Decades later, mercury still poisons parts of Lavaca Bay

April 22--POINT COMFORT -- For as long as he can remember, Jack Gandie has fished the part of Lavaca Bay closest to Alcoa.

Gandie suspects what led his father to take him there as a kid is the warm water coming from the aluminum refinery and the plastics producer built nearby years later. The warm water draws fish in whenever there's a cold front.

"But I think it was also just word of mouth. People tell their friends that they caught some fish, and they're like, 'Oh yeah, where?' and more and more people show up," Gandie, of nearby Port Lavaca, said, recalling catching red drum there and taking some home to grill and season with lemon and butter. "I don't think I've ever heard somebody say, 'I wouldn't fish over there.'"

But extreme health risks lie beneath the surface. The Environmental Protection Agency declared the area in 1994 to be a Superfund site -- the highest warning possible.

Alcoa, a now-idled aluminum refinery, used to discharge tons of mercury into that water, leading to the Superfund designation. More than two decades later, residents' memories have faded, but the latest EPA report shows the danger remains: The average mercury concentration in red drum there is twice what state health officials consider safe to eat over a sustained period.

Tons of mercury into the bay

According to court records, Alcoa discharged wastewater that contained inorganic mercury into Lavaca Bay from 1965 to 1981. At the time, this wasn't against the law, and the dangers weren't as well understood.

No court record shows how much mercury Alcoa discharged, but Dan Morales, then the Texas attorney general, was quoted in the Advocate as saying it was as much as 67 pounds per day in the late 1960s.

Inorganic mercury is used in industrial processes and can become organic mercury, or methylmercury, when combined with carbon. Methylmercury accumulates in the food chain. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people who have eaten large amounts of fish with methlymercury over time have damaged nervous systems. Babies born to women who did the same also may have developmental abnormalities and cerebral palsy.

In the early 1990s, Morales joined a chorus of other officials calling on Alcoa to pay for the mercury contamination. A few years later, the site was added to a list of sites so contaminated that the EPA could force the responsible party to either clean it up or reimburse the federal government for doing so.

The cleanup

Before Alcoa had reached an agreement with the EPA and the state in court about how to clean up the site, the company installed four groundwater extraction wells. The EPA says this prevented possibly contaminated groundwater from migrating to the bay.

Around this time, Alcoa also removed the part of its refinery where the mercury was coming from, capped the area and erected signs warning people not to enter. In addition, the company has shoveled a lot of earth in the years since the agreement was reached. For example, in 2011, Alcoa reseeded the slope of a disposal facility on a dredge spoil island in Lavaca Bay that had been eroding because of wave action and took out plants that had sprouted up there.

Alcoa spokesman Jim Beck described the cleanup as successful. He said tests the company performed in 2016 and 2017 showed the average mercury concentration in red drum is the lowest it's been since 1997, which is still above the level the state says is safe to eat over a sustained period of time. He said the company performed those tests in the same way the EPA would have.

"Last year, additional dredging work removed impacted sediment within a targeted area, which includes Witco's channel and harbor. Also, specific marsh grasses were removed and that work will continue this year. These actions are expected to further lower mercury concentrations within the closed area," Beck said.

EPA spokeswoman Jennah Durant said the agency estimated in 2001 that the cleanup would take 10 to 15 years. Although that hasn't been the case, she said, the EPA is hopeful the average mercury concentration in red drum will continue to go down based on the past two years of tests Alcoa performed.

But marine biologists who reviewed the EPA's latest report said a lot of the cleanup is up to Mother Nature. She must heal a wound that has left a deep scar.

The marine biologists said waves could bury the contaminated sediment, but storms, such as Hurricane Harvey, could bring it up again.

Experts wouldn't eat the fish

The marine biologists said they were "disturbed but not surprised" that the average mercury concentration in red drum remained high in the 2016 EPA study. All said they would not eat any fish caught in the area.

They were not surprised by the high levels partly because red drum are high on the food chain and so absorb all the mercury eaten by the smaller fish and crabs that they eat. Humans are at the top of the food chain, so the mercury levels would be even higher.

