Are Bay Fish Safe to Eat? Showdown Expected Tuesday : Charges of Cover-Up Coincide With Stepped-Up Debate Over DDT Peril

In recent years, when authorities wanted to know the truth about toxic contamination in Santa Monica and San Pedro bays, the man they called on was Willard Bascom, the confident and amiable director of the publicly funded Southern California Coastal Water Research Project.

As the guiding force behind dozens of contamination studies, Bascom came armed with statistics on everything from marine feeding habits to human cancer concerns. What few people realized as they listened to the silver-haired director’s rosy assessment of the bays was that at least one of his own top staff members thought that he was misrepresenting the facts.

David Brown’s accusation last week that his boss played down the toxic threat by distorting scientific findings and attempting to censor staff members incensed Bascom and set the stage for a showdown Tuesday before a tribunal of noted scientists.

At the hearing, which will take place at the research project’s office in Long Beach, Bascom and Brown are expected to provide lengthy explanations of their views. The confrontation occurs just as the debate over toxic contamination of off-shore waters is heating up, but the topic is not new. Opponents have quietly battled over contamination since 1970, when a scientist discovered the nation’s highest levels of the chemical DDT in area sport fish.

On one side of the issue is a group of tenacious environmentalists who compare the bays to cesspools. On the other side are people like Bascom, who contend that marine life actually has benefitted in some ways from the tons of waste discharged into area waters.

Officials in the Middle

Public officials stand somewhere in the middle. After denying the existence of a health threat for more than a decade, three agencies recently concluded that local sport fish may be hazardous. The state Department of Health Services advised fishermen to stop eating white croaker, the most contaminated species, and recommended that consumers avoid any fish caught around White Point sewerage outfall off Palos Verdes, the Gerald Desmond Bridge in Long Beach Harbor and Cabrillo Beach pier in Los Angeles Harbor.

As health department workers posted warnings on fishing piers from Malibu to Long Beach, authorities stressed that there is still much to be learned about the bays. “There’s going to be a concerted effort to move ahead,” said Robert P. Ghirelli, director of the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board. “We really need more and better information on what’s out there now. What are the (contamination) levels and what do those levels mean?”

As the contamination inquiry gains momentum, people who make their living from the sport fishing industry complain of a dramatic decline in sales.

Owners of bait stores and charter boat companies say business dropped 25% to 50% after reports about contamination surfaced. Jerry Morris, owner of bait and tackle shops in Redondo Beach and Hermosa Beach, said his business was immediately cut in half. Rico Curtis of the Twenty-Second Street Landing in San Pedro, a charter boat company, reported that bookings had plummeted from 150 a day to about 30 a day.

Some seafood retailers say they have also seen sales drop, although most of their catch comes from unaffected areas. “We’ve been hurt,” said Vince Torre of A&P; Seafoods Inc. in West Los Angeles. “Business has been down about 20%. None of our fish comes from the bays, but people are scared about fish in general.”

New Controversy

Sport fishing industry complaints aside, most scientists agree that further study of the bays is warranted, especially with the recent protests about the disposal from the Hyperion waste-water treatment plant at Playa del Rey. The difference between the two issues is that Hyperion represents a relatively new controversy and that concern about the massive dumping of DDT and other chemicals goes back more than 30 years.

A synthetic chemical, DDT became the country’s most widely used pesticide after World War II. Twenty years later, scientists began to realize that the chemical was causing serious damage to marine life and birds. By the time the pesticide was taken off the market in the early 1970s, however, manufacturers had dumped more than 2,500 metric tons of the chemical into local waters, according to officials.

Scientists who study the effects of toxic chemicals say DDT-related problems abound. In 1970, high concentrations of DDT were blamed for causing reproductive failures in brown pelicans, peregrine falcons and bald eagles, three species of fish-eating birds.

