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Tuesday, October 10, 2006
A rising tide of chemicals and sewage
Modern chemical is now found at the top of the food chain
PORT RENFREW, Vancouver Island -- Sporting hockey helmets and knee pads, the two researchers squatting in the aluminum skiff looked ready for a roller derby.
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Peter Ross' voice broke the static of the marine radio.
"We've got a customer," he said. "We'll be coming up alongside."
On a sunny summer afternoon, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada scientists zipped back to the larger Zodiak-style vessel where research gear was stored. The "customer" was a baby harbor seal swiped from a rocky, seaweed-slippery beach.
Ross opened up his medical tool kit and got to work. Shrouded in a green net, the scientists hoisted up the seal and weighed her. They stretched a measuring tape from whiskers to flippers and around her chubby, speckled belly. The surprisingly docile pup was pierced with a needle and four finger-sized vials of blood filled, plus two small plugs of blubber and fur were taken.
The samples will strengthen a body of research tracking contamination in seals in Puget Sound, around Vancouver Island and along the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The scientists are looking for long-lived toxic chemicals that can sicken animals -- including orcas and people. Contamination is one of the bigger threats to local killer whale populations.
"Harbor seals give us a good snapshot, a good overview of these chemicals in our ocean food web," Ross said.
The picture isn't black and white. Contamination levels have remained steady for some of the pollutants, but the amount of chemical flame retardants has skyrocketed, doubling in the Sound's harbor seals every four years dating back to 1984.
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 | Paul Joseph Brown / P-I | |
| Canadian scientist Peter Ross releases a harbor seal after taking blood and blubber samples that will be tested for toxic industrial chemicals. | ||
Despite years of cleanups, bans on certain chemicals and increasingly stringent regulations, pollution in Puget Sound remains pervasive.
Microscopic bits of plastic are sucked up by sea life of all shapes and sizes. Humans flush their pharmaceuticals and birth control and caffeine into the ecosystem, in some cases making male fish more female. Nutrients in sewage waste are helping stoke algal blooms that then die, rot and suck oxygen from the water, making it lethal to fish, crabs and octopuses.
There are bright points. About 1 million pounds of creosote-soaked logs have been removed from Whidbey Island beaches alone. Across the Sound, efforts continue to recover abandoned fishing nets that catch and drown sea life. Two high-tech sewage treatment plants are being built and state-led plans are in place to reduce the release of dangerous chemicals, including mercury and the flame retardants.
But new man-made threats are always emerging, more waste is always being generated.
All of the marine pollution causes Seattle oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer to scoff at the idea of wild seafood honestly being labeled "organic."
"Everything in the ocean is in a giant garbage dump," Ebbesmeyer said. "It's inescapable."
A giant cycle
When PCBs were introduced as a fire-proof insulator and coolant in electrical items and machinery, they were hailed as safe and effective. It took severe poisonings from rice oil contaminated during manufacturing -- one incident in Japan in 1968 and another 11 years later in Taiwan -- to raise the alarm over the polychlorinated biphenyls.
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The United States banned PCBs in 1977 and their levels in local marine animals declined substantially until the mid-1980s.
"Then we saw a much slower rate of decline," Ross said. "Almost an equilibrium."
Cleanup projects were launched and completed. The PCBs wouldn't go away.
Sandie O'Neill, a research scientist with the state Fish and Wildlife Department, believes the solution is tangled in the web of marine life. The chemical -- which can accumulate in animal tissues and blubber -- is traveling from the mud-dwelling creatures and tiny floating plants to salmon and orcas and back again as the creatures die and decompose.
"You turn off the (PCB) tap, what's in the food web is cycling around and around and around," O'Neill said.
The geologic structure of the Sound -- a deep tub with a shallow underwater ledge at its northern end -- limits the amount of flushing from the ocean.
The contamination is also found trapped in higher land elevations, carried by air and deposited in remote places. It could be unleashed as global warming melts snow packs and glaciers.
"There's an awful lot of environmental contaminants that are locked up in snow packs in the Olympics and Cascades," said Steve Jeffries, a scientist with Fish and Wildlife who sometimes works with Ross. That pollution is likely to wind up in the Sound.
Now many people fear that chemical flame retardants could cause similar environmental and health woes. The retardants are called polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, and are a sort of chemical cousin to PCBs.
The PBDEs, which are added to seat cushions, mattresses and electronic devices, among many other items, appear to be escaping into the environment as PBDE-laden foam cushions fall apart and plastics break down. The flame retardants are turning up in the dust in homes and workplaces. They're being found in human breast milk.
Scientists have found that the chemicals can affect liver and thyroid function and cause behavioral and developmental problems following high exposure in the womb.
