Fisheries Management & Legislative Report

PBS Frontline “Poisoned Waters”

Finally! Below are an article and an opinion piece about the possibility of removing PCBs from the Hudson. This has been a long time coming. Maybe your great grandchildren will be able to eat fish from the Hudson River without PCB contamination. This happens in spite of the fact that General Electric spent hundreds of millions of dollars to avoid their responsibilities.

Winter Flounder

I attended the ASMFC Spring Meeting. There were Management Board Meetings about many species. The complete meeting summary report can be found at the JCAA webpage or at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission webpage. That link is on the JCAA webpage. I have included information from three of the board meetings below. There is also an article from the Asbury Park Press about winter flounder.

The Winter Flounder Board did not completely close the Southern New England stock inshore fishery. I made a motion for status quo but could not even get a second from another state. There is a moratorium in federal waters but we do not know how long that will be in place. The New England Fisheries Management Council is preparing an addendum to the plan which will replace the moratorium in federal waters. The federal fishery is 95% of the fishery so any change will have a big impact. With the small two winter flounder bag limit, the 50 pound trip limit and the closure of federal waters, we essentially have a moratorium since the fishery in 2009/2010 will be reduced by about 98%. Again, because of the estuarine dependency of the Southern New England winter flounder stock, it will be interesting what impact these measures actually have on rebuilding the stock. The failure to reduce the human impacts on the environment of the bays and estuaries will impede any rebuilding process. The environmental problems have a huge impact on the winter flounder population along with all the other estuarine dependent species.

River Herring

Why am I not surprised we are suffering the same problems in river herring and shad? We know they are estuarine dependent as well. In 2006 New York State completed a study that looked at the possible impacts of requiring all the power plants to use a closed loop system. This system re-circulates the water within the power plant so they are no longer taking billions of gallons of water from the Hudson River to cool the plant and then returning the water, hot and organism and oxygen depleted. In addition, this water contains chemicals that prevent the growth of algae and mussels on the pipes. They found that the commercial and recreational harvest of shad and river herring could be 50% greater. That 50% greater harvest does not mean simply a 50% greater stock. In order to guarantee an increase of 50% in the harvest, the actual stock would increase by more than 6 fold. This is a dramatic increase in the total biomass. Because fisheries management plans cannot control the water usage by power plants and other industries, we’re stuck reducing the commercial and recreational harvest. According to the amendment just passed to allow a harvest of river herring, any state must prove that the individual runs are sustainable. Since I do not see a giant increase in funding for New Jersey’s Bureau of Marine Fisheries, we will probably have a moratorium on the harvest during most of the runs of river herring. What strikes me as ironic is that JCAA was founded when 6 surf fishing clubs joined together to deal with the problems of regulating river herring and now we are facing a total moratorium in 2011.

Striped Bass

The Striped Bass Board met and there was another move to increase the commercial harvest. Luckily, that was held up until the new status of the stock is available later this year. Some of us expressed our concerns over the huge illegal commercial fishery for striped bass, not just in Maryland and Virginia, but in many other states that have commercial fisheries. Many of us are concerned about the effects of environmental conditions, the lack of Menhaden, and the disease spreading through the striped bass stocks in the Chesapeake Bay. We think these factors are having a huge impact on the amount of striped bass that the Chesapeake Bay is contributing to the coastal migratory stocks. The Chesapeake Bay was always seen as the major contributor to the coastal migratory stocks. The Hudson and Delaware Rivers were viewed as minor contributors. With the problems in the Chesapeake Bay, this might no longer be true. We need to do some studies to get really accurate data on this. I believe the old numbers no longer represent what is actually happening and we need new data to adjust our management plans.

Winter Flounder Board Approves Addendum I to Initiate Stock Rebuilding of Inshore Stocks

Alexandria, VA – The Commission’s Winter Flounder Management Board approved Addendum I to Amendment 1 the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for the Inshore Stocks of Winter Flounder. The Addendum establishes harvest reductions for both the Gulf of Maine (GOM) and Southern New England/Mid-Atlantic (SNE/MA) inshore stocks of winter flounder (0 – 3 miles).

