• PCBs in river sediment of Superfund site pose health risk for humans

Portland has always asked a lot from the Willamette River, using it as a highway and work site, a source of food and power, a playground and a sewer.

It’s a conflicted history that provokes rueful jokes from Portlanders like Charles Wilson, who’s sitting on the beach one sunny summer day, fishing in the gray-green water. 

Wilson says he eats what he catches, despite the comments of his friend, who stands on the bank nearby, making cracks about fish that glow in the dark.

“Yes, I’m a little concerned about the condition of this water,” Wilson says. “I’m just rolling the dice.”

Wilson is fishing in the Swan Island Lagoon, which was a flowing river channel until it was blocked in the 1920s. It lies in the heart of the Portland Harbor, the industrial stretch of the river just north of downtown. The area was declared a Superfund site in 2000, meaning it’s on the federal list of the most contaminated sites in America.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the water and river sediments of Portland Harbor contain hazardous substances including heavy metals, polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), dioxin, and pesticides. But the major concern is polychlorinated biphenyls, usually referred to as PCBs, which can cause cancer and pass from mothers to babies, causing learning disabilities. They also can damage the immune system, the reproductive system, the nervous system and the endocrine system.

Direct contact with Willamette River water won’t hurt you. But PCBs accumulate up the food chain, moving from river sediment to insects to small fish to bigger fish, becoming more concentrated with every step. According to the Oregon Department of Human Services, the amount of PCBs in the tissue of fish at the top of the food chain can be 3.5 million times greater than what is measured in the surrounding water.

Warning Signs

Health alerts in six languages — English, Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese, Chinese and Laotian — are posted near some of the fishing spots in the Superfund stretch of the Willamette River. They warn that resident carp, bass and catfish should only be eaten once a month, and avoided entirely by children, women of childbearing age, and anyone with existing health problems. Resident fish are those that live in the area full time. Migratory fish like salmon are not of concern.

The health advisory for PCBs has been in place since 2004, but the pollution dates to much earlier. Most of the PCBs were released unintentionally in the 1950s and 1960s by a wide range of industries. Electrical fires, spills of other substances, leaching and leaking transformers probably all contributed, says Chip Humphrey, the EPA project manager for the Superfund site.

PCBs were banned in the United States in 1979, but they don’t dissolve in water and are extremely persistent.

It’s that very stability that made them valuable. PCBs retard fire, insulate against the transfer of electricity and increase the plasticity of materials like paint and rubber, qualities testified to in old trade names like Inerteen, NoFlamol, Plastivar and Saf-T-Kuhl.

Another quality of PCBs is their tendency to build up in human fatty tissue.

“They really accumulate over your entire lifetime,” says David Farrer, a public health toxicologist with the Oregon Health Authority. A woman who grows up eating contaminated fish will be passing on a lifetime of PCB accumulation to her children.

The danger can be greatly reduced by avoiding the fattiest parts of the fish. The skin, fat, eggs and internal organs should be discarded, and the fish should be cooked in a way that allows fats to run off. Fish vary, and older fish are more toxic. All this makes it extremely hard to determine actual human exposure.

“The short version is we don’t really know,” Farrer says. “All of the risks that we’re talking about are long term. We don’t really have a good handle on how many people have actually gotten sick from eating fish in the Portland Harbor.”

So why not ban fishing entirely?

“Our general philosophy with fish advisories is to put as little restriction as possible, because we do recognize that fish have a lot of healthy things in them, in general. They’re a very healthy source of protein,” he says. And some of the city’s poorest rely on the fish as part of their diet.

“Often times they’re not in a position to choose something else,” Farrer says. “You die faster from not eating.”

Guidelines make sense elsewhere

The fish advisory applies to the Portland Harbor from the Fremont Bridge north to River Mile 2, which is partway up Sauvie Island. But Farrer says anyone fishing in the Portland metro area should be following the same guidelines.

Fish toxicity is the biggest risk to human health in the area, and is the major driver for the Superfund cleanup effort. So it may irk the people who have to pay for the cleanup — including local businesses, taxpayers and water and sewer customers — that the data on fishing is so incomplete.

The numbers are murky, says Travis Williams, executive director of Willamette Riverkeeper. But after spending 12 years on the river, working on Superfund-related issues, he knows people are out there, in boats and on the shore, fishing for resident fish.

“Sometimes they tell you that they don’t consume resident fish; other times they tell you that they do,” Williams says.

Meanwhile, the cleanup process inches along. The EPA is currently considering a draft feasibility study, with plans to release a proposal for public comment about a year and a half from now. Still, Williams has reason to hope that some of the worst toxic hotspots will be cleaned up in the meantime.

“At the end of the day, that’s a public right,” he says. When they’re hungry, he asks, “What have people done for countless millennia? They’ve gone down to the rivers to catch fish.”

Anne Marie DiStefano can be reached at portlandtribunefood@gmail.com.