Figuring the Kingfish Odds
Santa Barbara Channel fishermen Ed Wayman and Dan Asbell figured they had a good year ahead of them. They spent last season out of the water, dropping about $20,000 to rehab an old Navy hull they’d picked up and turn it into a commercial hook-and-line boat.
In May they hit the water, and for a while the fishing was pretty good. They were averaging about 500 pounds of kingfish a day, for which they found a ready market in Los Angeles: wholesalers willing to pay 65 cents to 70 cents a pound. Not great money, but enough to get by.
Then they hit a wall. Three weeks ago the Santa Monica environmental group Heal the Bay released a report that analyzed more than 125 samples of kingfish, also known as white croaker, that had been purchased at various Asian markets in the Los Angeles area.
The study found that almost 10% of the fish exceeded the FDA action levels for DDT or PCBs, the level at which the agency can theoretically ban interstate sales of the product. And almost 85% of the fish exceeded the state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment’s risk management level. The worst of the fish were literally too polluted to be used legally as landfill.
Heal the Bay’s point isn’t that all kingfish is bad; rather, it suspects that kingfish is still being caught off the Palos Verdes Peninsula in an area that had been used as a dumping ground for almost 25 years by the Montrose Chemical Corp. A 1990 law forbids the fishing of white croaker in part of that area.
White croaker is especially susceptible to some forms of pollution because it is a bottom feeder that tends to remain in the same areas for long periods of time. Beyond that, it is an oily fish, and DDT is stored in fatty tissues.
Though croaker is a fairly popular sport fish, it’s relatively minor in commercial terms. Although Southern California’s three leading catches--mackerel, sardines and sea urchins--are measured in millions of pounds, last year the white croaker catch was only a little more than 150,000 pounds.
Wayman and Asbell say they never went anywhere near the Palos Verdes Peninsula for their white croaker. There are plenty of the fish to be caught in the safe, clean waters right off Santa Barbara--so many, in fact, that the Santa Barbara Channel accounts for almost a third of all the white croaker commercially caught in California, far more than the Los Angeles-Orange County area.
Still, their sales came to a screeching halt.
“That took us right out of business,” says Wayman. “We’re not in that closed area or anywhere near it, and our product is fine. But the markets in L.A. aren’t paying any attention to that. [The store’s buyers are acting as if] all kingfish is poisonous.”
Indeed, three weeks after the study was released, a spot check of half a dozen Asian fish markets still showed no white croaker being sold.
This is not the first controversy to surround the so-called DDT hot spot off the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Far from it. The ocean area, roughly the size of the city of Pasadena, contains several million pounds of the pesticide and was declared a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1996.
In March, the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, along with 155 other local governments, agreed to pay $45.7 million to help clean up the mess. Still pending is the federal government’s claim against Montrose for hundreds of millions of dollars more. In a story reminiscent of Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House,” Montrose has long gone out of business, leaving behind only an army of attorneys defending its skeleton.
In fact, there is little agreement about how to solve the problem. As detailed in a series by Times staff writer Marla Cone in 1995, scientists can’t agree whether it would be better to dredge the ocean bed to remove the contaminated sand, to cap it by dumping six or seven feet of clean sand over the entire area, or to just leave it alone, leaving the pesticides to decay on their own.
Any solution is bound to be expensive and take many years, leaving the polluted white croaker a problem to be dealt with for quite some time.
How serious is the health risk posed by these fish? And what can be done about it? The answers to those questions are no easier than the others.
The risks posed by pollutants are rarely the kind that show up immediately. Polluted white croaker don’t taste any different from so-called normal fish and you won’t get sick to your stomach from eating them.
In fact, the risks are so long-term that they are almost theoretical: How can you determine the risk of a lifetime of consuming a fish that came into popular use only after World War II? Usually, these risks can be described only by mathematical equations based on what scientists know about other cancer sources.
In their study, Heal the Bay used a formula to determine what is called a theoretical lifetime risk. According to this formula, the most polluted fish will cause cancer in one of every 420 people who eat it. Or, to be more specific, someone who every day for 70 years eats 50 grams of fish as polluted as the worst sample Heal the Bay found (the equivalent of about two normal servings a week) stands a 1-in-420 chance of developing cancer.
