Don’t Drink the Water – Mercury contamination
There are many places where the water has been polluted by something. Ten Bears talks about Bend, Oregon.
1979 and one of the largest environmental complaints was lodged by the Federal government against a major corporation. Acting on behalf of EPA, the Department of Justice filed four suits against Hooker Chemical Co. Hooker Chemical and its parent corporation Occidental Petroleum Corporation were to clean up four chemical waste dumpsites in Niagara Falls, New York. Love Canal was posing substantial danger to residents of the area.
Where I was living in Michigan, the current danger is PFAS and similar compounds. People were told not to eat the fish. In Mississippi SCOTUS ruled the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote Congress must speak clearly on this subject. I can see Congress quickly deciding on anything?
SCOTUS restricts Congress from delegating authority to an agency created to manage environmental issues. Next up Ten Bears and Oregon.
Mercury … | Homeless on the High Desert, Ten Bears
Long as I can remember, pushing seventy years now, we’ve been admonished to don’t drink the water or eat the fish out of the Deschutes River, it has unhealthy levels of mercury in it. Grandma wasn’t talking about our teeth falling out in our twenties when she said,
“it’s in the water.” Took a while to figure it out.
First commercial enterprise in Central Oregon wasn’t logging or lumber, cattle or trapping. First commercial enterprise in Central Oregon was a mercury mine.
The pall, when not a wood-smoke pall pumping its own mercury into the environment: the air we breathe, the dust, the fine powder stirred up by a hundred thousand people driving three hundred thousand cars we wipe from the mantel in the mornings, out of the refrigerator, or suck out of the dryer vents once a year. Mercury silicate. Central Oregon, all of Oregon is volcanic. Some of it quite young. Parts of Bend sit on fifteen hundred year old lava that isn’t quite “set”, is still “wet”, as if it were concrete. Lava. Crushed to gravel the roads, then further crushed by cars and trucks to stir up and … inhale. Breathe.
The only thing we know about the aquifer is the water to replenish it has to percolate through thousands of feet of lava, of mercury silicate, to get there.
This is why so many of us, so many of our children and grandchildren, our parents, grandparents, are on the spectrum. Why we’re drunks and meth-heads.
Doesn’t help that Bend, home to my family for seven generations, is The Beer Brewing Capital of the World: got more breweries, got more brewing capacity per capita than anywhere else in the world. Actually has more bars, breweries, beerhalls and bordellos than Portland, five times the size of Bend. It’s like a great neon sign a’ flashing: We Are Drunk! And I have personally found meth, methamphetamine, laying in the street; recent reporting has had school-children finding in their front-yard. Beertown USA. Drunktown USA, meth-central, the crossroads of alcoholism and methamphetamine addiction.
I didn’t know those two kids, but I’ve known the man accused of killing them since he was a kid, in grade-school. Contemperous with, went to school with my sons. Knew him in some of the work he did. This is hard, it breaks my heart.
I don’t know, maybe it’s evil spirits, but there’s something wrong in Bend
It’s not a safe place
“Mississippi leaders react to Supreme Court EPA ruling” (wtok.com)
“U.S. Sues Hooker Chemical at Niagara Falls, New York” | About EPA | US EPA
Thermofil Inc, Green Oak Township, Livingston County (michigan.gov)
yes
and there are still people who tink we can mine and drill our way to happiness.
“smells like money to me.”
Thank you run. I was pretty angry when ~ I’ve been angry for a long time ~ I put that together, it probably could have turned out better. The point I’ve been trying to make without coming right out and saying it is most of this is hidden from us. Beyond a paragraph in the back of the Fish and Game guide there’s virtually no publicly available information readily available. I have a really hard time with the notion that people would be aware of this and continue to profit, all-the-more-so after what we’ve seen at Love Canal and all the research recently available into lead poisoning. People I know.
Ten Bears
You are welcome. You are noticed by other too Ten Bears.
If the mercury in the aquifer is the result of water passing through thousands of feet of mercury silicate infused lava, isn’t this a natural phenomenon? Human activities can aggravate the problems of course, but if the water is naturally bad, maybe people need to leave.
Eric:
You can filter heavy metals out of the water.
Eric377
Good point. I don’t know what the answer is, but I thought he was (also) saying they were paving the roads with the rock and the traffic turned some of it into dust which got into everything.
I assume the heavy metals are not dissolved in the water as such, but chemical compounds of those metals might dissolve. but these would not be filterable. i would need to look it up to know more.
Mercury In Our Air, Water, Soil And Fish
BY JIM ANDERSON
In April of this year the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) issued a warning about consuming too many bass found to be contaminated with excessive amounts of mercury in fish tissue sampled from a number of water bodies across the state.
Dave Farrer, Ph.D., toxicologist in the Environmental Public Health Section at the OHA Public Health Division, said, “Fish are an important part of a healthy diet, especially migratory fish like salmon, steelhead and trout. The elevated mercury levels we’re talking about in bass are of concern to us, but there are some simple steps people can take to reduce their exposure to mercury when consuming bass.”
Like it or not, bass are alien trash fish in Oregon. According to research conducted by Rick Moberly, Fish Biologist with Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, largemouth bass were introduced illegally into Crane Prairie in the late 1970s or early 1980s. ODFW had nothing to do with their sudden appearance, and first found them while electrofishing in May 1986.
It’s the same with Davis Lake: their presence wasn’t confirmed by ODFW until 1995. It’s assumed all the other state-wide bass introductions are also the results of anglers who just wanted to fish for bass in Oregon, without any regard for the impact of their selfish desires on native fisheries and the aquatic ecosystem.
Bass are considered a top predator, eating other mercury-contaminated fish within an ecosystem; therefore, the longer bass live, the more mercury they accumulate. They are found across the state in many popular fishing waters. Unfortunately, the state does not have enough data to warrant a statewide advisory.
