NEW YORK -- For the first time in two decades, New York state environmental scientists have found that chemical contamination in striped bass from the lower reaches of the Hudson River has dropped to levels deemed safe to eat by the federal government.
In a recent study, staff scientists with the Environmental Conservation Department concluded that the drop was large enough for state officials to consider ending a 23-year-old ban on commercial netting of the fish, a state law that has nearly eliminated a centuries-old traditional springtime harvest of stripers and shad along the river banks.
Any change would take at least a couple of years, but commercial fishermen were delighted by the announcement.
The chemicals in question are PCBs -- polychlorinated biphenyls -- which were legally released into the river for three decades from General Electric factories north of Troy before they were banned in 1977 as a probable cause of cancer.
The study, of samples taken in the spring of 1997, showed that PCBs in fillets from striped bass captured in the lower river (where fresh water becomes salt water, typically around Catskill) averaged 1.06 parts per million, about half the federal limit of 2 parts per million.
Only 3.3 percent of the samples exceeded the limit, the study said.
In 1990, the PCB level in stripers was almost 3 parts per million; by 1994, it was down to 2 parts per million.
Tests of 1998 samples will not be completed until April.
Dr. Ronald Sloan, a biologist for the Environmental Conservation Department and an author of the study, emphasized that PCB levels were below the federal limit only in fish taken south of Poughkeepsie.
Although the level in stripers from the river near Albany also dropped, it was not low enough to bring them under the federal limit, he said. He added that other species did not show a similar decline.
Striped bass are less prone to absorb PCBs than other river fish because they spend part of each year at sea, he said.
Shad have little exposure to PCBs because they come to the Hudson only to spawn.
Other fish that live in the river -- largemouth bass, catfish, eels -- tend to have higher PCB levels and remain above the limits.
Sloan said the results should prompt state officials to consider ending the law banning commercial netting of stripers.
"PCB concentrations in striped bass have reached the point where continued limitations on the commercial fishery due solely to PCBs are not justified," the study concluded.
"At least for this species, the monitoring vigil over the last 25 years is starting to bear testimony to the fact that if a natural system stops being insulted, conditions will start to shift favorably."
Robert Gabrielson, a commercial fisherman who has netted shad for 58 years near his home in Nyack, said, "I've been waiting 23 years to hear something like this."
Any decision on reopening the commercial striped bass fishery in the Hudson would be preceded by public hearings and would involve a multistate commission that sets limits for how many fish may be taken in each state along the Atlantic Coast, said Gerry Barnhart, the director of fish, wildlife and marine resources for New York's Environmental Conservation Department.
The PCB study was not expected to change state and federal efforts to force General Electric to clean up the river banks and bottom downstream of its two factories, at Fort Edward and Hudson Falls, which released the PCBs while making transformers and other electrical equipment.
Pub Date: 03/05/99