WILLIAM BOWERMAN
(Clemson University):

Everybody knows that this is a rescheduled workshop, actually a combination of two. Thank you for negotiating your way through the Delta Centre and over to this building to find us. Hopefully, there will be more people that will find us today.

My name is Bill Bowerman. I'll be the moderator for this morning. I'm from Clemson University.

It's my distinct pleasure to welcome Commissioner Tom Baldini, the U.S. Chair of the International Joint Commission, to welcome us and give us a few remarks as we open this conference.

TOM BALDINI
(U.S. Chair, International Joint Commission):

Thank you, Bill, and welcome, everybody, and thank you for coming.

And more importantly, on behalf of the Commission, let me thank you all for reworking your schedules and your life because of the events of last month.

We really appreciate the fact that you have done that. I know many of you are very busy and you schedule many weeks and months ahead, and it's not something easily you can do. But we do appreciate you doing this.

As you know, we've rearranged some of the schedules and we've combined the two workshops here, the RAPs, ZIPs and Community Health, and very important ones.

Just let me thank those of you who have been involved with RAPs and LaMPs for so many years. As I said last night at a hearing that we had on the Lake Ontario–St. Lawrence study that we are conducting, that has been seven and a half years.

And one of the first trips that we took as commissioners back in 1994 was a tour of the St. Lawrence. We started here, in Montreal, worked our way up the system to get an understanding of the water levels and flow issues on this system.

But also, one of the issues that has been with us is the entire issue of RAPs and LaMPs. One of the very first briefings that we received was the areas of concern. What are they? Where are they? What are the issues?

And from a personal perspective, I have to say that I'm not really pleased at the progress that we've made. We've talked a lot about RAPs and LaMPs. And I do think one of the areas that we've made progress, however, is bringing to the forefront the issue of health, human health and how it has been impacted.

I think many of you here are the very knowledgeable public, and so you know that the studies have begun to indicate even with more reinforcement that there is an impact on children and on women and other members of our society who are impacted by some of the contaminants in some of the sediments that are out there.

So one of the areas that we have made progress is in the area of combining the human health and showing the linkage – and that's very important.

I think what many of us have been concerned with – and you saw in our tenth biennial report – we really stress the fact that government has to get on with cleaning these sites up.

Our own Water Quality Board some years ago, about three or four years ago, did a very extensive study on whether we should clean up, cap, leave alone, things of that nature. They did a very good analysis of those issues. There's been that sort of progress.

But now, there has to be an investment of money.

Last year, during the political campaign – at least on the U.S. side – there was some discussion about if you can clean up Florida and the Everglades and commit that amount of money, should we not begin pressuring government to commit that amount of money to clean up the sites, at least on the U.S. side?

Obviously, as a Commission, we want the sites cleaned up on both sides in a binational aspect. But at that time, there was that sort of discussion going on.

I don't think that discussion is dead. I think that discussion is still out there.

And that's why I believe that this workshop today and your continued involvement are so very, very important. We have shown that there is a connect between these sites, what goes on in the Lake, and between human health. And looking at the agenda, we're going to get some update on that information today.

But also, it's very important and very critical because you – the RAPs and the LaMPs and the ZIPs and the AOCs – are the organizations that are really closest to the people because you're organized on a very geographic basis.

And that's important because we have to maintain the information link to the people who make the decisions, whether they're state or provincial leaders or federal leaders in either country.

We've got to keep that sort of information in front of them, and more importantly, keep that political pressure on them to take the action which is going to be needed.

There is just no way of saying it other ways. It's going to take money. There's no magic. There's no wand we can wave. It is going to take some money to clean these sites up, and we're going to have to commit to that money.

I would hope that in the next five or six years, that commitment will be made. I would hope the commitment would be made earlier. Obviously, you're not going to do it all in one year. If somebody stepped up and said here's six billion, go out and do it next year, we'd have chaos. But I don't think we have to worry about that problem.

But I want to thank you because it's been individuals like yourself who have been out there and have been continually involved in these issues that have kept the momentum going even though at times it's been discouraging.

I think it's important. I think we have achieved some things, not as much as perhaps we want.

I believe we are now at the point where we can begin cleaning up some sites, and there have been some movements on U.S. side. Manistique Harbor has been cleaned up.

I notice now that the discussions are proceeding on the Fox River on the U.S. side, and that's very encouraging.

I do caution everyone, however, that how we begin to delist these sites and how we define delisting is going to be very, very important.

What does delisting mean? Is there a way for us to recognize progress other than the final end gain?

I think that's important because being a former schoolteacher, I think positive reinforcement is important to show people that progress is being made.

So I encourage you to remain involved and I look forward to today's discussion because the issues are very important to discuss the connection between the RAPs, the ZIPs and the human health.

So I want to thank you for your continued involvement and cooperation over all these years and encourage you to remain that way.

One other comment before I leave. I think many of you have picked up a copy of the priorities. We are asking that you look these over.

We are going to, as a Commission, be making decisions as to what the priorities will be for the next cycle. Obviously, we want your input, and so we would like that by the end of the month. I know that's a little short, but we are trying to maintain our schedule so that our budgeting with our regional office and with our people who commit their time to us – their volunteer time, really – can move forward on these.

Please pick this up. Please look at it. If you have comments, please get your responses back.

So thank you very much and, Bill, thank you, and I look forward to what you have to say this morning.

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

Thank you, Commissioner Baldini.

Now, to open our program, now that I see our technical difficulty looks to be taken care of, I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Chris DeRosa, who is the Director of Toxicology for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in Atlanta, who will speak on “Progress on Human Health Research”.

Chris?

DR. CHRIS DeROSA
(Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry):

Thanks, Bill.

I'd like to also begin by thanking the organizers of the workshop for the opportunity to share my Agency's perspective on the issue of how human health findings might be used to shape public health policy. That is a linkage to the title slide here.

I think I'd like to take just a minute to talk about what I mean by policy, going back to Webster's definition of policy, that being a meld between technical principles – in this case, what we know from the human health effects literature and values – and as an Agency for the public health service, one of eight agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services, an emphasis on the precautionary principle with the idea of disease prevention.

I'd like to go back to some of Dr. Baldini's points about this being something that has to be pursued at the community level. It's clear that from the events of the last month that a community capability, a community infrastructure has to be in place in order to deal with the issue of surveillance, intervention and response in a timely fashion.

I'd also like to acknowledge my co-authors, one of which who is indicated on the screen, Dr. Annette Ashizawa, an epidemiologist on our staff, and also Dr. Heraline Hicks, who is the senior toxicologist overseeing our Great Lakes Human Health Effects Research Program.

My comments this morning will be captured in a publication and in a supplemental issue of Environmental Health Perspectives soon to come out. The next slide. Do I take care of the slide from here? The next slide is an aerial view of the Great Lakes basin.

This is a view that's familiar to many of you, but there are a couple of things that I'd like to bring out here, in looking at this magnificent natural resource – 20 percent of the world's freshwater, 10,000 kilometers of shoreline, and home to about 40 million North Americans.