But those two statements give two very different interpretations. And though a 1-in-420 chance of cancer is enough to make that fish a serious health risk, Gerald Pollock of the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, a division of the state Environmental Protection Agency, points out that the formula includes a lot of assumptions that must be looked at very carefully.
“Among [them] is that a person is going to go to a store and buy a fish that is as polluted as that twice a week for 70 years,” he says. “That’s probably highly unlikely.”
Instead, he says, considering the range of pollutant concentrations Heal the Bay found even in fish from the same store, “if you didn’t get the worst fish every time, the risk would drop substantially.”
Pollock stresses that this is not to say that the fish is safe, rather that assigning a specific risk is difficult. Nor, he says, can you really compare the risk of eating the tainted fish to that of something better known such as, say, smoking cigarettes.
“The problem is that there aren’t a lot of assumptions with smoking. If a guy says he smokes a pack a day, there aren’t a lot of assumptions about the [carcinogen] dose he’s getting. Depending on the brand, you can say here’s the risk. Those are pretty well known. In this case, you’ve got some doses that are high, some moderate and some that are low.
“When you do cancer risk assessment and begin to get up into risks that are that high, you’ve really gone beyond the strength of the method,” he says. “It isn’t really designed to look at that high of a risk; it’s really for estimating low risks.
“There are just too many things we don’t know. This is not to fault [Heal the Bay’s] research. I would use the same scenario for doing my estimates, but that doesn’t mean it’s a realistic scenario.”
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There are even more questions about what should be done about the polluted fish. Simply banning fishing in the affected areas clearly won’t work. Commercial fishing in that area was banned in 1990 and technically it remains closed today.
Heal the Bay director Mark Gold says the numbers of contaminated kingfish in the study prove either that fishermen are fishing in the prohibited area or that the contaminated white croaker have moved around a lot more than had been previously reported.
But Mary Larsen, an associate marine biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game who tracks white croaker, has another theory, which is not much more appealing.
“That [contaminated] area is pretty far from the harbor, and those guys don’t like to go very far to fish,” she says. “My personal opinion is that these fish were probably caught inside the Long Beach and Los Angeles harbors. I’ve observed that when we pull over fishermen in that area, nine times out of 10, they’ve got white 5-gallon buckets full of white croaker. And that’s not illegal.”
So does that mean that the white croaker in Long Beach and Los Angeles harbors are as polluted as the fish off the Palos Verdes Peninsula?
“The only area I’m familiar with that generates white croaker with [DDT and PCB] levels as high as [Heal the Bay] got is around Palos Verdes,” says Pollock, who disagrees with Larsen’s theory. “I would suspect they were coming from Cabrillo Pier around the horn to Palos Verdes.”
But even if the fish are coming from the banned area, who is to stop boats from fishing there? According to the Fish and Game Department, there are only 12 wardens to patrol all of Los Angeles County.
That’s why the department has traditionally opposed bills aimed at limiting fishing for white croaker in polluted areas. Though it has not taken an official position on such a bill proposed by state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) before the legislature, department spokeswoman Cassandra Goss points to a problem. “The way the bill is written [it’s] difficult if not impossible to enforce,” she said. “It closes certain areas, but we never have enough wardens to adequately patrol those areas. It’s just adding another responsibility to an already overburdened system.”
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Besides, as Fish and Game biologist Larsen points out, a commercial ban on white croaker fishing in Los Angeles and Orange counties, which is what the Hayden bill proposes, is pretty meaningless unless it is accompanied by a catch limit for sports fishermen.
At present, recreational fishermen can take as many croakers as they want. Any commercial fishermen stopped by the Department of Fish and Game can simply claim they’re merely out for a day’s play, rather than work.
Even a public health warning is not as clear-cut as it might seem. Five years ago the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services posted a stern warning at local sport fishing spots, proclaiming “No eating of white croaker. . . . Consumption of this fish should be avoided.” A recent study by the South Coast Water Research Project found that it was still the second most frequently caught sport fish off local piers and private boats.
Furthermore, half the fishermen who had caught white croaker were aware of the health warnings that went along with it. Typically, they had eaten the fish at least once in the previous month. Almost 80% of them preferred it fried.