OHA, however, recommends the following monthly meal allowances for bass from all water bodies across the state, including river systems:
-General population—Limit consumption to no more than six meals per month.
-At-risk populations (pregnant women and children)—limit consumption to no more than two meals per month.
-A meal is about the size and thickness of your hand; for children, a meal is about the size and thickness of a child’s hand.
For a list of water bodies with an existing advisory, see the advisory table at HealthOregon.org/fishadv. People should follow the recommended meal allowances for fish from these individual water bodies, rather than the statewide meal allowance of six and two.
Where does the mercury come from? Contrary to popular belief, it is not a foreign element to the ecosystems of Earth; it occurs naturally in deposits throughout the world, mostly as cinnabar. During WWII cinnabar mines were as common as pot smokers in Bend. Mining claims could be found all up and down the Bear Creek Country, out on the Great Sandy Desert, and in other locations throughout Oregon.
That’s because mercury was a much sought-after element in the manufacture of triggers for bombs dropped by Allied bombers on targets in Italy, Germany, Japan and other enemy installations. It was also used in the manufacture of electrical switches, and no one knows precisely how much cinnabar/mercury from the old tailings went down the nearby creeks and into nearby water storage facilities and fishing holes.
Mercury was once used exclusively in thermometers, barometers, float switches, relays and fluorescent lamps, but concerns over the element’s toxicity changed things dramatically.
And now we get to the nitty-gritty of this discussion: serious mercury-poisoning can result from exposure to water-soluble forms of mercury (such as mercuric chloride or methyl mercury), by breathing it in as a vapor or by ingesting any form of it—which brings us to mercury in fish.
Back in 1994 the Oregon Health Division advised anglers to limit the intake (eating) of fish from several bodies of water within the state. Antelope, Owyhee, and Brownlee Reservoirs, stretches of the Columbia, Snake and Willamette Rivers, and East Lake were among the bodies of water containing fish that tested high in mercury levels.
East Lake’s fish tested positive, while Paulina Lake’s fish did not. The source of mercury in East Lake fish is natural, likely due to the volcanic nature of Newberry Crater, which is still active in this particular body of water. As most of us “old-timers” know, there are residual hot springs along the shores of East Lake, especially at the site of the once famous East Lake Spa of the early 1900s. It is indeed possible that those hot springs are the main source of mercury in East Lake.
The status of mercury in East Lake today is anyone’s guess, because the water has not been tested in many years. However, OHS officials believe that, because the source of mercury probably comes from the volcanic vents in the lake, the mercury level hasn’t changed all that much since the 1994 report. That said, you’re on your own if you consume fish from that body of water.
Methyl mercury increases in concentration as it moves up the food chain, and because it accumulates in fish, eating fish is the way most people are exposed to mercury in the environment. It can also cause a range of toxic effects to fish, aquatic life and wildlife.
Mercury primarily affects a warm-blooded animal’s nervous system and is particularly dangerous for infants and young children, whose nervous systems will continue to develop through adolescence. For developing fetuses, it can be even worse. Mercury can be passed from mother to fetus, resulting in potentially serious effects, such as brain damage, mental handicaps, blindness, seizures, and speech problems. Babies born to mothers who have elevated mercury levels may have developmental issues and learning disabilities.
What’s being done to clean up this mess? That’s a hard one to answer because the mercury is not only coming from natural sources, but is also getting into our air and water because of human activity.
In fact, humans release thousands of tons of toxic mercury into the environment every year from coal-fired power plants, cement kilns, chlor-alkali plants, trash incinerators, and gold mining. Much of it collects in sediment, where it is converted into toxic methyl mercury and enters the food chain, ending up in the “sport fish” we eat.
In the meantime, things don’t look so good for anglers looking to land a lunker Kokanee, or Atlantic salmon for dinner. The bigger the fish, the better the chance it has too much methyl mercury for a human to handle. Health advisories from various health agencies suggest keeping little legal fish and putting big ones back.
To muddy the waters further, ODFW recently recommended limiting consumption of all fish but rainbow trout from Emigrant Lake, 20 miles southeast of Medford, due to mercury levels.
Yes, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality is on top of the mercury problem with both hands and both feet. They are identifying waters where fish tissue samples have higher-than-standard mercury levels and adding them to the state’s list of impaired waters. DEQ then collects additional information and conducts analyses to determine the severity and extent of the problem, identifies the sources of mercury, and develops restoration plans to reduce the levels of mercury reaching Oregon’s water ways. But tax dollars can only go so far.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jim Anderson
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We talked about this on community radio before he published.
Thanks for reminding me …
Ten Bears
what I get from this…and i could be wrong….is that except in a few cases (East Lake) water does not become contaminated by percolating up through ancient lava, but does become contaminated by tailings from mining mercury containing rock…which weathers and is changed to soluble forms by the action of micro-organisms. I also get that the State is somewhat feeble in regulating this…my conclusion here is based on the “what can we do?” language in the Anderson article. I understand that actions have been taken that reduce the dangers from mining…but i don’t know how successful they have been, or how much they have been limited by the usual money interests in not being regulated.
when i lived near Baker we were told not to drink the water in streams because of contamination from gold mines. and i understand that there is still plenty of lead in the air from leaded gas and lead paint…fifty (?) years after their use was outlawed.
hope that helps.
i don’t think it is useful to measure the lead in the air generally. it’s probably in the fine dust that can be kicked up by local disturbances that can affect health locally without necessarily being in great concentrations “generally.”
meanwhile we are replacing it with plastics and pcb’s.
salud!
Ten Bears
Any comments on the shooting in Bend, Oregon? Mercury is supposed to cause brain issues.
methyl mercury article in wikipedia helps explain more.