Later, officials pulled San Pedro-area mackerel off the market because the fish contained twice the amount of DDT that is considered safe for human consumption. More recently, local shellfish have been banned because of DDT contamination. And last year, scientists reported that marine mammals along the Southern California coastline had the world’s highest known levels of DDT.

Moreover, authorities say the entire Southern California sport fish catch, which exceeds 20 million pounds annually, is affected by some form of chemical contamination. Even with the recent warnings, however, anglers are allowed to catch and sell the most contaminated fish.

Serious Illness

In one 12-month period, state officials said, fishermen sold more than 64,000 pounds of white croaker (a species that is discarded by many people but is popular with immigrants) that had been caught at White Point, widely viewed as the state’s most contaminated off-shore site. Officials estimate that 10 times that amount of white croaker may be eaten annually by recreational fishermen.

With all the concern about DDT levels, relatively little is known about how the chemical affects humans. Most scientists agree, however, that the ingestion of large quantities of DDT is likely to cause serious chronic illness.

Dr. Harold W. Puffer, a USC pathologist who authored a federally funded survey on the eating habits of local sport fishermen in 1981, contends that the toxics pose a serious threat. “We’ve had severe ocean pollution for a long time,” Puffer said. “What we don’t know is how many people may have been damaged by this. . . . I’m very confident that there’s at least somebody out there who has cancer from consuming animals from our coastline.”

Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), chairman of a state task force investigating contamination, supports Puffer. Hayden said he is especially disturbed by the fact that no agency has clear responsibility for determining when precautions should be taken. “The lack of authority makes it possible to look the other way, to allow a crisis to fall through the cracks,’ he said. “The whole situation is incredible.”

The legislator called for Bascom’s resignation last week after Brown accused him of distorting scientific findings. In a five-page letter to Hayden, Brown said Bascom had purposely mislead “an unsuspecting public and unsuspecting public officials.”

‘There’s Some Risk’

Bascom, whose research is primarily funded by Southern California sanitation districts, stood by his assessment of the bays. He compared the danger from eating large amounts of the most contaminated fish to the risk of dying in an airliner crash. “You should tell people that there’s some risk,” Bascom has said. “What you shouldn’t do is panic them about the whole thing.”

Others have also voiced skepticism about the existence of a serious health threat. Lewis A. Schinazi, a regional water board scientist, called the bays a “gem” at a recent board hearing. In addition, several officials have admitted that public pressure was the biggest factor in the recent decision to post health warnings along the piers.

With the effects of DDT dumping generating more and more concern, however, many critics are questioning why authorities had to be pressured into acting on reports showing that Santa Monica and San Pedro bays are more polluted than Washington state’s Commencement Bay, a well-known contamination site. At the very least, they say, officials were curiously unresponsive to recommendations contained in a string of contamination studies issued between 1970 and 1981.

“If we’re posting warnings on seafood gathering places now, it stands to reason that we should have posted them 10 years ago,” said Allan Chartrand, an environmental scientist with the regional water board, “because (contamination) levels were even higher then.”

‘Who’s in Charge?’

Brian Melzian, an environmental scientist with the San Francisco branch of the Environmental Protection Agency, agreed. “Some of this data has been around for years,” Melzian said. “Some of it could or should have been looked at by the appropriate agencies in the past. I don’t know why this has not happened. . . . The question we hear most often is, ‘Who’s in charge?’ ”

Locally, fishermen have been complaining about water quality since 1949, when a group of anglers formed the Ocean Fish Protective Assn. to investigate why their catch was declining. Six years later, two scientists from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla also expressed concern, noting that the White Point discharges were hurting marine life.

The Environmental Protection Agency provided the first conclusive evidence of the problem in 1970 by funding an ambitious survey of DDT levels in fish taken from the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts.

J. S. MacGregor of the federal Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, who was commissioned to study fish from Baja California to Los Angeles County, recalled that the toxic levels rose as he went north, reaching their peak around White Point. MacGregor discovered that toxic contamination levels in fish around White Point exceeded the readings found anywhere else in the country.

