PFOS/PFAS contaminants in fish, info about poss. problems in area

NOTE: This information is NOT from me. I am merely passing on information from someone who is hoping to make the information more publicly available to people around Ontario that are likely facing a similar problems but are not being informed by our gov't agency(ies). If you would like more info., please contact the person through e-mail shown below. He's been involved in the Hamilton Airport issue for years now and is concerned (as I am) that the available contaminants information that the gov't has obtained using tax payers money is not being released to all that maybe affected (but only to local land owners and leaving it up to them to decide if they want to warn people, esp. fisher people, about the risks of eating fish from the watershed)

Pine and Nottawasaga rivers have a similar situation as you will see below but of course is not getting the same attention (and funding to study) that the Hamilton Airport has received. Like many of the members of this board, he also use to fish (and eat) a great deal of pike from the area thinking it was "clean".



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Attention: People fishing in the Pine and Nottawasaga Rivers in Simcoe County

How much have you been told about the PFAS/PFCs/PFOS contamination in Simcoe, and what is being done about it?

I live in Hamilton, and I am writing you because we share a common problem. We both have one of our local waterways so badly contaminated with PFAS/PFCs/PFOS that there are restrictions on how much fish should be eaten. Some of the fish are so highly contaminated that they are deemed to be “do not eat” fish.

The contaminated waterway in Simcoe starts at Bear Creek in CFB Borden, and then continues downstream to the Pine River and then downstream to the Nottawasaga River (including Jacks Lake). According to the “current” Guide to Eating Ontario Fish: Near the source of the contamination, none of the fish should be eaten at all. Further downstream (Pine River), children and women of childbearing age should not eat any of the burbot or white suckers (the species tested for PFAS). Even further downstream (Nottawasaga River including Jacks Lake), there are still reductions to consumption levels for yellow perch, pike, rock bass, bullhead, carp, white suckers, and redhorse. As bad as this is, recent scientific studies have indicated that the amounts of PFAS/PFCs/PFOS that were deemed “advisable” to eat in the Guide were set too high (see below).

In Hamilton, the highly contaminated areas are downstream from the former fire-fighting practice pad at the Hamilton International Airport. In order to comply with directives from Transport Canada, fire fighters sprayed large amounts of AFFF (aqueous film-forming foam) on practice fires in order to train with the use of AFFF. A popular type of AFFF had PFAS/PFCs/PFOS as a major ingredient, and the PFAS/PFCs/PFOS ran off the airport site and contaminated many kilometers of waterway downstream in the upper Welland River. The zone of high contamination is so long that it extends across Hamilton and on into Niagara. Even the Binbrook Conservation Area has highly contaminated fish and wildlife.

In Hamilton, Transport Canada has funded a million dollar, seven year (and continuing) study called the “Hamilton International Airport - Offsite Risk Assessment”. Because some of the results of this study are relevant to all PFAS/PFC/PFOS contaminated waterways, I will attempt to send the three pdf’s that have been released as attachments in following eMAILs. (If you did not get them, please eMAIL me if you would like me to send them to another eMAIL address.)

One of the key findings of the study is that it is likely that the spraying of PFOS ended in 1989, and the spraying of all PFAS ended in 1994. Despite this, high levels of environmental contamination (including tainted fish) persist for many kilometres downstream to this day. It is likely that this pollution will remain a significant problem for the foreseeable future.

An important part of the study was to evaluate whether or not the levels of PFAS/PFCs/PFOS currently used in the Guide to Eating Ontario Fish are consistent with the current state of scientific knowledge. The short answer is not even close. Adult men should eat no more than 30% of the amounts recommended in the Guide, and children and women of childbearing age should eat no more than 14% of the amounts recommended in the Guide. This means that the amounts listed in the Guide for men need to be decreased by more than 3.3-fold, and the amounts listed for children and women of childbearing age need to be decreased by more than 7.1-fold.

To see what applying this correction looks like for the fish in the upper Welland River, please see the pdf labelled “ERRATA_Tables”. As can be seen, the result is many more fish with decreased amounts of consumption.

I do not know when the Guide to Eating Ontario Sport Fish will be corrected to bring it in line with current scientific knowledge.

The main thing to remember is that these correction factors (e.g., children and women of childbearing age need to decrease their consumption by more than 7.1-fold) should also be applied to the fish in the contaminated area of Simcoe along the Bear Creek-Pine River-Nottawasaga River-Jacks Lake watercourse. The result will be decreased consumption levels, with more fish deemed to be highly contaminated “do not eat” fish.

