Industrial Chemicals In Charleston Harbor Taint Fish — And Those Who Eat Them | SC Climate And Environment News

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Mostly cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy after midnight. Low 73F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph.

Dwone Washington watches his two fishing poles while a flock of bird passes overhead at North Bridge Park on Monday, April 25, 2022, in West Ashley. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

Donald Bellamy casts his net along the dock at Riverfront Park on Thursday, April 28, 2022, in North Charleston. Bellamy said he typically uses this park to get bait for fishing at other locations around Charleston. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

Dominique Brinkley, an avid fisher around Charleston, casts her pole into the Ashley River from Brittlebank Park on Sunday, March 20, 2022. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

Dominique Brinkley checks through her tackle box while out fishing at Brittlebank Park on Sunday, March 20, 2022, in Charleston. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

A lone fisherman casts a line along the beach at North Bridge Park on Monday, April 25, 2022, in West Ashley. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

A spoonbill is seen in the marsh at Brittlebank Park on Sunday, March 20, 2022, in Charleston. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

Dwone Washington watches his two fishing poles while a flock of bird passes overhead at North Bridge Park on Monday, April 25, 2022, in West Ashley. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

A lone fisherman casts a line along the beach at North Bridge Park on Monday, April 25, 2022, in West Ashley. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

Recent testing by the military has shown dangerously high levels of industrial chemicals in locations that could easily wash into Charleston Harbor — and into the diets of humans.

The results come as military installations across the country are facing potential liability for using the compounds in toxic firefighting foams. In one case, at Joint Base Charleston, chemicals showed up at levels thousands of times higher than a recommended health limit.

The results have helped to provide one answer for where this chemical pollution is coming from, which has been indicated for decades as researchers found evidence of contaminated dolphins and fish. But even as a likely source of the contamination has become clearer, state health authorities in South Carolina have yet to issue warnings about eating what comes out of the water.

A spokesman for the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control said the agency would start testing fish themselves this summer — even though the evidence of contamination in marine life first emerged nearly two decades ago.

These compounds, abbreviated as PFAS, are linked to cancers and reproductive problems in humans. The do not degrade readily, building up in the bodies of those who are exposed to them, earning the name "forever chemicals."

In high levels, they are recognized as toxic. After The Post and Courier tested and found them in the drinking water of a Columbia-area trailer park in 2020, state health authorities agreed to provide bottled water for the residents there.

In the past year, legislators have debated a bill to regulate these chemicals in drinking water around the state. But there was little discussion about another known pathway for PFAS to enter human bodies: through the fish we catch and eat.

Patricia Fair, an environmental scientist, has been studying these chemicals for years. Her interest started in 2003, in the midst of a wide-ranging health study on bottlenose dolphins.

Charleston's dolphins, she and a group of colleagues found, had as much PFAS in their bodies as might be found in a worker who manufactures these chemicals.

A spoonbill is seen in the marsh at Brittlebank Park on Sunday, March 20, 2022, in Charleston. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

This discovery matters not just for the dolphins, but for us, too: we eat the same fish from the same place. But little has been done to warn the public about this risk, or to clean up the chemicals that have polluted water, soil and animals.

"What have we done for 20 years, knowing that these (chemicals) are highly persistent?" Fair said.

For years, a succession of scientific studies slowly raised a din of alarm about a pollution problem in Charleston: animals that live in the city's harbor, and even the sediment that sits under the changing tides, are laced with PFAS chemicals.

PFAS, which is an abbreviation for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are long chemical chains of fluorine and carbon. These strong bonds have special properties that are useful in many applications, from repelling water and grease to putting out fires.

When Fair was studying dolphins in the early 2000s, then as a researcher for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, she and her colleagues didn't set out to find PFAS alone.

The health project used a broad team of researchers to compare bottlenose dolphins here to another population in Indian River Lagoon in Florida. The group aimed to capture the big picture of these animals' health. The team hauled the dolphins they studied onto a boat and sampled blood, measured the thickness of blubber, took biopsies of fat and recorded other observations.

Far and away, the PFAS chemicals stood out in their results, even against other dolphin populations.

"We did not know the level of contamination that we would find," Fair said.

The first paper published with this information, in 2005, was an early entry into what is still-growing literature on how far these chemicals have spread — and how deep their dangers run. In the time since, researchers have found PFAS across the globe.

