Name your Poison

All the furor over contamination of Gulf waters by that British Petroleum  oil well reminded me of an article that appeared a few weeks ago in the Houston Chronicle .  It had to do with contamination on a much smaller scale, but potentially more deadly, and much closer to home:

The waters of the San Jacinto River near the Interstate 10 bridge may not look inviting from a passing car, but folks have always fished this spot. Signs warn anglers not to eat the fish and crabs, which are contaminated with high levels of cancer-causing chemicals from decades-old paper mill sludge. Yet people still come with fishing rods and buckets of bait in hand.

To try to keep them away, the companies responsible for the cleanup of this stretch of river are installing a fence with barbed wire along more than 3,000 feet of shoreline.

The installation comes as crews continue to evaluate the extent of the San Jacinto's dioxin contamination.

The cleanup could take years.

“In the short term, the important thing is to limit access,” said David Bary, a spokesman for the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which placed the site on its roster of the nation's most polluted places in 2008.

The dioxins come from submerged waste pits north of the Interstate 10 bridge. McGinnes Industrial Maintenance Corp., which is no longer in business, owned and operated the pits in the 1960s, filling a 20- acre site on dry land with waste from a now-closed paper mill near the Washburn Tunnel.

In the bleaching process, paper mills generated large amounts of dioxins, a family of compounds so toxic that scientists measure them in trillionths of a gram. The EPA says there is no safe level of exposure to the chemicals, which are known to cause cancer and disrupt immune and reproductive systems.

The San Jacinto River began to run through the waste pits by the early 1970s because of subsidence — the sinking of soft soils as water is pumped from underground.

With the McGinnes pits under water, the dioxins spread into the river and worked their way through the ecosystem, becoming more concentrated at each step in the food chain.

For more than a decade, the Texas Department of Health has warned that fish and crab caught along this stretch of water, north of the Lynchburg Ferry, are tainted with cancer-causing dioxin, pesticides and PCBs. No one should eat more than one 8-ounce meal a month.

But the state's warnings haven't stopped folks from fishing for a cheap meal in the murky waters.  Even with the signs and advisories, fishermen seem oblivious to the potential danger.

“This fish is good,” said Victor Fagian, who spent an overcast Friday on the banks of the San Jacinto in pursuit of catfish and redfish.

Fagian and his buddy Jose Castillo said they have fished the spot regularly for more than a year. Even when told of the warnings, they seemed unconcerned.

“We don't have a problem here,” Castillo said.

In July, the EPA identified the International Paper Co. and McGinnes, which became part of Waste Management through a series of mergers and acquisitions, as the firms responsible for the dioxins problem.

Under the Superfund law, the two companies will be required to evaluate and clean up the contamination.  So far, they have paid about $65,000 for the fencing and roughly 50 warning signs in English, Spanish and Vietnamese.