It's also been the centre of our country's industrial and commercial heartland.

And as a result of that, there have been a number of pollutants that have accumulated over time in the Great Lakes basin in part because only one percent of the volume of the Great Lakes leaves on an annual basis.

And so it's not surprising to see, depending on whom you talk to, that between 362 and 1,000 chemicals have been detected in the sediments, water and biota of the Great Lakes.

The issue is compounded by the fact that many of these substances that are shown here in this next slide are ones that are bioaccumulative and therefore bioaccumulate in successive food chain levels. As you go up the food chain, you see that these substances tend to bioconcentrate.

By the time you reach the top predators – the predatory birds, predatory fish, humans – you see that the levels have increased from ambient levels by a factor of two to three million-fold, which raises questions about potential health effects.

So it's safe to ask the question, or appropriate to ask the question are the fish I catch safe to eat?

And the answer to that very simple question is an unequivocal “maybe”. It depends. It depends on the size of the fish, the body of water from which it was obtained and the stage of the life cycle that the particular consumer happens to be in.

And so the answer to that question is really drawn from three broad areas of knowledge: the findings of wildlife biologists, the findings of well-controlled toxicological studies, as well as epidemiologic research that increasingly has been convergent with respect to its conclusions over the last 20 to 30 years.

I use the point or the term biologic plausibility, and the idea of is it biologically plausible that the substances that we're concerned about could be associated with the effects that we see?

Rather than talking about the issue of causality, I use the term weight of evidence because the tobacco debate indicates that causality will never be pinned down to everyone's satisfaction.

But I think that what we do as a public health agency is lay out the spectrum of information on a particular topic and then look to see where the weight of evidence tends to centre. And we use that weight of evidence as the basis for public health practice.

I'll get more to that in a little bit.

Let me just back up for a second.

Back in 1997, in this city, the Quebec Ministry of Health and Social Services, Health Canada and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry convened a symposium to look at the body of knowledge that it accrued over the last 40 years in these three broad areas that you see there on the screen.

The conclusions of the material presented at that meeting was the basis for a synthesis paper that we developed. It was peer and publicly reviewed and was referred to a panel of expert scientists, policymakers and senior science administrators for a wingspread workshop in Wisconsin in 1998.

As the basis of their deliberations over a two-day or three-day period of time, there were 32 separate recommendations made to the International Joint Commission in the broad areas of demography, exposure and research.

But the one that I would like to share with you is sort of an overall summary of their findings based on again the review of the literature over the past 40 years.

They concluded by saying that there is an urgency for action, that sufficient evidence is available to demonstrate that exposure to certain toxic substances have been sufficient to harm human health.

And as Commissioner Baldini indicated, without interventions, future exposures will continue to harm human health.

The point being given this compelling information, what are the actions that we need to take?

I'd like to step back from answering that question for just a moment and begin to talk about the overall weight of evidence in those three broad areas of knowledge – the findings of wildlife biologists, toxicologists and epidemiologists over the last 40 years.

This is a summary slide. I'm sorry that it's a little bit difficult to read, but right across the top are the range of potential health impacts across a number of vertebrate species, wildlife species in the Great Lakes basin.

And basically, this table summarizes a range of reproductive and developmental deficits, disrupted endocrine function, neurological endpoints, compromised immune function and cancer.

Again, you can see based on the checks here which indicate positive findings in those areas that there is a significant body of knowledge that the wildlife biologists have provided to us.

The reason this is of concern is that the National Academy about ten years ago shared with us that animals can be viewed as sentinels of human health events, that when you see something happening in an animal population, that's a heads up that there are implications potentially for human health.

And so those findings set the stage for a range of epidemiologic studies beginning in the 80s.

But before I go back to some of that information, I'd like to just point out that we have some supporting information. It's not surprising to see, based on what the National Academy shared with us, that the findings of wildlife biologists are recapitulated in the findings that have been summarized for in this case dioxins, mercury and PCBs, and some of the systemic health effects that you see in both humans and animals.

And what you see across the board here, in the case of these there primary suspects, is that there is a concordance of effects reported in the area of reproductive developmental deficits, neurological endpoints, endocrine function and compromised immune status.

So there is a concordance of effect across the findings of wildlife biologists, toxicologists and epidemiologists indicating that these are three legs of a stool that support the case for biologic plausibility of the human health effects of these persistent toxic substances.

So in the Great Lakes basin over the last few years, we've been engaged for about ten years in conducting a series of epidemiologic studies. I'd like to just share briefly the findings in those three broad areas of exposure, demographics and health effects.

We found that fish consumption appears to be the major pathway of exposure to persistent toxic substances. We know that the food chain accounts for anywhere from 80 to 95 percent of the body burden in human populations for these persistent toxic substances and that fish represents the primary component in contributing to that overall 80 to 95 percent proportion of the exposures accruing through the food chain.

This has been well documented in the peer-reviewed literature over the last 12 years or so.

There is a significant trend based on what I said of increasing body burden associated with increased fish consumption, again bearing out what I just mentioned.

That the susceptible populations, Mr. Baldini referred to women of reproductive age, the developing fetus and children. We see this borne out here, that women of reproductive age, the fetus and nursing infants, children, sport and subsistence anglers, the urban poor which rely on fish as an important component of their diet, and the elderly in some information that was just published in the last six months.

And the range of human endpoints are the ones that we already touched upon to a certain extent, reproductive and developmental deficits, behavioral changes, compromised immune function, neurologic endpoints and endocrine endpoints as well.

This is a summary of some 20 to 30 epidemiologic studies that have been conducted for PCBs in the last 20 or so years. These are prospective epidemiologic studies. They follow a population out in time. They're considered to be the gold standard of epidemiologic studies.

What you see is a remarkable concordance I think of some of the issues that we've talked about and along the lines of these reproductive and developmental deficits, neurological effects, endocrine and immune effects focusing on women of reproductive age, men of reproductive age, the developing fetus, recognizing this exquisite sensitivity of developing organ systems, and those who rely on fish as an important component of the diet.

So these are populations that are at risk or perhaps vulnerable by virtue of their physiologic status, the time in their life that they're exposed, as well as their elevated exposure.

And when you see a nexus between physiologic sensitivity and elevated exposure, you have particular concern.

The point of the Peou(?) Commission this past year, and I think others after the events of this last month, is that the public health infrastructure is sadly lacking in its ability to track and identify hot spots in the human population, where things may be occurring.

This is something that requires significant new funding in order for communities to be prepared for, to recognize and then to respond to human health impacts that may be occurring.

So some of the effects that I'd like to talk about a little more in depth in terms of our findings from the Great Lakes program include reproductive effects in humans following oral exposure to PCBs, again through the diet.

Jane Courval at the Michigan State University studying a cohort of over 600 couples of reproductive age has documented a delay in the time to pregnancy.

And she, along with John Vena and his colleagues at the State University of New York, Buffalo, have identified a reduced length of menstrual cycles.

