| Title: | Methods for the Analysis of 26 Million VOC Area Measurements during the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Clean-up |
| Author(s): | Groth CP; Banerjee S; Ramachandran G; Stewart PA; Sandler DP; Blair A; Engel LS; Kwok RK; Stenzel MR; |
| Address: | "Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, WVU School of Public Health, West Virginia University, One Medical Center Drive, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA. Department of Biostatistics, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, University of California-Los Angeles, 650 Charles E. Young Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. Department of Environmental Health and Engineering, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, 615 N Wolfe St, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA. Stewart Exposure Assessments, LLC, 6045 N. 27th. St., Arlington, VA 22207, USA. Epidemiology Branch, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, 111 T.W. Alexander Drive.-MD A3-05, P.O. Box 12233, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA. National Cancer Institute, 9609 Medical Center Drive, Building 9609 MSC 9760, Bethesda, MD 20892-9760, USA. Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 35 Dauer Drive, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA. Office of the Director, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, 9000 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA. Exposure Assessment Applications, LLC, 6045 N. 27th. St., Arlington, VA 22207, USA" |
| ISSN/ISBN: | 2398-7316 (Electronic) 2398-7308 (Print) 2398-7308 (Linking) |
| Abstract: | "The NIEHS GuLF STUDY is an epidemiologic study of the health of workers who participated in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill response and clean-up effort. Even with a large database of approximately 28 000 personal samples that were analyzed for total hydrocarbons (THCs) and other oil-related chemicals, resulting in nearly 160 000 full-shift personal measurements, there were still exposure scenarios where the number of measurements was too limited to rigorously assess exposures. Also available were over 26 million volatile organic compounds (VOCs) area air measurements of approximately 1-min duration, collected from direct-reading instruments on 38 large vessels generally located near the leaking well. This paper presents a strategy for converting the VOC database into hourly average air concentrations by vessel as the first step of a larger process designed to use these data to supplement full-shift THC personal exposure measurements. We applied a Bayesian method to account for measurements with values below the analytic instrument's limit of detection while processing the large database into average instrument-hour concentrations and then hourly concentrations across instruments on each day of measurement on each of the vessels. To illustrate this process, we present results on the drilling rig ship, the Discoverer Enterprise. The methods reduced the 26 million measurements to 21 900 hourly averages, which later contributed to the development of additional full-shift THC observations. The approach used here can be applied by occupational health professionals with large datasets of direct-reading instruments to better understand workplace exposures" |
| Keywords: | Humans Bayes Theorem *Occupational Exposure/analysis *Petroleum Pollution *Volatile Organic Compounds/analysis Deepwater Horizon oil spill direct-reading instruments high volume data volatile organic compounds; |
| Notes: | "MedlineGroth, Caroline P Banerjee, Sudipto Ramachandran, Gurumurthy Stewart, Patricia A Sandler, Dale P Blair, Aaron Engel, Lawrence S Kwok, Richard K Stenzel, Mark R eng ZO1 ES 102945/ES/NIEHS NIH HHS/ R01 ES027027/ES/NIEHS NIH HHS/ R01 ES030210/ES/NIEHS NIH HHS/ Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural Research Support, N.I.H., Intramural Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S. England 2021/06/30 Ann Work Expo Health. 2022 Apr 7; 66(Suppl 1):i140-i155. doi: 10.1093/annweh/wxab038" |
