Coping with oil spills: oil exposure and anxiety among residents of Gulf Coast states after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Date: 20 September 2021

Handling Editor: Prof Dan Osborn

Editorial decision: Request revision. The Handling Editor requested revisions; the article has been returned to the authors to make this revision.

Additional comments by the Editor:

I would now like to recommend that you revise your paper according to the reviewers' comments and upload the revised paper as soon as possible. Please review the instructions for submitting a revised article in the editorial guidelines. Please take into particular consideration:

• Although both reviewers consider this an important paper they make points that, if addressed, would strengthen it. One reviewer makes a number of points in relation to methodology and analysis that would make the paper easier to understand.
• The same reviewer asks for clarification about the relationship between this paper and ref 10. Such a clarification would be very helpful.
• The other reviewer asks that more context is provided for the paper - e.g. with respect to similar large environmental incidents caused by oil spillages.
• This reviewer also would like to see the methodology set out more clearly - I suggest that placing the methodology in some broad psychological context or providing some theoretical background to the choice of approach or measures (e.g. mastery) might be one way of approaching those points.

Date: 30 March 2021

Handling Editor: Dan Osborn

This article is a preprint article and has not been peer-reviewed. It is under consideration following submission to UCL Open: Environment Preprint for open peer review.

Additional comments by the Editor:

People's wellbeing can suffer when they have experience of an environmental disaster and what factors increase or ameliorate anxiety need to be clearly defined in the context of different types of disaster. This preprint has analysed data from a survey of populations with varying experiences of the Deepwater Horizon disaster that were living in coastal and inland communities.