And again, Dr. Vena's group identified an increased risk of infertility defined by trying for 12 months unsuccessfully to conceive.

And this has been documented that 15 percent of the couples studied here by Dr. Courval were unable to conceive in a period of 12 months.

So the significance of that is clear I think to everyone.

One I'd like to just mention a little bit more about is this reduced length of menstrual cycles. This is, according to the Endometriosis Association, a predictor of a twofold increase in incidence of risk of endometriosis. Endometriosis is an inappropriate growth of the vaginal lining, of the uterine lining.

In 1900, there were only five cases diagnosed worldwide. In the United States alone, on a yearly basis, there are about five million cases of endometriosis diagnosed on an annual basis.

Undoubtedly, part of this is due to differential diagnosis, but there is a significant change here and again points to the need to be able to track disease over time and try to identify what the reasons are for these variations that we see in the human population.

Also reported in terms of developmental effects is a decrease in gestational age on an average of five days and lower birth weight. This is based on the work on the order of 160 to 190 grams based on the work of Jacobsons and has been recapitulated more recently by Taylor et al., studying an occupational cohort in upper State New York.

These are, in the case of the Jacobsons, a cohort of 240 plus mother-infant pairs. In the case of Taylor's work, he was looking at 500 plus mother-infant pairs. Again prospective epidemiologic studies, significant sample sizes and very robust and showing a convergence in findings in two widely divergent populations.

Also, neurotoxic effects in newborns and children include decreased neuromuscular maturity. This is work done by one of the colleagues of Jacobsons, Fein, the Jacobsons and Walter Rogan in North Carolina, the North Carolina mother-infant, or maternal milk study.

This one is Lonky et al., at the University of New York at Oswego, in one of the studies funded by ATSDR and Koopman-Esseboom and her colleagues in The Netherlands. Again, you see that you have different populations, different geographic areas but the same basic endpoint in conjunction with this association with PCB oral exposure.

Other neurotoxic effects in newborns and children include deficits in visual recognition memory. This is the study done by the Jacobsons in the 80s. Poor short-term memory and intellectual impairment.

And again, I mention the study by the Jacobsons, the study of 240 plus mother-infant pairs whose mothers consumed fish six years prior to and during pregnancy, and then more recently reaffirmed by the findings of the University of New York at Oswego group.

And I'll be talking a little bit more about the Jacobsons' work in just a minute.

The Jacobsons published a follow-up to their work at 11 years, and they found – this was published in the New England Journal of Medicine – and they found that at 11 years of age, they were three times more likely to have low normal IQs, two times more likely to be at least two years behind in reading comprehension. They exhibited poor short-term and long-term memory and they had difficulty paying attention. It sounds like me on a good day.

But the point is that these have significant implications, particularly in the event that they are irreversible. And the work that I mentioned to you that we're funding at the University of New York of Oswego has now been following the kids out to three years of age, and we see that these trends continue at three years. The question becomes whether or not they are ones that continue through life or whether they are no longer seen over time.

The reason I say that that's important is that one of the studies I referenced was the North Carolina study by Walter Rogan. Walter Rogan is very good at putting a human face on the hypotonia, the lack of mature reflexes that the kids exhibit.

He says that when you hold a kid – he's a pediatrician – when you hold a young baby in your hand and you stimulate it, you usually see a reflex response. But instead, these kids, according to Walter Rogan, are very floppy. They simply do not respond in the normally mature way for an infant of that age.

And so the point being that in his work, he was looking at background exposures to PCBs as opposed to elevated levels that the others were looking at associated with the exposure through the fish. And so at three years of age, the trend things that he observed were no longer evident.

So there is a question here about at what level does the body burden lend itself to irreversible changes or reversible changes? That is, that can be overcome over time.

In terms of immune effects, it's been observed that there is a reduction in the natural killer cell activity. These are cells that respond to the presence of foreign substances, or bodies in the human body. So the reduction in activity means that they are less effective in dealing with that immune challenge.

A positive association between infants' infectious illness and maternal serum PCBs. This was a study in Wisconsin that reported this tendency to be more prone to infection up to four months of age.

And the interesting thing about this study is that it's often pointed to one of the studies that failed to document any of the neurodevelopmental deficits that the others did.

And there may be a good reason for that because when they enrolled the mothers in their particular cohort, they coupled that with an aggressive education program so that the mothers could move to more positive diets and thereby reduce their exposures.

And so the failure to document some of the neurodevelopmental deficits in this case – although they did document these immune effects – may be a reflection of good prenatal healthcare.

In addition, John Dellinger and his colleagues studying a Native American tribe, the Chippewa people, the Ojibwa tribe of the Chippewa people, reported an increase in diabetes. There was also an increased reporting of neuromuscular pain, or joint pain, and also a self-reported liver disease.

In addition, Koopman-Esseboom and her colleagues in The Netherlands have reported altered thyroid status in both mothers and children associated with PCB and dioxin exposure.

This is an important finding from a mechanistic or mode of action point of view because thyroid status is an important predictor of developmental health overall, and particularly normal cognitive development.

Perhaps some of the neurodevelopmental effects seen by the other epidemiologic studies are undergirded by this finding of altered thyroid status, which increasingly seems to be reported in the world literature.

Okay, this is going to be a tough one here. It shows what happens when you have a graphically challenged toxicologist trying to put some things together.

But I mentioned earlier that there was a concordance between effects across animal and human species, the question being how generalizable are the findings in experimental animal studies or wildlife biology studies to findings in humans?

While the earlier slide indicated that there was a qualitative concordance –that is that you see the same effects associated with the same chemicals – the question is what about the effect level at which these effects occur?

The challenge that we have here is if you look across the world literature, you see that in toxicological animal studies, you typically have very well controlled studies that carefully document what the exposure level is. They generally do not report body burdens, that is what is actually in the body of the animal as a result of that exposure.

In contrast, in the epidemiologic literature, we generally do not have the luxury of knowing what the exposure is. We're dealing with body burdens.

But increasingly, we're able to interrelate the two by the application of some computational toxicology methods. The one that I'm referring to in this case would be physiologically-based kinetic modeling so that we can follow the exposure, the uptake, the distribution in the metabolism, the storage and up to the elimination of the compound so that we can interrelate body burden with exposure level and we can work back and forth in this continuum in both the animal studies and the human studies.

And so here for two effects associated with exposure to TCDD, we've looked at the human literature with respect to immunologic effects as well as reproductive effects.

And if you look at the studies in humans and the effect levels associated with immune effects and you look at the same levels associated with immune effects in animals, you see a remarkable concordance in terms of the body burdens here. There's a common dose metric.

And the same is true for looking at the reproductive endpoint here in humans and then again in animals expressed in body burden, nanogram per kilogram body weight, you see that there's a remarkable concordance of effect and effect levels.

So the take-home message here is that the studies derived from the animal literature can be increasingly applied with confidence, or extrapolated with confidence to human populations.