This action is taken in response to the findings of the 2008 Groundfish Assessment Review Meeting (GARM III), which estimates that the SNE/MA stock is at 9% of the target biomass (overfished) with overfishing occurring and that the GOM stock is likely to be overfished with overfishing likely to be occurring. The Addendum’s provisions are also intended to complement federal management measures on groundfish stocks under the final interim rule, which will significantly reduce fishing mortality on federally-managed groundfish stocks, including winter flounder, in offshore waters (3 – 200 miles).

For the GOM, Addendum I requires an 11% reduction in fishing mortality for the recreational sector and a 250 pound possession limit for non-federally permitted commercial fishermen (estimated 31% reduction in harvest). Recreational reductions may be achieved by using possession limits, seasons, or other measures. Commercial measures under the final interim rule are intended to achieve at least an 11% reduction in fishing mortality.

For the SNE/MA, the Addendum establishes a two fish recreational bag limit with current size limits and seasons maintained and a 50 pound possession limit for non-federally permitted commercial fishermen. Both measures will allow for the consistent application of management measures in state water fisheries and are intended to complement the federal interim rule which prohibits any take of SNE/MA winter flounder from offshore waters (an estimated 62% reduction in fishing mortality). The Board set bag and possession limits that are low enough to discourage directed fishing but allow fishermen to keep their winter flounder bycatch. The two fish recreational bag limit is estimated to achieve approximately a 50% reduction in harvest, while the 50 pound commercial possession limit is estimated to achieve approximately a 65% reduction in harvest.

Cooperative management between state and federal waters on winter flounder is particularly important because of the unique migration patterns and spawning site fidelity of this species.

Editorial, New York Times, 5/16/2009

A floating dredge lowered a clamshell bucket to the bottom of the Hudson River on Friday and pulled up a load of muck contaminated with PCBs — oily industrial lubricants that General Electric spent decades dumping into the river, and decades more fighting to keep there.

It was a big moment — the beginning, after years of legal, scientific and political wrangling, of one of the costliest and most complicated environmental cleanups in American history. It was testimony to the power of sustained advocacy, and a tribute to everyone — private citizens, environmental groups, scientists, politicians from both parties — who had fought to make it happen.

It was also a reminder of the importance of state and federal environmental laws, without which this never would have happened, and of the need to keep them strong in the face of constant pressure to undercut them.

If successful, the cleanup will also add one more chapter to the long and improbably triumphant rebirth of the Hudson, one of the world’s great rivers. Once little more than a sewer for the towns and industries along its banks, the Hudson staged a remarkable comeback after the enactment of the clean water laws of the 1970s. But one blot remained: a large concentration of PCBs in river sediments below two G.E. plants in the Upper Hudson.

The company had dumped these toxic hydrocarbons in the river for decades, back when that was legal. They were banned in the 1970s, but by then they had worked their way into the food chain, the striped bass in particular. The parts of the river saturated with PCBs were identified as a federal Superfund site, with G.E. held responsible for cleaning them up or at least containing them.

But how? The fight raged for nearly two decades — dueling scientists and dueling lawyers — with G.E. arguing that the PCBs would biodegrade and, in any case, were best left alone, and the federal government arguing that they ought to be dredged and buried off-site.

The government ultimately prevailed. The basic cleanup plan was devised by the Clinton administration and ratified by George W. Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, who in 2002 ordered G.E. to get on with the job. Even then, the river waited as the company sought new studies and found new reasons for delay. As recently as March, G.E. was in court trying to argue that the E.P.A. had no constitutional right to tell it what to do.

G.E.’s engineers have tackled the job more willingly than its lawyers. They have built a “dewatering facility” on the Champlain Canal that will process barge loads of dredge material, sending clean water back to the river and dried toxic sediment by train to a landfill in the Texas Panhandle. Phase One of the project, covering 94 acres of the most densely contaminated river bottom, will end in October. Then comes a period of analysis to examine whether the dredging stirred up unacceptable levels of PCBs, as G.E. has warned it might.