“The director at the time told me to write it up and put it in my monthly report,” MacGregor said. “(Later), someone sent word to take everyone (who didn’t work for the government) off the mailing list. I don’t think they wanted to publicize it.”

‘There Was No Response’

The first public reference to MacGregor’s findings was in September, 1970, when marine biologist Rimmon Fay called the report to the attention of the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board. “I wrote the board asking for an immediate investigation,” Fay said. “But there was no response. I couldn’t get anything, not even the satisfaction of someone saying there might be a problem here.”

Three years later, a young scientist with the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project expressed the same frustration. Dr. David Young, who had read MacGregor’s study, received Environmental Protection Agency funding for follow-up work and concluded that nearly half the fish taken from Santa Monica and San Pedro bays contained high levels of DDT and PCBs, another toxic chemical.

“There was a very concerted effort on our part to get the data out,” recalled Young, now employed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in New York. “I don’t recall that there was much of a response. The answer I got (from public officials) was that there was not a very large percentage of the population exposed to these things.”

Young’s report was reviewed by Don Baumgartner, director of the Pacific division of the Environmental Protection Agency. “I think the reaction was that the Food and Drug Administration wasn’t particularly concerned because the fish weren’t used in interstate commerce,” Baumgartner said. “If there was going to be a health warning, it would have to come from the state.”

‘Problematic for Fish’

Asked about the state’s response to Young’s findings, Dr. James M. Stubblebine, who was head of the state Department of Health Services at the time, said he had no recollection of the report. Kizer, the current director, said no one on his staff could recall the study either. Even if they had, Kizer questioned whether it would have raised any serious concerns.

“Clearly in the 1970s, (toxics) were viewed as potentially problematic for fish, but not on the same level for humans,” Kizer said. “It has only been in the last few years that people have come to view them that way.”

Young disagreed, pointing out that officials were aware of the Food and Drug Administration’s standards for hazardous levels of DDT. “I felt that there should be a health warning given if the FDA level meant anything,” Young said. “It wasn’t unusual to get levels four to five times the FDA limit in those days.”

Scientists produced numerous studies on the bays in the years after Young’s report. (Some authorities have speculated that the Santa Monica and San Pedro bays are the most studied bodies of water in the country). Among the most prominent were a follow-up study by MacGregor in 1976, a 1980 public health report issued by the Sludge Management Program for the Los Angeles/Orange County Metropolitan Area and Puffer’s consumption study.

MacGregor’s report, published in the respected Fishery Bulletin, traced the 20-year history of DDT dumping in the bays and concluded that there was heavy toxic contamination in the ocean sediment, with most of the DDT concentrated in a small area within a few miles of the Los Angeles County sewer outfalls.

‘Potentially Significant’

In the 1980 sludge management study, scientists turned their attention to the health risks caused by consuming contaminated fish, concluding that there was “a potentially significant public health concern to sport fishermen from consumption of (contaminants) in seafood taken from the outfall areas.”

Moreover, scientists estimated that people consuming half a pound of white croaker a day exposed themselves to 180 times the national average for DDT and that people who consumed slightly more than a pound of any fish from the area around White Point took in the same amount of DDT as the average citizen would consume in 30 years.

The sludge report was closely followed by Puffer’s 1981 survey of sport fishermen. In his study, funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, Puffer and his associates examined the eating habits of more than 1,000 sport fishermen. Puffer found that white croaker, the most contaminated species, constituted nearly a third of the catch. He also discovered that “more fish were consumed from . . . a site likely to be affected” by contamination than from any other sites and that a large population of poor people depended on their catch as their major source of food.

“We wanted to see whether there was a population of people really eating fish from contaminated areas in any quantities,” Puffer said. “We verified that this was true. . . . Something that’s always puzzled me is why there wasn’t more attention paid to our problem.”