Mercury Rising

Nothing of the day or the place spoke danger to the two fishermen when they launched their canoe into the upper reaches of the Chester River watershed. A soft September sun shone through the afternoon haze and a fitful breeze riffled the surface, making sparkles. Birds sang. The men flicked spinning rods, casting bait to the shallows, and the strikes came quickly.

There are photos of them there that day, smiling, unshaven, holding their catches a little toward the camera, like fishermen do, to make them look larger. The men were plainly proud, as fishermen are, of a catch like that -- largemouth bass, fat, green, shimmering in the light -- hard-fighting and pretty good eating, buttered and battered and fried just right. They didn't know, then, what they know now.

What they held in their hands could wreck their brains. A poison.

Some already had suspicions, though, or Jim Thompson of Maryland's Department of Natural Resources and Dave Sutherland of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would not have been out on Urieville Lake this day and on Jones Pond the next. The Chester Riverkeeper had asked them to bag and return all the fish they could catch, to be sent to a laboratory at the University of North Carolina.

It turned out that every fish they caught in the so-called freshwater catchments of the Chester River contained mercury. Three out of 10 fish had mercury in their flesh exceeding the level set by government as safe for human consumption.

Mercury, of the same chemical family as lead, stunts brain development in fetuses and children, cripples coordination in everyone overexposed to it, causing involuntary muscle action, attention deficit disorders, heart irregularities and problems with blood pressure. It impairs vision and hearing, and reproductive systems, too. It's a worldwide worry.

But in the Chester? In a river that is arguably the least developed of the upper Eastern Shore? There is no industry in sight for the 60 miles this tidal estuary flows, nothing to warn boaters or those dangling hooks from the bridge at Chestertown of the danger below.

Where's it coming from? Downriver and upwind. Just across the Chesapeake Bay from the mouth of the Chester rise the stacks of Brandon Shores, a coal-fired power plant. "It is one of the 50 top mercury polluters in the nation," reports the Chester Riverkeeper. According to a study in 2005 by the National Wildlife Federation, Brandon Shores spits 709 pounds of mercury in the air annually. Also nearby are Phoenix Services, spewing 198 pounds of mercury in a year; Waste Energy Partners, 162 pounds; and C.P. Crane Generating Station, 91 pounds. Total mercury air emissions statewide, according to Maryland's Department of Environment, and all of it from plants that are up prevailing wind from the Chester: 3,295 pounds of mercury that wind up falling from the sky.

Meantime, studies cited by the Waterkeeper Alliance find that 1/70th of a teaspoon of pure mercury is enough to contaminate a 25-acres lake.

The Chester isn't the only sick river. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has reported that more than a fourth of American rivers now are under mercury fish advisories. Two years ago the EPA administrator admitted, "Mercury is everywhere. The more waters we monitor, the more we find mercury."

Trouble is, ever since George W. Bush became President, EPA hasn't wanted to do all that much monitoring. And the Chester is not one of the rivers where the EPA bothered to look. The findings here came because of an initiative by some 130 Waterkeepers nationwide, who sent fish to the lab in North Carolina. Reports Dr. Rick Maas at UNC, "We are finding mercury levels above the EPA consumption guide in roughly half the samples sent."

A number to remember: 630,000. That, according to research cited by the American Academy of Pediatrics, is how many infants were born in the U.S. last year with unsafe levels of mercury in their tissues. This year 630,000 more will be contaminated, and 630,000 will be every year until the pollution is plugged. The number of American children impacted by mercury poisoning is four times higher than those affected by all other birth defects combined.

It's no mystery how it happens. The puzzle is why.

Technology exists that can prevent 90 percent of mercury air pollution from power plants. The National Wildlife Federation told the Maryland General Assembly in testimony in 2005 that filtering processes to cut the polluting would cost the average Maryland household between 63 cents and $1.88 per month in passed-along billing. "That," said the NWF representative, "is about the price of one cup of coffee each month.

To date, bills requiring 90 percent reductions of coal-plant mercury pollution by 2010 have failed in the General Assembly. Environmentalists are always outnumbered and outspent by lobbyists for the industry, who tell lawmakers the cost is too high. These mouthpieces for the smokestacks cite a finding by the EPA that less that one percent of global mercury that taints fish comes from the U.S.

That may be true -- worldwide. But U.S. industry remains the cause, as the EPA also concedes, of 60 percent of that pollution within this country. Furthermore, EPA estimates that 14 percent of the mercury emitted is deposited within 30 miles of each site. The Chester is within that range from four of Maryland's top 10 mercury polluters.

To arguments that filtering mercury would be too expensive, Dr. Lorne Garrettson of the American Academy of Pediatrics is scornful: "The case against is flawed to the degree that if you did it on a high school economics test you'd flunk. Nobody puts in the cost on health, and that's enormous. Nobody figures in lost earning capacity that is the direct result of intelligence lost caused by mercury pollution, and it's vast. Cost benefits far, far outweigh cleanup cost."

And yet, the last time the General Assembly voted, it bought the power industry's logic. Even though every single member lives in the wind-shadow of a mercury-vomiting smokestack. Their votes seemed to defy self-interest -- although state legislatures being what they are, no citizen can always be sure that argument is all that lobbyists are feeding lawmakers. Absent clear evidence of bribery, however, you can only suppose that rejecting any affordable plan to rid mercury from what we eat was an involuntary muscle action, the result of impaired vision and hearing, mass attention deficit disorder, raging insanity, or the thinking of people with the IQs of largemouth bass.

Must be something in the water.