The Maryland Department of the Environment said yesterday that it will be posting up to 10 signs "within days" warning people not to eat fish caught in the Back River, which have been found to contain high levels of a suspected carcinogen.

The announcement came one day after the Herring Run Watershed Association and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation chastised the MDE for failing to put up the signs while people have continued to fish in the polluted river for the past five months.

The department, however, denied that it had promised to post the signs as early as February. A member of the Herring Run group and a state legislator's aide both disputed that claim.

The delay was partly due to discussions over wording and where to place English and Spanish warnings on the 17- by-22-inch signs, an official with the Baltimore County Department of Environmental Protections and Resource Management said yesterday.

Nevertheless, environmentalists are pleased that the signs are going up.

"One of the reasons for putting up the signs immediately is that you can avoid future problems with people coming into an area and contaminating themselves," said Andrew Fellows, Chesapeake program coordinator for Clean Water Action.

The issue of warning signs arose after the Herring Run group asked for a study of the safety of eating fish from the Back River in April last year after a member donated 2,000 pounds of them to the Helping Up Mission in Baltimore.

The study, released in January, found that five species of fish contained PCBs up to eight times the federal limit. PCBs were used in insulating fluid in electrical transformers and are a probable carcinogen.

The watershed association held a meeting Feb. 27 with MDE and state Department of Natural Resources officials. At that meeting, the MDE pledged to post the signs, said Richard S. Hersey, executive director of the association.

But Richard J. McIntire, spokesman for the MDE, said yesterday that the group never requested the signs. "The idea of the signs being requested in February is a misnomer; it's inaccurate," McIntire said.

Hersey took issue with that claim.

"I've got other things to do than to make up stories," Hersey said. "It's unfortunate they've taken this position. They should move forward."

Bob Ward, legislative representative for state Sen. Norman R. Stone Jr. of Dundalk, attended the meeting and said that he, too, heard the agency pledge to post signs at contaminated sites.

"Yes they did," Ward said. "They said they would be posting something and notifying the watermen."

The Back River study results came not long after a similar study of some Maryland waterways in December, which led the MDE to promise to post signs in 11 other spots at which it recommends an outright ban on eating fish or shellfish caught there.

Those waterways are the Back and Gunpowder rivers and Lake Roland in Baltimore County; the Susquehanna and Bush rivers in Harford County; Corsica Creek in Queen Anne's County; the Elk, Sassafras and Bohemia rivers in Cecil County; Furnace and Curtis creeks in Anne Arundel County; and the Potomac River along the Maryland-Virginia border.

Asked whether those signs had been posted, McIntire said: "I do not know of signs going up anywhere else."