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Mercury and PCBs threaten ecology of the Pinelands
27th January 2003
By JACK KASKEY
Press of Atlantic CIty Staff Writer
(609) 272-7213,
Airborne PCBs and mercury from Camden and Philadelphia are raining down on the Pinelands, contaminating fish and potentially sickening people who eat them, according to Rutgers University researchers.
The research helps explain why fish in the Pinelands, a region with the state's most environmentally protective land-use regulations, have the highest levels of mercury in New Jersey.
But funding for the research - the New Jersey Atmospheric Deposition Network, a 3-year-old collaboration between Rutgers and the state Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP - has run out.
The last of the network's nine monitoring sensors around the state shut down over the weekend.
"We are hoping they are going to come up with some more money to keep it running," Rutgers professor Lisa Totten said.
Perhaps the most startling of the network's findings is that air over Camden has some of the highest PCB levels in the nation, Totten said.
PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, are a class of man-made compounds that until a decade or two ago were used to insulate and cool electrical equipment, such as transformers, among other uses.
Camden air averages about 3,000 picograms of PCBs per cubic meter, with some measurements topping 14,000 picograms. (A picogram is one trillionth of a gram.)
In comparison, air measured at the network's New Lisbon monitoring station contains about 300 picograms of PCBs per cubic meter, Totten said.
Somewhere between Camden and New Lisbon 30 miles east, most of the PCBs disappear, she said.
While some PCBs are diluted with cleaner air, others are absorbed by Pinelands trees and waters, she said.
"I think it does mean Camden is influencing the Pinelands," Totten said.
On warm days when trees respire more, PCB levels in the Pinelands increase, leading Totten and others to theorize that the pine trees are essentially exhaling the PCBs they've accumulated.
"There is not enough in the air to hurt you," Totten said. "It's really the fish you have to worry about."
When PCBs get into the aquatic food chain, they concentrate in the tissues of fish.
Pinelands streams are so clean and free of sediment that whatever comes in from the atmosphere tends to go right into the fish, Totten said.
People who eat too much PCB-laden fish increase their risk for cancer, and PCBs in children can cause developmental problems.
The DEP is expected to soon revise its fish-consumption advisories for PCBs for the first time in 14 years, but it's not clear whether Pinelands fish will be included, as the advisories will be based on an Academy of Natural Sciences study that focused on saltwater fish.
As to where the PCBs are coming from, no one knows.
"We know the sources are somewhere in the Camden-Philadelphia area, but we don't know exactly where," Totten said.
PCBs evaporate when exposed to the air, so the sources could range from leaking drums in an abandoned warehouse to an abandoned transformer manufacturer, or any other factory that used PCBs, she said.
Even the Delaware River could be a source. Just last week, a federal judge found the owners of a Philadelphia Superfund site liable for spilling thousands of gallons of PCB-laced oil along the Delaware River.
Mercury from the Camden-Philadelphia area also is contaminating the Pinelands, said Rutgers professor John Reinfelder.
"Mercury is generally building up in the soils and waters of the Pinelands," he said.
But unlike PCBs in the Pinelands, where air from the adjacent urban area is the only source, mercury in the Pinelands has multiple sources, he said.
"We think it's a combination of Philadelphia and farther," Reinfelder said.
Prevailing weather patterns cause mercury-laden emissions from coal-fired power plants in the Midwest to fall on Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey when it rains, he said.
New Jersey has coal-fired power plants, too, but their owners have spent millions to outfit with them with pollution-control devices that older Midwest plants lack.
In New Jersey, the main sources of atmospheric mercury are metal recyclers and incinerators, where mercury from switches and other electrical components escape up the stack, he said.
Mercury is a greater hazard in Pinelands lakes and streams because of the region's water chemistry, Reinfelder said.
The Pineland's naturally acidic waters allow bacteria to easily convert mercury to methylated mercury, a particularly noxious form of the silvery metal that accumulates in the muscles of fish, he said.
That helps explain why surface waters in the Pinelands meet health standards for mercury, but fish caught there do not. The DEP last year advised pregnant and nursing mothers, as well as children 5 and under never to eat a number of Pinelands fish species.
Mercury is a particular threat to young children and fetuses, potentially causing neurological impairment.
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