They were found to contaminate the drinking waters of several towns along the Ohio River Valley, and an ensuing study of about 70,000 affected people from Ohio and West Virginia turned up links to liver cancer, kidney cancer and hypertension in pregnant women.

PFAS chemicals, once in the body, were found to pass from mother to child via the placenta and breastmilk.

"Every baby that comes into this world is contaminated with it," Fair said.

She went on to contribute to several papers spurred by this initial discovery. The dolphins here, Fair and collaborators found, had higher amounts of this chemical in their bodies than any other U.S. dolphin population at the time of the 2003 sampling. The chemicals were showing up in hotspots in the sediment under the water, suggesting ongoing releases. And they were in fish species eaten by both dolphins and people.

And as scientists probed these affects on animals in Charleston Harbor, one source of potential pollution here and around the country became clearer: the military.

The Department of Defense first starting using PFAS chemicals in its firefighting foams in the mid-1960s. The chemicals proved useful in putting out dangerous fuel blazes — used in foam, these molecules spread out to create a layer that effectively cut off oxygen from blazes.

At the former Charleston Naval Base, which sprawled for 3½ miles along the Cooper River next to present-day North Charleston, the chemicals were also sprayed in the air to suppress the spread of another toxic substance: chromium, used in ship plating.

That base officially closed in 1996, but like other military installations, it was the site of repeated PFAS releases from fire drills where the foam was sprayed over and over. It wasn't until 2018 that the Navy actually started testing for the chemicals on base — despite the fact that Navy scientists internally described the harms of firefighting foams as early as 1976.

The Navy started testing at the former Charleston complex because the U.S. Congress has demanded it in recent federal laws setting the annual budget for our armed forces, said Jared Hayes, a policy analyst with Environmental Working Group.

"Essentially, they're testing now because they finally have felt the pressure to take responsibility for the contamination that they've caused," Hayes said.

Military officials also told The Post and Courier they were essentially following the procedure for a Superfund cleanup, even though PFAS chemicals are not currently regulated under federal law.

Some public results are available in Navy documents from 2019, posted in obscure government databases. They show dangerous levels of PFAS have seeped into the groundwater flowing under the former base.

In one sampling well just northwest of Bainbridge Avenue, near the top of Shipyard Creek, test results showed the levels of two chemicals were nearly eight times the Environmental Protection Agency's health limit for drinking water. In all, the Navy found PFAS chemicals in all 18 wells it tested. In six of them, the chemicals were higher than their screening level for a potential cleanup.

"Because of the widespread presence of PFAS across the site, which is complex in nature and has many potential PFAS sources, no area of the former (Navy base) can be currently completely eliminated from future investigation," according to the Navy's report.

EPA's drinking water standard is only a health recommendation, and none of the groundwater on the Navy base was used for drinking water. But groundwater moves, potentially affecting other wells off-base, and eventually reaching the harbor.

In a statement, Dawn DeFreitas, environmental cleanup coordinator for the naval complex, said the Navy was moving into a new phase of investigation at the site this year to further study the extent of the chemicals. But it won't be testing the handful of private wells found nearby because they see no immediate threat.

"The Navy has determined that the sampling of drinking water wells identified within a one-mile radius of the (Charleston Navel Complex) is not required at this time," she wrote.

In recent years, the Air Force has also started testing for PFAS chemicals on Joint Base Charleston, which stretches along the Ashley River in North Charleston, and shares runways with Charleston International Airport.

An initial round of testing in 2018 showed extreme levels of these chemicals: a combined 1.15 million parts per trillion of two PFAS chemicals — an amount 16,428 times higher than EPA's health limit. That makes Joint Base Charleston one of only 13 bases across the country with PFAS levels this high, Hayes said.

Subsequent testing at the base has shown lower levels of these chemicals, but two testing areas on the Joint Base property have a "high" risk of groundwater contamination, according to a 2021 report.

Diana Cossaboom, a spokeswoman for the Air Force, wrote in an email that the military branch was moving into the Remedial Investigation phase of study, in which more testing will be done through 2023.

She wrote that the Air Force would "complete remediation if necessary to protect human health and the environment."