A chemical manufacturers trade group assures the public that PBDEs are safe, that they don't stick around long in animals and degrade in the environment.
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| Paul Joseph Brown / P-I | |
| Canadian researchers are measuring pollution levels in clams, sockeye, Dungeness crab and seals around Vancouver Island in part to better understand the risks posed to humans by contaminated seafood. | ||
But O'Neill and others have researched PBDEs in the Sound and found them behaving like PCBs -- getting trapped in marine life and concentrated in the food chain.
Looking 20 years into the future, Ross said, "PBDEs are likely to overtake PCBs as the No. 1 chemical in terms of concentration in killer whales."
Despite the pollution, health officials urge people to continue eating fish, noting that many varieties are still relatively safe and can be made safer by minimizing the amount of fish fat being consumed.
By next summer, officials with the state Ecology Department and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency hope to have completed a rough assessment of where the Sound's pollutants are coming from. The study, which could cost about $150,000, would allow regulators to prioritize cleanup projects and pollution prevention strategies.
The state Ecology and Health departments earlier this year released a plan for reducing PBDEs in the environment. It included a recommendation that all PBDEs be banned provided an alternative product is available.
An industry group strongly objected. State lawmakers failed to take action.
A tide of sewage
"Is your poop hard to get out of the water? No."
Casey Plank looks out at the faces of the high school students whose good luck this day got them an all-expenses-paid visit to West Point Treatment Plant -- King County's largest sewage-treatment facility.
"The poop, the solids, the foods, they're easy to get out," continues Plank, who works for the county's sewage department.
"The shampoos, the medicines, all the chemicals -- they're the hardest," she says. "We're not designed to get out chemicals."
Despite big improvements in the treatment of sewage dumped into the Sound and its rivers in the past few decades, a growing tide of sewage pollution continues to pour into the Sound.
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And this tide carries with it chemicals that appear to affect marine creatures' reproduction, as well as nutrients that can cause unnatural explosions of oxygen-smothering algae.
As the students listen, Plank explains her rule for eco-friendly shopping: Read a product's ingredients. Can you pronounce them? If so, you're probably in good shape. If not, Plank says, buy something simpler.
"The safer the product is for you, the safer it is for the environment," Plank tells the class.
Medicines are a particular problem for the treatment plant. "If it dissolves, it can pass straight through," Plank says. "We can't blame industry for pills. It's households."
The advice used to be to flush old, unused medicine down the toilet. Now people are advised to put the drugs in the trash.
Once those chemicals get into Puget Sound, they can affect sea life. Exposure to the antidepressant Prozac can cause freshwater mussels to release larvae before they're fully developed and viable. English sole in the Sound have been found producing a female protein -- as if a male chicken started to produce egg yolk. Researchers wonder: Could hormones in women's urine or birth control pills be at work?
Virtually all of King County's sewage, some 200 million gallons on an average winter day, gets dumped at two points about five miles apart, one north of Alki Point and the other off Magnolia. More than 40 other sewage treatment plants discharge into the poorly flushed Sound or its rivers.
That's got some folks concerned.
Gale Cool says he's seen an explosion of the sea lettuce, or ulva, that shows up on his beach property on Bainbridge Island. He calls the waves "green tides."
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| Paul Joseph Brown / P-I | |
| Casey Plank leads a group of students from Mercer Island High School on a tour of King County's West Point Treatment Plant. She advises students to consider the environment when they buy products. | ||
Cool, a former developer who now works in environmental restoration, suspects that nitrogen is to blame. It's a nutrient that's known to promote the growth of plants such as seaweed and smaller algae that eventually die and rot. Their decomposition consumes oxygen needed by marine life.
"It's something we have to pay more attention to," Cool said. "We're collectively ignoring some fairly compelling anecdotal evidence, and we need better science to decide whether it's worth the money to retrofit" the sewage-treatment plants.
The state Department of Ecology, which watches over sewage plants, says it hasn't seen convincing evidence yet that nutrients are a widespread problem, except in some poorly flushed bays. Most treatment plants don't completely get rid of nitrogen.
"The consensus seems to be that the nutrient problem is getting worse," said Dave Nunnalee, who recently retired as head of sewage regulation for Ecology's Northwest region. "It's on our radar. We here at Ecology don't think it's a problem here in central Puget Sound, but it is getting to be a problem in southern Puget Sound."
That's where some new technology could help. King County is building the Brightwater Treatment Plant in Snohomish County and another in Carnation. The facilities will use a treatment called "membrane bioreactor technology," a cutting-edge device that sucks water through a rubbery membrane. The membrane filters out smaller contaminants that are being flushed out to sea at older facilities.
