By Doug Draper

They don’t call them “persistent” environmental poisons for nothing!
More than three decades after the manufacture of chemicals like PCBs, Mirex and a trichlorophenol-based herbicide that produced the most toxic form of dioxin as an unwanted byproduct was banned in North America, they continue to menace the waters of the Lower Niagara River and Lake Ontario.
According to the most recent guide booklets released by the New York State and Ontario governments for consuming fish caught in state and provincial waters, there are still fish in the lower Niagara and Lake Ontario the governments are advising people to limit their consumption of or not eat at all due to an accumulation of high levels of toxic chemicals in their flesh.
This remains the case despite many years of cleanup work by governments and industries on both sides that have reduced the flow of hazardous chemicals to the Niagara River by well over 50 per cent.
That’s right, despite all of the cleanup successes the governments can rightfully boast about, a person is advised not to eat a lake trout from the lower Niagara River that is over two feet long due to the presence of worrisome levels of chemicals like PCBs, Mires and Dioxin the meat of the fish. The same is true for many other larger species of fish from the lower river and the downstream waters of Lake Ontario to the St. Lawrence River.
 In other cases, both the New York and Ontario fish eating guides advise people to limit their consumption of larger fish like smallmouth bass, rainbow trout, coho salmon and other species to once a month. Children and women of child-bearing age are still being advised, after all these years, not to eat some of these fish at all.
This is a sad legacy of decades of reckless industrial waste disposal practices that took place through most of the first seven decades of the last century and are still occurring to some degree. Chemicals like Dioxin, Mirex and others that were discharged from industrial pipes and that leaked from toxic waste dumps, most of them located along the American side of the Niagara River, are slow to break down when they are released in the environment, and they are still there to haunt us.
It was a little over three decades ago, in the late 1970s that the irresponsible industrial waste practices occurring along the Niagara River finally received the widespread attention they deserved with the leakage of toxic chemicals through a neighbourhood in Niagara County, New York from a dump called Love Canal. In short order, residents on both sides of the river learned about other massive dumps in that county leaking poisons to the river – dumps with names like Hyde Park, S-Area and 102nd Street, all burial sites for tens-of-thousands of some of the most hazardous man-made substances known to modern science and all located virtually along the shore of the river or on fractured bedrock a short distance away.
By the early to mid 1980s, environmental agencies on both sides of the border had tracked the presence of these chemicals throughout Lake Ontario and hundreds of miles downstream in the St. Lawrence River where high concentrations of them had accumulated in the flesh of beluga whales.
Those findings and years of pressure from citizens in New York and Ontario finally led to the signing in 1987of a U.S/Canada “declaration of intent” to cut the flow of chemicals to the river by at least 50 per cent. There is all kinds of evidence that a great deal has been achieved since the signing of this agreement. Some monitoring by agency scientists in both countries have shown levels of chemicals down by as much as 80 to 90 per cent in the flesh of fish and the eggs of fish-eating birds like herring gulls and cormorants.
But the information in the latest New York and Ontario fish guides serve as a stark reminder that we still have a way to go in dealing with the chemicals that are still out their, cycling through water and air, embedded in the bottom sediment of our creeks, rivers and lakes, and accumulating in the flesh of fish, birds and other members of the food chain, right up to and including humans.
The fish guide warnings are also a reminder that large quantities of Dioxin and other toxic chemicals remain entombed in Love Canal, Hyde Park and other massive dumps on or near the shores of one of the world’s great rivers. These dumps have been surrounding over and capped over the past few decades with “containment systems” the engineers who built them assure us should last three or four decades before they have to be repaired or replaced.
The problem with that is the persistence of the chemicals the systems were installed to hold back. A chemist can tell you that many of these chemicals may remain dangerous for hundreds of years and that begs a few worrisome questions.
Who is going to be there in the decades ahead to make sure these containment systems remain intact enough to keep these chemicals from bleeding into our shared waters in the quantities they did 30 years ago? Will the media be doing its job as a watchdog on this one?
A year ago this June, when the International Joint Commission – the official Canada/U.S. watchdog on Great Lakes environmental issues – was in Niagara Falls, N.Y. to hear residents’ concerns about issues around the Niagara River and adjoining water bodies, there was no one from the mainstream newspapers or broadcast media there.
Let’s hope, for the sake of future generations, that the environmental issues that still need to be addressed in and around the Niagara River watershed are not forgotten.