us. We were already told [during orientation] all the chemicals that were in crude oil, and we were steaming it, and we knew we were breathing it. We thought we better take some precautions"(99). The safety goggles steamed up "really fast," but the women tried to wear them to keep from getting splashed with oil and hot water. "You always got splashed anyway," La Joie recalled (98). They tried to wear respirators, but they "could never get enough" and the VECO supply people "ran out totally in a couple of weeks"(98,100). Whatever they got from supply , they used, including little paper masks like those sold in drug stores, which she knew did not really block any chemicals. She had worked to decontaminate and monitor radiation of nuclear submarines crews at the Pearl Harbor Navy Shipyard before she started working on the oil spill cleanup.

When the Exxon lawyer asked her if she ever used any respirators that covered her entire face including her eyes, she responded, "I saw those, but I never wore them. Those were used by the crews that sprayed that fertilizer [Inipol], or whatever it was, on those test shores to eat up oil.... They had gas masks because that was really lethal stuff"(102). The Exxon lawyer responded, "I will move to strike [delete] that..."(102).
The DECON crew took turns doing laundry. No one liked this job. The laundry room was small, enclosed, and the strong oil vapor from the clothes in the dryer made the DECON crew sick. Whenever La Joie felt dizzy from the fumes and like she was going to pass out, she would step outside for fresh air.

The women quickly found the laundry detergent Tide was not up to the job of removing oil, especially with the saltwater wash. La Joie explained to the Exxon lawyer that Tide was not a degreaser. The VECO supply people sent over stronger solvents, "many different kinds and one that almost looked like gasoline," as La Joie recalled (94). Finally VECO supply sent Simple Green®, which the women found worked well when added with Tide to each wash load. The DECON crew was unaware of the health hazards of using Simple Green, which contained 2-butoxyethanol, the same active ingredient in Inipol.

The job that absolutely everyone refused to do-except La Joie-was turning gloves. The DECON crews started machine-washing gloves instead of throwing them out as the crew had been told to do because the crew didn't have any way to replace the gloves- the suppliers couldn't keep up with the demand. The thick heavy rubber gloves had to be turned inside out so the liners would dry in the dryer-and they had to be turned back right side out once they were dry.

La Joie explained, "It was an excruciating job that had to be done because the guys had to have gloves ...They just had to. It was so cold"(109-110). She said,"[T]he young girls ...wouldn't do it anymore because they were afraid it would ruin their fingernails like mine from all the solvents and all the oil"(110). She cried some nights because of the terrible pain in her hands. Her fingernails started to rot and disintegrate, and her wrists and forearms became swollen, so badly one day that she couldn't open doors or dress herself. Yet, as long as she was physically able, she never refused to turn gloves, because "No one else would do it and it had to be done"(112).

La Joie told her VECO supervisor that the glove job hurt her arms, and she went to see the clinic doctors-Exxon or VECO, she didn't differentiate-who finally bound her hands to reduce the swelling. She had pictures of her bandaged hands. The doctors told her to rest her hands and shoulders, but VECO wouldn't let people take more than two sick days leave without pay before firing them, according to La Joie (118). This was substantiated in other personal injury lawsuits (Chapter 2).

La Joie also went to the medical clinics for broken toes, skin rashes, and an endless string of sore throats with, as she said, "all the cold symptoms; sinus, headaches... coughing"(121). She tried gargling with salt water and taking Tylenol. Nothing worked. The Exxon lawyer asked, "Shall we call that what, visiting a doctor for a cold?" Not aware of the symptoms of overexposure to oil vapors, mists and aerosols, she responded, "I guess that's the closest thing I can think of"(121-122).

Finally, after working twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, for six weeks or so, she was given a week off, which she spent in Anchorage with her grown children. En route back to the Sound, she and the other workers stopped at the VECO office in Valdez for another orientation. She recalled being given a lot of "stuff"(261). Among the papers were reports and charts showing the different types of cleanup jobs, the exposure levels for each job, and the number and types of injuries on the cleanup. She kept these charts and put them in her scrapbook.

La Joie noticed right away that her job in the DECON unit, specifically working in the laundry room with the dryers and all the fumes, was not listed, and there was no exposure information. This didn't surprise her as she had never seen any federal or state OSHA inspectors, Coast Guard people, state ADEC people, or any Med-Tox monitoring people during her night shift (124-125).