So all this information was reviewed at Montreal and what came out of that was the Assistant Surgeon General of the U.S. at the time, who was in attendance at the meeting, posed the question – he didn't make the statement –e posed the question: “Has the fetus become the unfortunate mining canary of the 90s?”

We don't know the answer to that question with confidence. But again, going back to the precautionary principle, if there's a possibility, we need to take some action in line with prevention of disease.

And the approach that we have taken is one that we pursued in cooperation with the International Joint Commission as well as the Council of Great Lakes Research Managers and the International Joint Commission's Science Advisory Board.

This is the traditional model of disease prevention, identification of hot spots in the population with respect to health events that are occurring. Evaluation of what might be underlying those patterns of mortality or morbidity in the human population. Efforts to control, intervene to control that.

And one of the most effective means of doing that is to disseminate information, empowering communities to make informed decisions and establishing an infrastructure at the local community level to inform those decisions so that they are optimal.

In terms of what we've done in the Great Lakes, we've identified those at-risk populations of fish eaters and followed them over time. I shared with you what those populations were. They're sport and subsistence anglers, men and women of reproductive age, the immunologically compromised, the elderly.

I've neglected to mention earlier that Sue Schantz and her colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana have recently reported in a publication of environmental health perspectives that there's an effect on global executive function in older Americans, 50 and older, who consumed fish 15 years or longer.

In addition, they had difficulty learning and they had difficulty with memory. So there's an issue here with respect to the non-dioxin-like PCBs and neurologic endpoints later in life.

In terms of evaluation, we've demonstrated that there are linkages between fish consumption and body burdens and between body burdens and potential health effects. A number of publications undergird that point.

In terms of control, outreach materials were developed. As soon as we became aware that there were elevated body burdens in these at-risk populations, we made as a prerequisite for successful competition for funding that intervention outreach activities be pursued and that we be able to make an impact on the health status of those communities.

And we found that based on disseminating that information at public meetings and making people more aware that they are in a position to make more informed decision.

Particularly significant is the fact that this one particular effort, this consortium of Great Lakes States who had developed these outreach materials were able to increase fish advisories awareness to 97 percent. And general fish advisory awareness is less than 50 percent and as low as 20 percent among women and minorities.

And so with this targeted series of interventions, we were able to increase this to 97 percent, change the behavior of people to choose their fish more wisely – not eliminate fish from their diet – but to choose it more wisely and thereby reduce their body burdens from a two to fourfold higher level down to background levels in a six-year period of time.

This basically is just to summarize the impact that information can have.

In 1995, we had very few targeted fish advisories for women.

In 1999, we have fish advisories for women in seven of the eight Great Lakes States and in Pennsylvania in the vicinity of Superfund sites, which we'll be hearing about a little bit later.

And in 1995, we had for minority and ethnic anglers two, and that has been doubled in 1999.

And so the point being that we have to do a better job of getting the word out, and meetings like this are the first step in that direction.

Finally, there are some who would say that the effects that we've reported out are very subtle types of effects. And they are subtle, and it represents a primary shift in the types of things that we're observing in the population. We no longer see overt manifestations of toxicity due to pollution prevention efforts, and that's a success story that has to be celebrated and shared.

But we are seeing a shift from the overt to functional deficits in reproduction, cognitive ability and so on.

And going back to the detriments in IQ that the Jacobsons reported, the significance of that I think is undergirded by what Bernie Weiss at the University of Rochester has pointed out. That for something like IQ that follows a continuous distribution, when you have a shift of five points on that scale, the impact of that is to double the number of those that are intellectually challenged and to cut in half the number that are intellectually gifted. And that has some profound societal implications.

So that concludes my presentation for this morning.

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

We'll take questions. Both Dr. DeRosa and Dr. Carpenter will be up here at the end of Dr. Carpenter's talk for questions and discussion.

So thank you very much.

Thank you very much for your talk.

Our second speaker of the session is Dr. David Carpenter. He's the Director of the Institute for Health and the Environment and a professor of environmental health and toxicology at the State University of New York, at Albany.

His talk is titled “St. Lawrence Region and New York State Residence Near Hazardous Waste Sites and Human Diseases”.

DR. DAVID CARPENTER
(State University of New York at Albany):

Thanks, Bill.

I want to really tell you sort of three different stories, briefly.

One is a continuation of the studies that Chris has already mentioned of our long-term research project with the Mohawks at Akwesasne.

Then the second and third are really quite the same.

We've used the Sparks data in New York State.

Sparks is a system whereby any time anybody goes into a hospital, the hospital must report to the State Health Department all of the diseases that person has. And we've asked the question “Are there diseases that occur more commonly if people live near hazardous waste sites?”

And I'll show you some of the results for the New York side of the St. Lawrence River, which is an area of contamination. It does include the Mohawk nation, but it goes beyond that.

And then I'll show you some data for all of New York State where we've looked at hazardous waste sites that contain persistent organic pollutants. We haven't looked at metals, but I think we have some striking results there that I hope you find of interest.

So first of all, let me show some studies of the relationship between PCB exposure and thyroid abnormalities from our studies with the Mohawks. This actually is very similar to the data that I presented last October in Windsor.

This is a study headed by headed by Larry Shell, who's part of our NEIHS Superfund Program. This is still an early, incomplete analysis of the whole program, but these are 117 adolescents between the ages of 10 and 16.

We obtained serum PCBs from each of those children.

The mean serum PCB level is 1.82 parts per billion. This is actually a relatively low value. This is a traditional fish-eating population. The fish consumption from local waters has declined very much in recent years, but this still is probably higher than children that aren't in fish-eating populations. But it's not a very high value. You see the maximum was less than five parts per billion.

Well, in this population, there was nevertheless a highly statistically significant relationship between the serum PCB levels and the levels of thyroid hormone.

Now, thyroxin can be either free in serum or bound to proteins. And what you see is that the higher the PCB levels, the lower the thyroid hormone.

Chris just told you that PCBs are related to thyroid function. Actually, the PCB molecule is structurally similar to that of thyroid hormone. Thyroid contains iodines. PCBs contain chlorines. But this is probably the mechanism of interference.

Now, TSH is a brain hormone. It's released by the pituitary gland and this stimulates thyroid activity.

And as consistent with this lower level, the brain is trying to remedy this problem by increasing its secretion of this hormone.

So I think that this evidence demonstrates that even in PCB levels that are probably of the order of magnitude of most people in this room. Probably those of you that are in the age range ten to 16 would have slightly lower values than these Mohawk kids. But the adults are going to have values right in this range.

And while the values of thyroid hormone are not ones that your doctor would say is out of the normal range, clearly there is a relationship between your PCB body burden and your thyroid hormone level.

Let me go on then and talk about these population studies that we have been doing.

Now, I should say that I hold the IJC organizationally responsible for significant disruption of my research career because a couple of years ago, when the Health Canada reports came out on the areas of concern and the diseases that people had there, I was asked to see if we could replicate those kinds of things in New York State.

That's increasingly become the most exciting and I think important part of the research that I've been doing, and I want to present some of those preliminary results to you today.