It is unclear when Phase Two, which will cover a much bigger area, will begin. G.E. has not yet agreed to do it, and environmentalists, for good historical reasons, are nervous. They worry that since G.E. designed and is running the project, the first phase will go awry somehow and give G.E. an excuse to quit. They worry that the E.P.A. will lack the will to force the job to completion.

The E.P.A.’s current administrator, Lisa Jackson, is a strong environmentalist, and we expect that she will insist that G.E. live up fully to its responsibility. For now, the start of dredging is reason enough to raise a glass of silty Hudson water to toast what we hope will soon be the river’s final break with its toxic past.

by Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times, 5/16/2009

MOREAU, N.Y. — Twenty-five years after the federal government declared a long stretch of the Hudson River to be a contaminated Superfund site, the cleanup of its chief remaining source of pollution began here Friday with a single scoop of mud extracted by a computer-guided dredge.

Twelve dredges are to work round the clock, six days a week, into October, removing sediment laced with the chemicals known as PCBs. Mile-long freight trains running every several days will carry the dried mud to a hazardous-waste landfill in Texas.

An estimated 1.3 million pounds of PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, flowed into the upper Hudson from two General Electric factories for three decades before they were banned, in 1977, as a health threat to people and wildlife. In high doses, they have been shown to cause cancer in animals and are listed by federal agencies as a probable human carcinogen.

“Today, the healing of the Hudson begins,” George Pavlou, the Environmental Protection Agency’s acting regional administrator, said under bright skies in a riverbank ceremony here as federal, state and local officials, G.E. representatives and environmental campaigners looked on.

Those gathered scrambled from a white tent to get a good view as a blue clamshell bucket rose slowly from the riverbed holding the first five cubic yards of mud. A lone duck paddled downriver along the far bank.

The dredging operation is the first phase of an operation that, if it continues as projected through 2015, could largely eliminate the Hudson’s last significant toxic legacy from an era of unfettered industrial activity and dumping.

While the Superfund site itself is 197 miles long, stretching from Hudson Falls, N.Y., to the southern tip of Manhattan, the initial phase involves spots along a six-mile segment south of Fort Edward, the hamlet across the river from this industrial site.

G.E. is supervising and paying for the cleanup, which federal officials have estimated could cost more than $750 million. Industry experts say the ultimate cost could be many times than that, however. (G.E. declines to give an estimate.)

While most of the chemicals were dumped when such practices were legal, the Superfund law requires the responsible polluting party, when one can be pinpointed, to foot the cleanup bill.

Yet G.E has reserved the right, after a review of the operation in 2010, to reject the project’s much larger second phase. Federal environmental officials have said that if it did that, they would most likely order the cleanup to proceed and levy enormous penalties against the company.

The first phase is projected to remove 22 tons of PCBs from the riverbed; the second phase would remove 102 tons, the E.P.A. said.Even as it embarks on the cleanup, G.E. has a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Superfund law working its way through federal court. (The company is a responsible party in 52 active Superfund sites across the country, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.)

Yet spokesmen for G.E. are quick to defend the record of the company, which these days, with its Ecomagination line of products, is casting itself as a good environmental citizen.

Mark Behan, a longtime spokesman for the company on PCBs, said that the challenge to the Superfund law “has no bearing on the Hudson project.”

He said G.E. had acted in good faith for many years and that in 2002, its chairman, Jeffrey R. Immelt, made a public pledge to cooperate and implement the dredging plan, drafted and approved by the E.P.A. Three related accords have since been signed, he said, and the company has met every commitment so far.

In organizing the ceremony near the first dredging spot, the agency cast the moment as a milestone in the history of the river and of environmental governance in the United States.

Yet environmental officials and groups that spent years fighting General Electric’s efforts to challenge the need to remove the mud were more critical.