When La Joie returned to the Greens Creek barge, she eagerly volunteered for beach cleanup duty so she could get out into what she "thought was going to be fresh air," as she said (108). On the beaches, she found the stench of crude oil "sickening" and "horrible" (140). There were also dead, decaying animals, mostly seals, seal pups, and birds, which the beach crews put in trash bags to be collected by the skiff people.

She survived her beach crew initiation. The supervisors handed her a fireman's high-pressure hose and turned on the cold water full blast. The hose flipped the 100-pound woman through the air, much to everyone's amusement. Then they gave her a steam spray gun and that also knocked her flat the first time, but s he quickly learned to wrestle the hose to do her bidding. She found that everyone preferred to use the steam spray guns because the high-pressure hoses were so hard to hold down. The beach crews took turns working with the high-pressure hoses. As the crews worked with the spray guns, they were engulfed in clouds of oil mist and saltwater steam.

La Joie tried to wear a respirator all the time as she had been taught in orientation to protect her from the oil fumes, but respirators were in short supply. She recalled, "We asked why we couldn't get them, and ... [the VECO foremen] said, 'Well, you go home if you don't want to ... [work without respirators]'" (139). Every morning on her own time, she spent "at least an hour trying to scrounge up respirators"(151) and she provided what she could to her fellow beach workers.

The beach job was dangerous and dirty as the VECO supervisors had forewarned. Each day the crews had to carry the 100-pound water pumps, hoses, and other equipment to the beaches and set them up. The oil was three feet deep in places, and the rocks were slippery and sharp. L a Joie described it as "a world of constant falls, slips. This [oil] stuff was unbelievable. [Y]ou were just constantly on your knees"(148). She explained,"[E]very time you fall, you had to crawl in it. You had it all over you"(147).

La Joie tried taping her rain jacket cuffs to her gloves and her pants' legs to her boots to reduce her oil exposure, but she found, "[T]he oil just ate away at the tape and the edges got open...." (146). She was constantly wet from rain, spraying, or splashing. On sunny days, the beach crews stripped by noon and "just got sprayed" (146). Her beach crew never was supplied with Tyvek suits to wear under their rain gear to protect them from the oil as she had been told during VECO orientations that beach crews needed to do (147).

After several weeks with the beach crews, La Joie went to work on the barges used for treating shoreline inaccessible to beach crews. The beach crews considered these jobs as premium, and she described her new job as "pretty cushy"(151). The high-pressure hoses and spray guns were already on the Omni and Maxi barges, so the crews did not have to haul the heavy equipment over oily rocks to set it up every day. The barges usually were maneuvered up to sheer rock walls, which the crews sprayed directly from platforms that could be raised or lowered.

While on the barges, La Joie did a variety of odd jobs: housekeeper, nurse, spray crew. As housekeeper, she cleaned toilets, which "was a constant thing"(144), as she recalled because of the oily crews. She used strong solvents such as Simple Green, disinfectants, and grease solvents, "too numerous to even begin to name"(145), as she told the Exxon lawyer. She never mentioned using a respirator while doing house cleaning. She took care of people who fell in the water, too, making sure they changed into dry clothes before they got hypothermia.
Her final job on the cleanup was DECON again, this time helping clean all the equipment and the USS Duluth, an old navy transport ship that served as a berthing vessel during the cleanup. La Joie and the DECON crew used the usual detergents, degreasers, solvents- Tide, Simple Green and others-that they had used all summer. They us ed hot water on the floors and in the showers to make sure they cleaned everything "really good"(155) as she said, for the Navy.

When La Joie left the cleanup work on 15 September 1989,she rested, or as she put it, "collapsed" (157), in Anchorage for a few weeks. She described it as "kind of a cultural shock ...It was worse than jet lag. It was January before I even started to look for a job. I was that exhausted"(158).

As La Joie rested to muster her energy, she filled the idle hours at her home in Hawaii by putting together her scrapbook of cleanup memorabilia. She also took a daily water aerobics class to prevent her acute tendonitis from stiffening. She found her arms ached from her fingers up into her shoulders. Tendonitis was just the beginning of her health problems.

Lingering Symptoms (1990 to 2003)

Continued in Sound Truth and Corporate Myth$...