A year ago, I did present studies that we had done looking at three areas of concern in New York, that being the Niagara River, the Buffalo River and Eighteen Mile Creek.

Then, we decided, well, when we compared those three areas to the rest of New York State, that sort of was a problem because there were lots of other contaminated sites in New York State than just the six areas of concern.

Well, what I want to present today, we've looked at because this is really a meeting around the St. Lawrence, we've looked at the New York side of the St. Lawrence area of concern.

Now, the problem is of course when you have a relatively small population, it's difficult to get statistical significance. We have actually done the same thing we did in Buffalo. We've taken all zip codes in the U.S. Our postal system is by zip codes. These are irregular boundaries. It's not a very good indication of residential proximity, but it's the best we have.

We've taken all the zip codes within 15 miles of the St. Lawrence area of concern. That includes 12 zip codes and a population of 35,000 people. That's not very large.

All of New York State has a population of almost 18 million, and we have considered that full population and then we have taken the nearly 1,000 zip codes in New York State and we've divided them up in different categories.

We have lots of contaminated sites in New York State. There are nearly 100 of the national priority sites, the federal Superfund sites, which the U.S. Government designates as being among the most serious.

But in addition, our State Department of Environmental Conservation has a total of 865 Superfund sites, which includes the federal sites. And we've taken that list of 865 and we've tried to subdivide it and tried to relate areas of contamination to where people live.

So I'll talk a lot about persistent organic pollutants. Now, these are the persistent compounds Chris mentioned, but it does not include the metals. We have a different series of zip codes that have metals and we haven't really studied those yet.

What we're going to be comparing is either people that live in these zip codes around the St. Lawrence area of concern to everybody else in New York State, or we're going to be comparing people that live in zip codes of which there are 262 in New York that have either a hazardous waste site in that zip code that has either PCBs, dibenzofurans, or dibenzo-p-dioxins or persistent pesticides as an identified contaminant of concern. That population is almost four million.

There are in fact over 1,200 zip codes that don't have any DEC designated area of…

What happened here? I guess I'm staying too long on this slide. I want it to go back.

So we've looked at people that live in zip codes where there are no hazardous waste sites.

And then as a control – because poor people tend to live in dirty areas, and we always have to worry about controlling for socio-economic class and education and other things – we looked at areas that had hazardous waste sites, but they contained volatile organics or metals or radioactivity, other things than the persistent organics.

Let me show you some of the results. Now, I'm going to go through a number of these and I'll be showing first the data for the St. Lawrence.

Now, remember there are only 35,000 people here, so this data will show a lot of scatter.

For thyroid disease, you see there's an increase incidence of thyroid disease in women that live near the St. Lawrence. This is for all of New York State. This is striking and really blew us away when we saw that.

So what we have here, the bar on the far left is comparing the incidence of thyroid disease that people that live in zip codes that either abut or contain hazardous waste sites containing PCBs, as compared to all of New York State, as compared to all the zip codes that don't have any hazardous waste site – the third bar over – or as compared to people that live in a zip code that has VOCs, metals, some other contaminant, but not the persistent organics.

And what you see is at every age, but increasing with age, there is a highly statistically significant elevation of thyroid disease in women.

All right now, let me say again, every time anybody in New York goes into a hospital, that hospital must report to the Health Department up to 15 different diagnoses. Now, if you have thyroid disease, you usually don't go in the hospital. There are lots of reasons why we wouldn't find this relationship. If you have hypothyroidism, you usually go to your doctor and get a thyroid pill. But if you go into the hospital for an infected, ingrown toenail and you have thyroid disease, you would be reported to the Health Department.

This is a survey over our whole population. We've used this data by international classification of disease codes for the years 1993 to 1998. There are over 11 million hospitalizations in New York over that period of time. So that is our database. The numbers are so large that we can find statistically significant effects quite easily.

But if you look at these bars, we're looking at a 30 percent elevation in the incidence of thyroid disease.

Now, note this number. The highest is at about 100 cases per population. That's in women.

This is in men. Now, the St. Lawrence data looks pretty much the same.

Bill, can you back up about three?

The incidence of thyroid disease in men is much lower. The number here is 25. We don't really see statistically significant relations.

This seems to be on autopilot. Well, it's moving me along.

Female genital disease. This is the data for men. The value is much less, but this is not statistically significant. Although you can see there is a tendency for an elevation there.

Female genital disorders. Not normally thought of as being due to environmental factors, although Chris gave me a good introduction in his discussion of endometriosis.

Look at the difference between the diagnosis of female genital disease in the 35,000 people that live near the New York side of the St. Lawrence River as compared to the rest of New York State.

This is when we compare all women in New York State that live near PCB, dioxin and persistent pesticide contaminated sites. Again, this is about a 30 percent elevation. And you don't see that – I mean, that's a 30 percent elevation as compared to all of these other control groups, including the people that live near dump sites – but they just are not dump sites containing this class of compounds.

This is the data for endometriosis. That is threefold, and this is endometriosis for all of New York State.

Now, endometriosis as an environmentally induced disease is a relatively new concept. As a matter of fact, there is now very good evidence in monkeys that – this is an interesting story because a group at Dartmouth fed monkeys dioxin and they were surprised to find that the females all developed endometriosis.

A few years later, they got around to measuring PCBs in the monkeys, although they had never given them PCBs, and they found that the relationship to the endometriosis was stronger for PCBs than for dioxin.

Now, let me at this point make one other comment. Chris made the point, which is traditional wisdom in both of our governments, that the major risk factor for exposure to these compounds is eating fish.

I think this data questions that assumption because it is certainly not true that most people that just happen to live by a PCB contaminated site go out and eat fish and the rest of the people in the state don't.

I think this data suggests that we need to pay much more close attention to the hypothesis that residence near a contaminated site is by itself a risk of exposure, and that risk of exposure is sufficient to cause disease.

Another disease that nobody thinks about as being environmentally relevant is heart disease.

That's St. Lawrence. That's New York State. And there is consistency. There is elevation. This is statistically significant at the 99 percent confidence level.

Think about heart disease for a moment. What do we know causes heart disease? Smoking, eating too much fat, having no exercise. All of those are complications and prevent us from really saying this is due to exposure.

Well, what is smoking? Smoking is basically being exposed to poly aromatic hydrocarbons, a related class of chemicals, which cause heart disease through mechanisms that we know quite well. And that is by acting on the liver, they cause an elevation in the amount of cholesterol and lipids in our bodies.

Well, PCBs and dioxins are well documented to induce enzymes in the liver, including those enzymes that promote lipogenesis, the making of fats.

Now, it's difficult with diseases like this to say with confidence that people that live by PCB and dioxin contaminated sites, they're just bad people. They smoke all the time, they eat a lot of fats and they don't exercise. But everyone else in New York State does. It seems pretty unlikely to me.

But it of course has to be dealt with. What some of my students are trying to deal with now is using our census data that has at least some information on income, we can apply it to income.

Again, a very important control here is the people that live by other dumpsites, just not dumpsites that have this class of compounds.

