Do you ever wonder what exactly all those fishing enthusiasts on our local piers are catching and sticking in their buckets? The L.A. Times reports that the daily catch often includes barracuda, white and black croaker, topsmelt, barred sand bass, DDT, PCBs, mercury, and other dangerous pollutants. Scary? Yes. So what’s being done about it?
Following a study in 2009, four of these fish joined the white croaker on the city’s “do not eat” list, citing much of the contamination from Montrose Chemical Corp., major makers of DDT who, over a 30-year period, flooded the ocean off of Palos Verdes Peninsula with 110 tons of the stuff, along with eleven tons of PCB, by dumping it into the sewer that unloaded in the sea. The EPA has declared the surrounding sea shelf as one of “most hazardous dumping grounds in the nation,” swimming with white croaker, named as “the most contaminated species along the Los Angeles and Orange County coasts.”
This contamination has lead to a new health advisory for area fisherman in the red zone that goes from Seal Beach to Santa Monica Beach, who may not know (or in many cases, not care) about the major health risks posed by taking the fish home and cooking them up. While Heal the Bay is making an attempt to personally reach out with east-to-read, bilingual cards that display the fish, city-installed signs are coming to twelve piers next month to warn anglers of the dangers of consuming these species and encouraging them to throw their catches back.
Attitudes, meanwhile, are hard to change, as many of the anglers have been fishing at these piers for decades and find the catch a cheaper way to survive than buying groceries or meals. One clever anglers compares the fresh-caught seafood to delicacies enjoyed in restaurants, offering, “You don’t know what you’re getting. It could be kangaroo meat or mystery meat…In the same way, you don’t eat these fish every day, because that’s how you get sick.”
Unfortunately, he’s more correct on the latter part of his statement, as eating contaminated local fish over time can lead to cancer, liver damage, immune and endocrine issues, and developmental problems in children. And here we were worried about radioactive fish coming from Japan…
Toxic Fish: On Southland piers, warning that more fish species are tainted [LAT]