Greg Stunz, the endowed chair for Fisheries and Ocean Health at the Harte Research Institute for the Gulf of Mexico Studies, said the EPA's latest report doesn't show how big or how old the red drum it sampled in 2015 were. He said this was important to know because smaller and younger fish would contain less mercury.

Darren Rumbold, a professor of marine science in Florida, where fish have high concentrations of mercury from incinerators and coal-fired power plants emitting mercury into the air, suggested organisms living in the sediment were moving the mercury in the bay system in a way no one predicted. The EPA needs to investigate further, he said.

"Oftentimes, when we stop the discharge of mercury, we see an initial dramatic decline of mercury in the fish, and this is followed by a slower, second phase where the rate of the decline in the mercury in fish lessens or levels off, and that's what's going on here. It shouldn't be a surprise," he said.

George Guillen, the executive director of the Environmental Institute of Houston at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, used to work for the state in the '90s, so he urged people to remain cautious about eating what's caught in the Superfund site. The state doesn't do routine monitoring of contaminants in fish unless some type of environmental disaster has been reported to it, he said.

"It's like the issue of gun violence. Everybody is talking past each other right now, and one of the reasons for that is Congress never allowed the National Science Foundation or any of these agencies to do research on gun violence, so there's a patchwork of data and hearsay, and nobody has investigated it very vigorously," he said.

Chris Van Deusen, a spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, confirmed the agency checks fish for contaminants only as funding allows. The last time it checked whether fish in Lavaca Bay had mercury was in 2012 after receiving a $65,000 grant.

Doctors say eating fish with a high concentration of mercury one time probably won't land a diner in the hospital.

But they also say eating it over weeks, months and years or in large quantities will cause subtle but serious reproductive and neurological changes. The neurological changes include diminished vision, hearing and cognitive ability. They say this can happen to anyone -- not just women and children, who remain the most susceptible to mercury poisoning.

"And these changes are not dissimilar from other diseases, so it's not easy to recognize them unless you're specifically testing people for mercury," said Paul Rountree, a professor and interim chair in the Occupational and Environmental Health Sciences Department at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler.

"It's very difficult, I think, to discourage people from consuming fish that they've caught, but I can tell you that the Texas Department of State Health Services is not cavalier in its decisions to ban fishing in a particular area. They do that with good reason, and they do that because there is a health risk for the population," Rountree said.

Sagging Superfund support

The Superfund act doesn't have the same level of bipartisan support in Congress now that it did when it passed in 1980. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, funding for Superfund cleanup was cut almost in half from a high of $2 billion over 15 years.

The GAO found during that same time period, while the total number of Superfund sites remained constant, the number of those making progress decreased by 37 percent.

And most recently, the Office of Inspector General released a report that the EPA doesn't have enough full-time employees to tackle Superfund sites.

In March, Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed a $1.3 trillion, six-month spending bill. That bill allocated a little more than $1 billion to Superfund.

Trump put in charge of the EPA Scott Pruitt, who previously repeatedly sued the EPA as the Oklahoma Attorney General. Pruitt has said he supports Superfund. He has said he wants to speed up cleanups, but some remain skeptical.

"Because of what Pruitt is doing at the EPA, there is very poor morale and a lot of people leaving at a time when we've got Superfund sites in Texas and across the nation that need to be cleaned up," said Neil Carman, who works for the Sierra Club's Lone Star Chapter. "Another thing to consider is that Texas' so-called mercury standard is seven times weaker than what a lot of other states use. We, the Sierra Club and other groups, have been raising that issue for 20 years."

Unconcerned about Washington politics or scientific warnings, some residents shrug at the Superfund designation.

"To me, fish have fins for a reason," said Charlie Barton, a 59-year-old Port Lavaca resident who competes in fishing tournaments up and down the coast. "It's not like they are going to stay in that closed area. You can catch a fish in Keller's Bay that was in the Superfund site yesterday, you know what I mean?"

Curtis Miller, 56, who took over a seafood market in Port Lavaca that his uncle started, agreed.

"I still get an occasional question about that area," Miller said, "and I just explain it to them kind of like I did to you, that it's more of a precautionary deal, that you'd have to eat a huge amount of fish for it to become a problem."

Jessica Priest reports on the environment and Calhoun County for the Victoria Advocate. She may be reached at jpriest@vicad.com or 361-580-6521.

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