This is the data for males. It's not as clear it's St. Lawrence and it's also not as clear for males.

Bill, can we go back again?

There seems to be an elevation down here at younger ages; but in older ages, it's not as clear.

This is a little bit surprising because cardiovascular disease is more common in males, but this early onset is very interesting and it is statistically significant.

Chris also mentioned diabetes, again a disease that rarely do people think of diabetes as being related to environmental exposure. Now, it's a little complicated in the St. Lawrence. It's quite well known that Native American populations have a higher incidence of diabetes than non-Natives.

This is the data for men. And here, there seems to be maybe a little bit of increase down here at younger ages, but not in older ages.

Now, there are two types of diabetes. There is type one, which occurs in young people, and is due to an autoimmune reaction in the pancreas; and type two diabetes, which occurs in older ages, has a quite different mechanism. Your pancreas makes insulin but it just isn't able to use it very well.

This is diabetes in women. This is statistically significant. I'll talk to you a little later about what's statistically significant and what isn't.

And once again, diabetes in women. We see the elevation at younger ages suggesting a relationship between type one diabetes. We don't see it at older ages, which may mean that the diabetics all die.

So here are the significant values for all of New York State against the clean areas. And we've got tables like this, which I won't show you for the other comparisons.

But the point here, where there is a plus, this is a statistically significant elevation at the 99 percent confidence limit, which is to say there's only one chance in 100 that this is a statistical artifact.

Let's go through these. Thyroid disease in women but not in men. Highly statistically significant and going over all of the age ranges. And as I showed you, this is about a 30 percent elevation.

The diseases of other endocrine glands. ICD codes have broad categories and then they have a number of sub-diseases. What we're doing right now is going from these broad categories to look at the sub-diseases.

But diabetes is a sub-disease of this category, and we think that the significant elevations in both men and women at younger ages is primarily a reflection of this elevation in diabetes at younger ages.

Now, it isn't all endocrine diseases that we find to be elevated because the ICD codes for ovarian dysfunction, testicular dysfunction did not show any significant relationship at this level, the 99 percent level.

I didn't show you all of the data for cardiovascular disease, but look across these. Hypertension – a significant relation to hypertension in everything except men over 75.

Now, again there was a paper that just recently came out who has followed the people. In Italy, there was a pesticide plant that exploded a number of years ago. This was a pesticide plant that manufactured the same agent that was in agent orange and there's a contamination of dioxin with that pesticide plant.

Those people have been followed now for 15 or 20 years, and they are finding a striking elevation in hypertension in people in proportion to their exposure.

I don't think there's any good knowledge of a mechanism that might explain that.

But this is so striking in our population, and I should say we started looking at the six areas of concern, which are the three in the Buffalo area, the Oswego River, the Rochester Embayment and St. Lawrence River. And while the numbers, there is more scatter in that data, the pattern is consistent in all of those areas.

If we add then all of the contaminated sites with persistent organic contaminants, this is what we get.

For ischemic heart disease – I have shown you that data – diseases of arteries, arterials and capillaries, this is another ICD code. And again, we see highly significant relations there.

I think personally, some of the things I'm most interested in following now are diabetes and cardiovascular disease. There are probably 20 reports of people following exposed individuals either to PCBs or dioxins that report elevations in serum lipids.

There are few studies now coming out from animal studies that demonstrate that some of the enzymes induced in the liver include those that make these lipids.

Now, we don't see any difference with the male genital organs, but we certainly see the striking difference with female genital organs – I tell you, Bill, your computer has a mind of its own – and this very striking increase in endometriosis in women of menstruating age.

We are seeing as consistent with what Chris mentioned a change in fertility in women.

Now, back up here, we didn't see any change in ovarian or testicular dysfunction. But again, there are some limitations of this database. These are people that go into the hospital. If you happen to have testicular dysfunction, or you're infertile as a man, you're unlikely to tell people that when you go into the hospital.

Some of these things would be treated differently and we recognize that we can't go beyond the data that we have.

But I think… Let me reiterate what was our hypothesis going into this study and what has increasingly become of interest and of concern.

This is not explainable by fish consumption. There are certainly some of the things I've shown you that may be due to other things than exposure to this class of chemicals. It may be that people that live in those areas smoke more. They may not have any exercise. They may eat bad diets. There may be a somewhat greater tendency to eat fish.

A lot of these PCB sites are not bodies of water. They are state Superfund sites that are inland that, well, they may or may not leach into local bodies of water that have fish.

But I think this really is a call to arms for us to pay much greater attention to the health of people that live around contaminated sites. The Health Canada report started that in a beautiful way, and there is an awful lot that has to be done above and beyond this kind of data.

But I think that this kind of study is important because it raises hypotheses that we can follow. Now, we have some very interesting data that I haven't shown you.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and bronchitis. Again, the big confounder is smoking. But they are elevated around PCB contaminated sites.

Diseases of joints are elevated around PCB contaminated sites and diseases of the category called dorsopathies, which is basically vertebral disk disease, is strikingly and significantly elevated around PCB contaminated sites.

I only know of one paper that would be consistent with that conclusion, and that is a study of the people in Taiwan that ate the contaminated rice oil where they had a fourfold elevation of joint disease and a threefold elevation of vertebral disk disease.

We'd have no idea of mechanisms that could explain that relationship. It may not even be real. But we're talking now about the diseases that are the major killers, the major chronic diseases of people – heart disease, diabetes.

In our group, we have not looked at cancer yet. That's obviously something that we're very interested in doing.

So I think, in conclusion, all I would say is I think it's dangerous to live around a hazardous waste site, especially if that hazardous waste site contains persistent organic pollutants. I think simply living near there makes one at increased risk of these diseases and perhaps more.

Thank you.

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

I'd like to have Dr. DeRosa come back up, and we'll have a discussion period for the next 20 minutes.

If you have a question or a comment regarding the first two presentations, there are microphones set up on both sides. If you'd please use the microphones, we would appreciate it. I know they are recording this session.

DR. DAVID CARPENTER:

We were so clear that nobody has any questions.

DR. CHRIS DeROSA:

While we are waiting for that first question, I just wanted to acknowledge Dr. Carpenter's point about the issue of the waste sites.

Eleven persistent toxic substances were shown in one of the slides, and those are the 11 of the top 15 chemicals that we see in completed exposure pathways in the vicinity of Superfund sites.

I think that the point here is very well taken that because we have knowledge as an Agency that 493 sites nationwide have completed exposure pathways involving those compounds, that means that we have a source in the environment, a site. We have a pathway through the environment – oil, air, soil, diet, what have you – and we have corresponding body burdens, so that we have made the case that because of the presence of these sites, we have levels of these compounds in human populations. That's one source.

But I think it points to the issue that these are multi factorial. Body burdens are multi factorial. There are many contributors to body burdens. I think NPL sites are certainly one. I think diet is another.

UNIDENTIFIED:

A question for either of you.

You have addressed the issue at sort of a macro level, as you said, by zip code, which is a broader base.