The cutting edge carries a high price. The larger Brightwater facility will cost $1.6 billion to build and will be able to handle 36 million gallons a day -- a fraction of the other county plants.
And some of the drugs and hormones will still make it to the sea.
"Whatever goes through your body comes out in the sewage," Plank said. "It's biology and physics -- very simple science."
COMING WEDNESDAY
One of the Sound's biggest threats goes unchecked.
What are your thoughts on promises to clean up Puget Sound and save local orcas?
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What are your thoughts on promises to clean up Puget Sound, and save local orcas? Tell us.
Part One:
Over some 90 years, Granny has dodged bullets, escaped captors' nets. Can she survive the contamination of her home -- and her body?
Part Two:
A young Granny grows from infant to mature female in a sea increasingly dirtied with human waste and poisoned with chemicals. To humans, she's a monster, a curse -- and, soon enough, a swimming target.
Part Three:
Granny has escaped the bullets of fishermen and the military, but she and her family aren't so lucky when the nets of fortune-hunters close around them.
Part Four:
Granny escapes the nets of captors, but she can't escape a world in change. Her seas grow noisy, crowded with boats -- and young relatives are dying.
Part Five:
Granny must adapt to a world that's noisy and crowded, an underwater New York City where orca mothers pass along human poisons to "crack babies." The world up top is as strange. The same humans who once feared her now revere her.
Part Six:
Granny is tough. She has dodged nets and bullets. She has swum in our garbage and pollutants for nine decades and survived. What she can't survive is a sea without prey.
All about orcas
A primer.
Part One:
Marine life is disappearing from Puget Sound, and fast
The causes are many: Politicians' broken promises, industries' resistance and the inability to convince people to live and work more gently on the shores of the Sound.
Although some species thrive, the feast is actually a famine
Shrimp and spot prawn appear to be thriving -- which may represent a serious imbalance in the Puget Sound ecosystem.
Some businesses find flouting laws is cost-effective
Environmental agencies are hamstrung by businesses that repeatedly fail to follow the rules.
In the battle between fish and farmers, orcas are the losers
The Skagit River is the classic example of how much people resist changes that are necessary to rescue the sound's sea life.
Part Two:
A rising tide of chemicals and sewage
Despite years of cleanups, bans on certain chemicals and increasingly stringent regulations, pollution in Puget Sound remains pervasive. Fish are bathing in microscopic bits of plastic, toxic chemicals, pharmaceuticals and caffeine.
The message in the (plastic) bottle is dire
A lot of the plastics -- bottles, bags, toys, packaging, etc. -- that we use are winding up in marine waters. It's a newly emerging threat to sea life as the items break down and make their way into the food chain.
Septic tanks suspected in threat to nation's manila clam harvest
Leaky septic systems are oozing sewage into marine waters and making shellfish unsafe for eating. But in many cases health inspectors can't get onto private property to pinpoint the culprits.
Part Three:
Toxic stormwater is one of the Sound's biggest threats
For years, government officials and scientists have known that polluted stormwater poses one of the greatest threats to the Sound. And they know how to fix it. But so far, no one has had the political nerve or money to match the threat.
Low-impact methods have high impact on ecosystems
Grassy ditches, rain barrels and green roofs are all innovations to close the tap on stormwater and can help save salmon and orcas.
Part Four:
Major oil spill presents greatest short-term threat to orcas' survival
Government scientists say a major oil spill is the biggest extinction threat for Puget Sound orcas over the next half-century. Even smaller spills irritate orcas' eyes and skin, and contaminate their prey.
An ounce of prevention won't clean up even a gallon of oil, activist warns
A gadfly has a warning about the preparedness for cleaning up a massive oil spill in Puget Sound.
Part Five:
Slaughtered orcas' DNA a chance to save the species
Odds are good that your grandkids -- or maybe even your kids -- could see the Sound's orca population shrink perilously low in their lifetime. The government has launched protections to save the orcas, declaring most of the Sound protected.
Saving Puget Sound could cost $12 billion
The cost of saving Puget Sound could exceed $12 billion and will require a holistic strategy that tackles the problems plaguing the entire marine ecosystem, according to an all-star advisory panel appointed by the governor.
Part Six:
Puget Sound is in trouble, but many still don't get it
The Sound is still in trouble and people still aren't getting it. Restoration advocates agree that getting the public onboard is key for raising needed funding and stanching the flow from the "death by a thousand cuts" sickening the Sound.
What the readers are saying ...
"The Sound of Broken Promises" readers were troubled to learn about the plight of Puget Sound and conflicted over who's to blame and what to do next, according to the dozens of comments logged on the P-I Web site.
Track the latest environmental news on Lisa Stiffler and Robert McClure's Dateline Earth.
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