Have you been told about these findings?
Transport Canada and the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks believe that their public notification regarding these results is “adequate”.
I am interested in learning what part of the public notification process is working. If you have heard about these findings, how were you informed?
If you have not been officially informed (e.g. by somebody other than me), please let me know when the results of this major federally funded study are made public in Simcoe.

Joe Minor
jminor942@gmail.com

Despite the fact that I have great concern about contaminants in the fish I get from the wild, it seems to me that the problem is quite a bit exaggerated here.
I had checked the Guide to Eating Ontario Fish for those water bodies in the post and I don’t see anything really bad or exceptional compared to many other lakes and rivers.
Obviously, the water in urban/development\agricultural areas are more contaminated than those in remote areas. With some exceptions though… For example I could never understand why, according to the Guide, fish from Lake Simcoe is cleaner than the fish from GB.
Or fish from urban Aquitaine lake, not far from my house in Mississauga, is eatable, according to the Guide, even though the lake is full of sh*t.
Or, you can see that 60-65 cm chinook salmon from Pine river can be eaten 4 times per month while the same chinook from Nottawasaga River only twice, despite the obvious fact that to get into Pine river chinook has to pass Nottawasaga River and in anyway this fish come from GB and all contaminants it gets should be similar to those in GB4 area. (In GB4 you can eat 8 per month according to that Guide)
Yes, I have way too many questions for the Guide…
Anyway, nearly all fish from nearly all lakes have some restrictions.
In the US they have guides (a few decades old though) for eating commercial fish. It is mostly concerned about mercury but generally I think commercial fish is not any better than our sport fish.
And then… They test the fish but I never heard of any government agency testing meat, dairy products etc in the same manner as they test fish.
So what to eat? We could try to convert to vegetarians but who knows what is in the veggy…
The good thing is that despite all this pollution, contamination, despite all this sh*t around, the population in developed countries is way much healthier than it was in the past when all was clean and nice…. Or we don’t know how it was…
I would take it a bit easier. Not saying to be stupid, though…

Flukes, you have a PM.

Bear creek starts near Barrie and empties at hiway 90 into the Nottawasaga R. doesn't flow anywhere thru Base Borden. Unless there are 2 Bear creeks in the area.

I think there is more than one Bear Creek.

First, again, I am not the person providing this information (just relaying it to members here who may be interested as it may affect them). I think one of the main points that was being made is that the latest information is not being made available on the guide.
Farm animals: lots of testing but of different kinds of chemicals (not the same ones that the sporting fish guide would test for (normally)...and if they are raising animals in these areas and drinking or eating grasses, etc. with these kinds of contaminants, there will be problems as well...in the summary of the report it does states that more studies have to be done on the animals being farmed in these contaminated areas.
Another issue to consider is that most of our farm animals are not high level predators as fish are. Most are provided lots of plant-based food so they are essentially grazers and as such are much lower on the food chain than fish (very few of which are strictly plant eaters so fish are accumulating more contaminants faster than lower trophic level animals).
The recommended levels for safe eating is based on modelling using limited data that the gov't obtains and then test and there can be quite a bit of individual differences so best to test more and keep testing (but making that information public in a timely manner - not several years later when things may have changed again). At least, I would like to know if and when I should slow down or stop eating fish with such bad chemicals as soon as possible and not many years later (7 year study and still none of this information is available on the guide...but only provided to local land owners - that doesn't make sense to me, a tax payer just as the local land owners are as well).
Anyway, this can go on but clearly you have lots of questions (and you should, as do I, because some of the data don't make sense) for the agencies testing the fish - I think they are the only ones who can really adequately answer your questions and they should be available to answer your (and any tax payer's) questions about the information they are providing. I can only guess at these things and that won't help much here. Another person you can contact is Joe Minor and his e-mail is posted below (you can get both perspectives and decide what you would listen to). Joe has a Ph.D. in biology and is also a fisherman who has caught and eaten lots of fish from the Nottawasaga watershed as well as near the Hamilton Airport watershed so he's not pleased with the withholding of information leading him to have consumed more fish than he would have if he had known. He is posting to warn others in areas where the gov't isn't even bothering to study in detail (at least not yet) and those are some places where there are more people eating fish that may have very similar problems with the same contaminants. I am sure Joe can provide much better info. than I can.

Thanks. replied

There's another that starts in the swampy area on the south side of Borden and runs through the Base and empties into the Pine river on the north side of Range Rd. Most folks are not aware of it.