What attenuation do you see with distance from the site? Do you have any sort of leanings in that direction?

DR. DAVID CARPENTER:

I think this is really the important question. And we wrote a wonderful grant, and I itch to do just exactly that study. It didn't get funded, but maybe Chris will give me some money to do it.

(laughter)

The New York State database is collected with a person's name and their house address. There of course are major issues about confidential information, about who lives where and what diseases they have.

But what we hope to do is basically use a GIS system so we can geo code where we can look at the incidence of disease in people that live a half a mile from the site versus those that live one mile from the site versus those that live five miles from the site.

And I think then one might hope to get a dose-response relationship.

Clearly, these zip codes are extremely crude indexes of exposure. And I think what surprised us was we got anything from them.

And yet, what we're getting is so striking that I think one would rationally conclude we're grossly underestimating the risk of disease in people that are closer.

DR. CHRIS DeROSA:

Now, I would underscore that, that the value of geographic information systems is it gives you the ability to overlay demographic data with geographic data, with the presence or location and the location of sites and facilities that may be the source of some of these chemicals.

That's a very powerful analytic tool that will be part of any surveillance system that we go forward with.

DR. DAVID CARPENTER:

And I think that there's another issue related to that. I think all of our governments – I know both in Canada and in the U.S. – are getting more and more nervous about confidential information. We collect this information and if we don't allow responsible researchers access to it, we might as well not collect it.

I think that just what we have without the confidential information points to it being an extraordinarily valuable resource in trying to understand where dangers exist.

So I think it's really very important that access to confidential information be continued by responsible researchers with obvious controls on preservation of confidentiality.

UNIDENTIFIED:

I would just like to understand the corresponding increase in the clean spots, in the clean… Like with age, it increases. And I just want to understand how come it's the same type of increase.

DR. DAVID CARPENTER:

Well, many diseases are more common in all of us as we get older, and I think this really is just the reflection of that. Thyroid disease increases over the lifetime of both men and women, but it's much more common in women.

Certainly, cardiovascular disease, that's what most of us are going to die of, the risk of that increases with age.

So those were the wrong numbers. Very few one to five year-olds are going to die of a heart attack, but lots of 60 to 65 year-olds are.

And that's why you see those changes with time.

UNIDENTIFIED:

I have a question. Being from New York State, the typical restoration model for these hazardous waste sites is what we call cap, pump and treat. So they are capped and the groundwater is pumped and presumably treated in some way.

It would interest me even more in terms of your study, looking at people living within a half-mile radius or a mile radius of a hazardous waste site, what about looking, in terms of the waste sites that you looked at, were these unremediated waste sites or were they remediated?

It would be interesting to see how do your health results correspond with the way in which we're actually cleaning up these hazardous waste sites. Are we looking at waste sites that have supposedly been dealt with in some way or are we looking at ones that are…?

I guess I can answer my own question. I know if they're on the list, they haven't yet been treated.

DR. DAVID CARPENTER:

That was our list.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Yes, okay. But still…

DR. DAVID CARPENTER:

Eight hundred and sixty-five of them, and some of them like the Hudson River run 200 miles.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Yes, yes. But it would be very interesting to see. The point I'm making is it would be interesting to see what the health results are for sites that have undergone remediation, because I think many of us believe there is still a problem with these sites leaching into the environment around them.

DR. DAVID CARPENTER:

It's a good point and I think you see why I said the IJC has disrupted my research career because there are so many things that one can do with this.

We haven't begun to look at VOC-contaminated sites or metal sites or remediated sites.

There are some complications, however, because many of the diseases induced by these agents are ones that have a long latency. So just because a site was declared remediated five years ago does not mean you're not going to see elevations in disease in people that lived around it before it was remediated.

But I think that would be another interesting area to proceed to study.

DR. CHRIS DeROSA:

And I think that the point you make about the latency and also the point that the question posed was what about the efficacy of our fixes for these sites? Do they work?

I think the issue of efficacy and the latency are intertwined to a certain extent.

The idea of now in Superfund is to have a five-year revisit to see whether or not the remediation that had been agreed upon is in fact still appropriate, based on what we know or based on what we've learned since that decision was made.

But to go to the point of the efficacy of the process, I think that there is a body of knowledge emerging from some of the studies that have been done indicating that for example at Love Canal, we saw a lot of the neurodevelopmental effects such as neural tube defects, cleft palate, and cardioseptal defects that were reported out of that population as well as other populations living in the vicinity of waste sites. We see the uptick in the incidence of those.

And then when measures are taken, perhaps alternative drinking water supplies, capping and so forth, restricted access to the site, we see that those things go back down.

But the point is that we still have those materials there, and over time, that remedial action needs to be revisited to see that the efficacy of the fix is still there.

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

And to put a plug in for this afternoon's session, we do talk about monitoring and surveillance in the afternoon session.

So stick around for the afternoon too.

UNIDENTIFIED:

You mentioned in the first presentation fish being a cause of contamination.

I was wondering with the proximity of living close to the contaminated sites how these people are contracting the contamination?

DR. CHRIS DeROSA:

Well that question goes to the pathway by which people can be exposed. PCBs are a volatile compound. They will go into the atmosphere and then they will go down into the surface waters, and they will settle in the sediments.

And the microorganisms there incorporate those materials into their body and they're passed up through the food chain.

So there are sources in the environment that may be then released through the groundwater or through the air that settle in the ambient water that are entrained in the food chain by these microorganisms. And they're passed up and magnified in their levels as you go to successive levels, so that they may be millions of times higher.

So the top predators, and the humans in the population are top predators, feeding on other top predators – perhaps salmon, trout and so forth – are exposed to correspondingly higher levels.

The point being that that's why I say part of the story at least, and I agree with David, the NPL sites – and in fact, that's what funds most of what I do – are another part of the story.

But with respect to some of these persistent organic compounds, we continue to think that the primary immediate source of exposure is through the fish.

It may be that the materials that the fish have came from a Superfund site, and it may be that they came from atmospheric transport from the former Soviet Union; or if we're talking about DDT, from atmospheric transport from the Caribbean, because they volatilize in the warmer climates, they're transported through the atmosphere and then they settle out in the colder climates of the world.

This sets the stage for what some have said is an environmental equity issue, that people living in colder climates are actually being put at a disadvantage in terms of their health status based on practices elsewhere which have no benefit to them at all. And some of the native peoples in Canada and Alaska and in the northern states I think are confronting some of that issue.

DR. DAVID CARPENTER:

I think it's hard to know what the other pathways are other than fish. We've got some major ideas, and we've actually just recently, or my lab has recently gotten some blood from people that live by very close to the Hudson River, which is highly contaminated, that specifically have never eaten a fish from the Hudson River. And we are finding that their serum PCB levels are higher than people that don't live around the river. They're not super high, but they're higher.

As Chris said, these things do go into the air and you can breathe them in.

Also, it's the sediments that are contaminated. And if you go wading in the sediments barefooted, you can absorb some through your skin.

