The flotilla of commercial fishing boats helping to clean up the oil spill destroying fishing jobs stayed docked Monday amid reports of dizziness and nausea among fishermen.

“They’re still waiting,” a spokeswoman for Vessels of Opportunity, the BP volunteer cleanup program, told the Star.

The 125 fishing boats were ordered back to shore late last week after crew on three different boats “reported nausea, dizziness, headaches and chest pains,” the U.S. Coast Guard said.

Louisiana fisherman Gary Burris said he felt “drugged . . . it was like sniffing gasoline” after exposure to the gushing oil fouling the Gulf.

BP has sprayed more than 800,000 litres of dispersant into the Gulf since an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20.

George Barisich, president of United Commercial Fisherman’s Association, dismissed the Coast Guard report as a “pack of lies” and said at least nine fishermen had been treated in hospital. Dozens more, he said, kept working although they were sick.

“BP calls our boats vessels of opportunity. We call them vessels of guys who gotta work,” he said.

From now until mid-July is when Louisiana fishermen usually make half their money, he said.

“I warned them. I said this was dangerous and would sicken us. I asked them for respirators, gloves, plastic sleeves, and we’re only getting them now from volunteer groups, not from BP.”

“These are the exact symptoms that you could expect from overexposure to crude oil and to the chemicals that are being used out on the cleanup,” said Riki Ott, a marine toxicologist and activist who worked on the cleanup in Alaska after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

The dispersants, she says, compound the health risks created by exposure to crude oil.

“This is like throwing kerosene on a fire,” she said.

Several Louisiana fisherman have contacted her to describe illness ranging from sore throats to burning headaches and skin rashes.

A BP Deepwater Horizon sunken drilling rig has been spewing millions of barrels of crude into the Gulf for five weeks, threatening wetlands, wildlife preserves, a $1 billion fishing industry and tourism.

The latest attempt to stop the worst oil spill in U.S. history, called a “top kill,”

iled after engineers tried for three days to smother the rupture with mud and junk 1,500 metres underwater.

“It’s all lose, lose, lose here,” said Rick Steiner, a retired University of Alaska marine scientist.

“The failure of the top kill really magnified this disaster exponentially,” he said. “I think there’s a realistic probability that this enormous amount of oil will keep coming out for a couple months. This disaster just got enormously worse.

The only long-term fix—drilling two relief wells to stem the flow of oil—would take until late July or August to finish. U.S. President Barack Obama called the news about the latest failed attempt “as enraging as it is heartbreaking.”

By August, the oil would almost certainly get into the Loop Current that moves clockwise around the Gulf, said Larry Crowder, a professor of marine biology at Duke University. From there, it would take a week to 10 days before it got to the Florida Keys. A few weeks later, the Gulf Stream would carry it to North Carolina.

Given the volume of oil building up in two months, “It could go anywhere,” he said.

Hurricane season starts Tuesday and runs through November and with it the threat of fierce winds spraying the oil further inland, forecasters said.

“It would very definitely turn an environmental disaster into an unprecedented environmental catastrophe,” said Brian D. McNoldy, a tropical storms researcher at Colorado State University.