Edward O. Sullivan, who from 1987 to 1995 wrestled with General Electric lawyers and scientists as New York State’s deputy commissioner of environmental conservation and ran the state’s hazardous-waste cleanup program, said that by pursuing the court challenge to the Superfund law and reserving the right to reject the second phase of the cleanup, General Electric had constructed two potential “escape hatches.”

“Clearly, G.E. has the capability to do it right,” said Mr. Sullivan, who now runs the private group Scenic Hudson and witnessed the start of the dredging on Friday. “But the question remains, is the commitment there? So far, the company has been masterful at instigating delay.”

The decision by the E.P. A. in 2002 to require dredging was a mix of politics and science, with a variety of expert panels split on the efficacy of dredging, but also on the perils of leaving so much contamination in sediments that might be disturbed by powerful floods or other factors.

In the 400 years since the first Europeans probed its waters, the Hudson has seen grand phases of development, with oyster, sturgeon and shad fisheries replaced by factories spewing everything from paint and dye to adhesives and toxic chemicals into the waters.

From the 1970s onward, the nascent American environmental movement grew partly out of efforts to restore the Hudson. The battle over PCBs dominated that phase.

After other cleanups, communities that avoided their riverbanks for two generations because of sewage or chemicals have reclaimed them. Still, from Fort Edward south to the dam at Troy, residents cannot keep any fish hooked in the river because of the chemicals that accumulate in them.

The hope now, environmental officials say, is that dredging 98 percent of the PCBs out of hot spots in the river like the Thompson Island Pool will greatly speed what has been a slow natural decline in levels of the chemicals in striped bass and other fish species.

After the PCB-tainted sediment is extracted, it will be replaced by clean fill, along with plants native to the river. Barges holding the contaminated mud will pass through locks into the Champlain Canal to a nearby $100 million treatment plant and transport hub built by General Electric for that purpose.

As work crews in an aluminum boat passed back and forth Friday along the waterfront in Fort Edward, some local residents at Jim’s Broadway Cafe reflected on how the river might benefit from the dredging operation.

Mary Cunningham, a former Chamber of Commerce president and self-described “river bug” whose house sits on one of the banks, said raw sewage was the main concern when she was young, and later, the chemical contamination.

She and Jim Rosch, the cafe’s owner, said that while the community has been divided over whether to dredge, for them it was never a question.

Mr. Rosch, 62, said he looked forward to taking a swim in the river without concern, and someday, to seeing people catch fish and keep them. “For the plant life, the fish life, the human life, it just has to be done,” he said. “The scientists made one thing clear: It’s not going to clean itself.”

by John Oswald, Asbury Park Press, 5/15/2009

What was once considered inevitable, has now been avoided. The 2010 recreational winter flounder will not be closed. But the reprieve has come at a price.

The Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission’s Winter Flounder Management Board voted last week to reduce the 10 fish limit to two fish next year. The size of the fish, 12 inches, remains the same, as does the the length of the season — short.

On the commercial side, fishermen without federal permits, are restricted to a 50-pound per trip limit. Commercial fisherman with federal permits have had their season closed since April 30 and when it reopens has yet to be decided.

Tom Fote, one of New Jersey’s representatives to the ASMFC, said the two-fish limit was adopted when it was agreed that such a limit would reduce the recreational harvest by 50 percent, which was one of the five options available to manage the fishery. “I made the motion to retain the status quo, but I couldn’t get a second,” Fote said.

Some might argue that they might as well have just closed the season saying it is unlikely any angler will dedicate the time and effort to winter flounder fishing if the reward will only be two fish.

Jim Donofrio, executive director of the Recreational fishing Alliance and one of the few who predicted the season would not be closed, disagrees. “It’s a significant cutback for sure, but it’s still an opportunity to keep fishing. Let’s use an opportunity while one still exists” he said. “We will not rebuild the stocks by stopping fishing.”

Donofrio was alluding to the fact that states that have closed their inshore fisheries have not seen any rebuilding of the winter flounder stocks.

Recent history has shown that no matter what fishery managers do to reduce mortality by targeting the recreational fishery, it doesn’t help the restoration of the stock.