All those chemicals, sprayed year after year, didn't stay in one place. They ended up in Charleston Harbor and, later, in the fish living there.

Dominique Brinkley, an avid fisher around Charleston, casts her pole into the Ashley River from Brittlebank Park on Sunday, March 20, 2022. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

Dominique Brinkley, a North Charleston resident, is keenly aware of contaminants that might seep into her daily catch. A hospice nurse, she picks up her fishing rod whenever she has free time.

"I'll go just about anywhere I can get access to the water," Brinkley said. "My work is more mentally and emotionally taxing. So it's nice to come out and not have to do too much."

Not that she's trying to walk away empty handed. One of the greatest joys of fishing, she said, is having a meal to bring home to her family. She's even started teaching her 2-year-old granddaughter to fish, albeit in the bathtub.

At the same time, she's thrown back plenty of fish that come out of the water looking injured or diseased. But PFAS chemicals wouldn't show up in such an obvious way.

When pondering the risk of consuming those chemicals, "It's scary to think about something you can't control," Brinkley said.

In a 2019 paper, Fair and other researchers sampled red drum, flounder, croaker, spot and mullet caught around the harbor for PFAS chemicals. They were found in all of these fish — and in a few, the levels were high enough to suggest that people shouldn't eat them more than a few times a month.

Dominique Brinkley checks through her tackle box while out fishing at Brittlebank Park on Sunday, March 20, 2022, in Charleston. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

But in South Carolina, the Department of Health and Environmental Control doesn't even warn the public about the possibility of these chemicals in local fish, the way it does for other pollutants, like mercury.

DHEC was aware of the PFAS found at Joint Base Charleston and the former Navy base before that information became public — it reviewed the military's testing plans, and later its results.

Asked whether the agency had ever considered issuing warnings about the fish in Charleston Harbor, Ron Aiken, a spokesman, wrote in an email that DHEC is following its own strategic plan to deal with the chemicals. It will begin to test oysters, blue crabs, fish and the water they live in this summer, he said.

"The Department has been proactive by preparing and implementing strategies to assess the impact of PFAS on water resources of the state," Aiken wrote.

Other states have issued warnings related to fish consumption. Massachusetts flagged five ponds near Cape Cod that were laced with PFAS chemicals. Maryland issued alerts for certain fish caught in a creek off the Potomac River.

But even though these warnings give the public important health information, in Andrew Wunderley's view, they're not enough.

"The concept of fish advisories has always really bothered me. ... DHEC is telling you how you can safely eat contaminated fish. It just drives me up the wall," said Wunderley, executive director of Charleston Waterkeeper.

Dwone Washington fishes at North Bridge Park on Monday evening, April 25, 2022 in West Ashley. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

Dwone Washington (left) and Eugene Triceo fish at North Bridge Park on Monday evening, April 25, 2022 in West Ashley. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

People fish underneath the bridge at North Bridge Park on Monday evening, April 25, 2022 in West Ashley. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

Dwone Washington fishes at North Bridge Park on Monday evening, April 25, 2022 in West Ashley. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

A boat passes underneath North Bridge on Monday evening, April 25, 2022 in West Ashley. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

Eugene Triceo (right) is seen fishing along the dock at North Bridge Park on Monday evening, April 25, 2022 in West Ashley. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

A lone fisherman casts a line along the beach at North Bridge Park on Monday, April 25, 2022, in West Ashley. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

Dominique Brinkley, an avid fisher around Charleston, casts her pole into the Ashley River from Brittlebank Park on Sunday, March 20, 2022. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

A spoonbill is seen in the marsh at Brittlebank Park on Sunday, March 20, 2022, in Charleston. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

Dwone Washington watches his two fishing poles while a flock of bird passes overhead at North Bridge Park on Monday, April 25, 2022, in West Ashley. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

Dominique Brinkley an avid fisher around Charleston casts her pole into the Ashley River from Brittlebank Park on Sunday, March 20, 2022 in Charleston. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

Dominique Brinkley checks through her tackle box while out fishing at Brittlebank Park on Sunday, March 20, 2022, in Charleston. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff

There are dozens of waterways along Charleston's rivers that offer fishing for residents or people passing by. Recent testing by the military has shown dangerously high levels of industrial chemicals in locations that could easily wash into Charleston Harbor.