Haidee V Eugenio

Pacific Daily News

Ten years after Guam health and environmental agencies began advising residents to limit or avoid eating fish caught in Cocos Lagoon, a new federal assessment states there’s a continued need for the advisory.

Results of the assessment, which was conducted in 2015, show that sediment and fish in the lagoon are still tainted with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a contaminant that drastically increases the risk of cancer.

The assessment also found another contaminant in fish and sediment samples — a pesticide once widely used to control insects that carry diseases such as malaria. In 1972, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned this contaminant, called dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT, because of damage to wildlife.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration conducted the 2015 assessment in the lagoon, taking samples of fish and sediment.

Results were presented Tuesday night to fishermen and village residents in Merizo by a team from NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science.

A printout of the presentation stated the following: “Results from the NOAA 2015 sampling in Cocos Lagoon validates the need for a fish advisory.”

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Guam Environmental Protection Agency administrator Walter Leon Guerrero told Pacific Daily News on Tuesday that the advisory, issued in 2006, has remained in place.

Leon Guerrero said NOAA made a commitment to Merizo residents that the federal agency will present the results of its assessment “as soon as they are available,” so they did so on Tuesday night.

He said there would be a meeting in September by local and federal agencies such as the Guam EPA, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard and NOAA, among others, to discuss the next course of action following the results of this assessment.

PCBs in Cocos Lagoon

The presence of PCBs in fish and sediment in and around the Cocos Lagoon has been well documented for some time.

PCBs are industrial chemicals that were banned in the U.S. in 1979 because of the possible health impact on humans and the environment, according to NOAA.

NOAA’s 2015 assessment found multiple fish species had concentrations above U.S. EPA’s recommended levels.

The administration also found all total PCB concentrations above the EPA’s recommended levels were from four species of fish caught around Cocos Island.

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The NOAA 2015 assessment identified another contaminant not previously reported or found in sampled fish and sediment in and around the Cocos Lagoon.

This contaminant is called dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane or DDT, a pesticide once widely used to control insects that carry diseases such as malaria but was banned in 1972 because of damage to wildlife.

DDT, an organochlorine pesticide, was detected at elevated concentrations in fish collected from around Cocos Island, according to NOAA.

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“Elevated DDT concentrations in fish from around Cocos Island is likely the result of the use of DDT in the past, perhaps to control mosquitoes on Cocos Island,” according to NOAA’s findings.

The NOAA team that conducted the assessment starting in 2015 comprises Tony Pait, Ian Hartwell, Dennis Apeti, Adrienne Loerzel and Valerie Brown.

The assessment results show fairly low concentrations of the chemical contaminants analyzed were found in sediment, including those around Cocos Island.

The results also show that the low concentrations of chemical contaminants in sediments may be related to sediment characteristics in Cocos Lagoon, primarily sand gravel, which typically does not accumulate chemical contaminants.

The 2015 NOAA fieldwork was done in May 2015.

Sediment samples were collected from 25 sites in Cocos Lagoon.

A total of 27 fish tissue samples were collected from 16 sites around Cocos Island and throughout Cocos Lagoon.

Cocos Lagoon is part of the larger Manell-Geus watershed, which suffers from poor water quality due to sedimentation and a history of contamination, according to NOAA.

Since 2006, the Guam Department of Public Health and Social Services has issued advisories regarding the consumption of fish pulled from the lagoon, which have tested very high for PCBs.

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The February 2006 fish consumption advisory issued by Guam EPA and the Department of Public Health and Social Services said the advisory doesn’t cover swimming, wading, catch-and-release fishing, or any other activity in Cocos Lagoon waters.

Because the local agencies at the time had only preliminary results, there wasn’t enough information to close the Cocos Lagoon to fishing at the time.

According to NOAA, there’s no mystery that the PCBs came from the Coast Guard’s LORAN station.

The LORAN, or long-range navigation station, was disestablished in 1965.

The NOAA assessment team said last year that the PCBs came from electrical equipment, such as transformers and capacitors, which were improperly discarded on Cocos Island and in Cocos Lagoon.

In 2005, military soil tests on Cocos Island found PCB levels to be about 4,900 times higher than the federally recommended level.

In that study, 11 fish from the lagoon were found to have PCB levels 265 times the acceptable level.