“It’s still better than nothing. There is still an opportunity to catch winter flounder. Guys fishing for striped bass in the spring, if they catch a winter flounder, they won’t have to throw it back. They will still be able to take a couple of fish,” Fote said.”

Bob Matthews of Fisherman’s Den in Belmar said he’s received a lot of feedback from fishermen coming into the shop who say it’s such a small bag limit, they should just close it.

But he, too, disagrees. “I think this is a good idea. It at least gives the guys who want to go fishing a chance to go. Some of my customers, if they catch two in a week, they’re happy. And tackle shops will still get a chance to sell some worms. It’s a lot better than closing it down, he said.

John DePersenaire, fisheries policy and science researcher at the RFA said landings of winter flounder have been declining for years and the fishery doesn’t receive the attention it once did. “Closing the fishery would have given people false hope that they were doing something to help the fishery,” DePersenaire said. “It would be an unnecessary action.”

For my part, I thought a necessary action would be to go and see what was going on with the winter flounder fishery firsthand and Capt. Bill Burge of the Barvic out of Point Pleasant was kind enough to include me in one of the few remaining winter flounder trips he would be making before the season closes on May 21. Unfortunately, someone neglected to tell the flounder I was coming, and while the charter, consisting mainly of members of the Renaissance Fishing Club from Manchester, did well with out-of-season blackfish — which were returned — and the occasional blowfish, the flatties remained out of sight.

But Burge, who has been involved in the charter business most of his life, starting on the docks when he was thirteen, was happy to comment on the state of the fishery. “It’s turned into one giant bureaucratic mess. Total nonsense,” he said. “They (fishery managers) have no idea what goes on out here. I know everyone has to make a living, but when it comes to regulations, hook and line fishermen are second-class fisherman. We always take it on the nose.”

That’s not a new sentiment. Because there are just so many avenues managers can take to control mortality, recreational fisherman are usually the fist to suffer with tougher restrictions.

Commercial fisherman, however, are also feeling the pain over winter flounder now that an emergency action has called for a closure of the offshore fishery for federal permit holders.

Burge said it’s been a tough season to begin with. “With winter flounder, it’s got be the right temperature at the right time.” The water, he said, stayed cold for too long and, coupled with the bad weather and tough economy, the fishing has been sparse.

One initiative that Donofrio said would be an enormous help would be the conversion of power plants located on rivers and estuaries to a closed loop heating and cooling system. “I would like to see the states from Delaware on up use money available from the stimulus package to put closed loop systems on their plants,” Donofrio said. Open loop systems suck up huge amounts of water which contain countless winter flounder larva that are then destroyed. The heated water is then returned to the estuary causing further harm. This situation is viewed has being far more harmful to the stock than any impact caused by the recreational fisherman.

Fote has been banging the drum against environmental degradation and for some time. He, too, points to the power plants as big culprit in the loss of the fishery. “Not only do they kill the larval fish, they treat the water to kill all algae and nutrients and return it to the estuary warm and sterile,” he said.

Fote says closed loop systems and cooling towers on power plants would have a significant, positive impact on fish stocks and its been proven with studies in the Hudson River when it comes to the harvest of river shad and herring in areas where closed systems and towers have been put in place.

“They’re always going after the fishermen instead of what is really damaging the stocks.,” he said.

Fote went on to say it will be interesting to see what affect the closure of the offshore fishery will have on the winter flounder situation, but he cautions you can’t find out anything in one year. “We’re doing this bag reduction, but now that the ocean fishery is shut down we’ll see what happens.”

“We keep changing the regulations every year. We never have a consistent base. Hopefully we’ll get some consistency over a period of time and see if we can affect a change,” he said.

Cruising peacefully down the Manasquan River on a beautiful May morning aboard the Barvic with the Renaissance Fishing Club, it’s a little hard to believe that the fish were in search of is at the heart of all this debate.

“I just wish these guys would find out what’s really going on with the fishery and smooth this thing out.” Burge said. In the interim, he’ll make a couple more half-day winter flounder trips through this weekend.