By Amy Artino, Peninsula News
Thursday, February 18, 2010 9:41 AM PST

Source: http://www.pvnews.com/articles/2010/02/25/local_news/news3.txt

On Feb. 10, the Palos Verdes Shelf Fish Contamination Education Collaborative Community Outreach Team was given the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 2010 Environmental Justice Achievement Award for its outreach and education of the community about the dangers of eating contaminated fish off the coast of the Peninsula.

The partnership includes the California Department of Fish and Game enforcement division, the Long Beach Bureau of Environmental Health, the Orange County Health Care Agency, the Cal-EPA Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, S. Groner Associates, the Herald Community Center, Boat People SOS, St. Anselm’s Cross-cultural Community Center and the Asian Youth Center.

“The Environmental Justice Achievement Awards for 2010 focused on collaborative partnerships,” said Sharon Murray, environmental justice lead region coordinator for the EPA. “So that’s kind of a departure from previous years, where the award was just based on environmental-justice achievements that may or may not have involved partnerships.”

The EPA defines environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, color, national origin or income, with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies.”

Reducing exposure to toxins means raising community awareness of the risks of eating fish from the area, which stretches from Point Fermin to PV Point — a region totaling about 9 miles in distance.

Consuming fish from this area is risky because large amounts of DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls linger in the sand deep underwater off the coast of the Peninsula. These chemicals came from local industries, like Montrose Chemical Corporation of California, a large DDT-manufacturing facility in Torrance that produced the chemical from the late 1940s until it closed in 1982.

According to Tiffany Jonick, project manager for S. Groner Associates, the firm that coordinates the public outreach and education, the program began in 2001, after Montrose settled the lawsuit that the U.S. government and the state of California filed against it. The settlement provided the funding to put these protective measures in place.

DDT exposure, over time, can cause cancer, liver damage and developmental problems. Children and women of childbearing age are the most at risk, according to Jonick.

“The tough thing about the contamination is that it accumulates,” Jonick said. “People get sick after years of exposure … you need to eat [contaminated fish] over a long period of time [to see side effects], and even then … you might have been exposed to other things, as well.”

One aspect of public outreach, Jonick explained, involves educating commercial fisherman, which is conducted by Heal the Bay and the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium.

“They speak one on one with fisherman all along the … coast, from the Santa Monica Pier to the Seal Beach Pier,” she said.

The Herald Community Center, Boat People SOS, St. Anselm’s Cross-cultural Community Center and the Asian Youth Center are successful at educating the communities — especially the Chinese and Vietnamese communities, which are at greatest risk because of the large amounts of fish they consume — because the people of these organizations know the cultures and the languages of these communities so well, Jonick said.

“We also work with the California Department of Fish and Game, [which] help do boat patrols, making sure that commercial fisherman aren’t fishing for contaminated fish, because there’s actually a regulation saying that the white croaker can’t be caught for commercial purposes,” she added.

Other PV-area fish on the “do not consume” list are black croaker, barracuda, barred sand bass and top smelt, Jonick said.

The PV Shelf has been labeled a “Superfund.” This name was given to the environmental program established to address abandoned hazardous-waste sites, according to Jackie Lane, community involvement coordinator for the EPA.

“The cleanup plan for the PV Shelf Superfund site includes an institutional-controls program as an initial response to protect the most vulnerable populations from the health effects of eating fish contaminated with DDT and PCBs,” she said.

“We used to have what we called a ‘Superfund,’ and money was put into there by people that generate[d] waste,” Lane continued. “If there was anybody on a site that we were investigating that could not pay for the clean-up, we would go into the Superfund to pay for it.”

Lane added that there are sites still labeled as Superfunds, even though the parties responsible for their contamination fund them.

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