In addition, the contaminated sediments, when they dry, become dust and they can blow into your house. And every time you mop the kitchen floor, that dust becomes wet. As the wet sediments dry, PCBs can evaporate into the indoor air.

So we don't know exactly what other mechanisms there are, but I think the evidence now is pretty good that there are other ways than just eating food.

Now, you kids should know that you can't eat a Big Mac without getting some PCBs. It's that spread through our food chain. But the amount that's in beef and most meat products is very low relative to what is in a fish that you catch out of a river that's got PCB contamination in the sediments.

DR. CHRIS DeROSA:

And one of the slides that I was unable to present because of time limitations pointed out that fish is a nutritionally important component of our diet, and we need to be cognizant of the benefits of fish consumption. There are fatty acids in the fish that contribute to overall cognitive development in a very positive way.

As an avid fisherman, this is just one fish story that I tell.

But the other fish story that I didn't tell today is that working with those Native American populations, we were able to reduce the exposure through fish without sacrificing fish as a nutritionally and culturally important component of their diet by emphasizing how to prepare the fish, by emphasizing from what bodies of water, and what size fish you should use as part of your diet.

And by proper trimming and cooking the fish, you can trim the exposure to PCBs by up to two-thirds and again still have fish on the plate because, as Dr. Carpenter points out, it may not be that the McDonald's down the street has the answer to your nutritional needs.

UNIDENTIFIED:

You did mention, and that tickled me a little bit, because you did mention some sources coming from Russia, for example.

But we should look closer to us right here, in Canada, or the U.S. where there is a lot… We make decisions, government people, to use for example coal as an energy source. So we are polluting our own environment with the decision on using some energy sources that are very pollutant.

Don't be shy to mention it in terms of it's not just from abroad. It's from right here, in our own backyard.

DR. CHRIS DeROSA:

I'm not necessarily the person to speak to this, but pollution prevention has gone a long way to ratcheting back on emissions. I think something like two-thirds of emissions of dioxin have been eliminated over the past ten years or so.

That's not saying that that's the end of the story. I think we need to continue that, emphasize that and get that message out more broadly because it truly is a global issue.

The IJC is I think uniquely positioned to point to the success here in the Great Lakes basin as a model for the rest of the world, confronted with many of these same problems.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Yes, Doctor Carpenter, I thank you very much for presenting some very interesting work in progress.

I just wanted to clarify something because further discussion creates a concern. I gather from this very large database that you're working with that you haven't yet done the corrections for confounders.

I'm wondering, given your discussion a little bit later about information availability, whether in fact that information was collected to allow you to do that in any substantive way.

DR. DAVID CARPENTER:

A very good question because it's the major limitation in the understanding of our data.

The answer is certainly that that data is not in the Sparks database from which the hospitalization diagnoses are obtained.

There are a number of limitations here. Without the identifiers, we cannot distinguish one person going in the hospital three times for the same disease from three different people going into the hospital.

But nevertheless, I think those things all pretty much come out in the wash.

There are two other major databases we're trying to use. They have some real limitations. We certainly have census data. We've already looked at income by zip code from the 1990 census.

The income information on the 2000 census is not yet available.

As you might expect, people that live in areas that don't have any Superfund sites tend to have a higher income than people who do. But the income level in the people that live by pops contaminated sites and Superfund sites that have other contaminants is just about the same. But again, that's not totally satisfactory.

Now, the CDC does have what they call a behavioral risk factors database, which reports the incidence of smoking and exercise and quality of diet. The data is relatively good at the level of the state, it's moderately good at the level of a county, but it's nonexistent at the level of a zip code.

So the biggest problem that we have is accounting for those things, for the things like diabetes and cardiovascular disease, because we have no real information on smoking, on diet, on exercise, factors that are certainly confounders for those kinds of diseases.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Okay, thank you.

DR. DAVID CARPENTER:

And we don't really know how we're ever going to get it, either.

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

Okay, we'll have one final question, and then we'll have to have a break for 20 minutes.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Coming from an area that's highly fished and by a Native population, how are you getting your word across what fish to catch, how to prepare it, and what other fish to avoid?

DR. CHRIS DeROSA:

Well, we found it to be very effective to work through the gatekeepers to the communities, some non-traditional mechanisms, because we've distributed fish advisories with the distribution of fishing licenses entitled “Should I eat the fish I catch?”

But increasingly, we think that there should be a second question, “And what about my family?”

The point being that it's women of reproductive age, the developing fetus, nursing infants and children that are increasingly at risk for the reasons that we have discussed this morning.

And so working through midwives, nurses, spiritual leaders, tribal leaders, conducting health fairs in conjunction with tribal gatherings has been extremely useful in getting that information out.

But it does become a bit of a local issue, and this is part of the importance of having infrastructure at the local level because patterns of pollution vary geographically and types of fish vary geographically. So these fish advisories have to be increasingly targeted toward the population and toward the geographic area.

So it's a very complex undertaking, and that's why we put out about two-thirds of our funding to the state and local communities to work through them to get that message out because one size does not fit all.

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

Thank you very much, Dr. Carpenter and Dr. DeRosa. Everybody, give them a hand.

Very interesting talks this morning.

We're going to have a 20-minute break and we'll be gathering back here at 10:30. For those of you, the only thing that I know are that the restrooms are located out the double doors, to the right, and then to the left. Thank you very much.

(BREAK)

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

We will get everyone back in and we'll start the second portion of our workshop.

It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Yolaine St-Jacques, from Environment Canada, who's in charge of Scientific and Technical Support for Communities.

Her talk is going to be on “The Priority Intervention Zones Program: Working Together to Save the St. Lawrence River”.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES
(Environment Canada):

I would like to make three introductory remarks before I start.

First, I'd like to thank the Commission for giving me the pleasure to present this program to this audience.

Especially, I would like to acknowledge the presence of those students that are coming I think from Regent Public School, is that it? It's the first time that I'm presenting this to a young group of persons, and I'm quite proud.

I'd like to acknowledge also the presence of two of the ZIP Committee Coordinators.

Claire Lachance is from the ZIP Committee du Haut-Saint-Laurent. Maybe she can raise her hand if she's there.

And also, Luc Bergeron is from the ZIP Committee Ville-Marie, which is on the Island of Montreal.

And I'll show you where Claire's big sector is.

I will start now. It is going to be a marathon because presenting this program in 20 minutes is really a marathon.

The objective of course is to increase… We want to have people gather and work together. So that's the main objective of this program.

You see the increase in budgets from 1988. This is in the context of an action plan.

There was a first phase, 1988-1993, where the community was not involved. They involved themselves, but we didn't involve them.

So in the second phase, we involved them and we gave them a budget of 1.7 million dollars.

Then, you will see in the third phase it increased to 5.5 million dollars. I'll show you why this increase came about.

What's so great about this thing is the fact that between 1988 to 1993, the community, the major NGOs in Quebec gathered together under the Quebec Union for the Conservation of Nature and they really knocked on the doors of the governments – provincial and federal – to get involved. They wanted to get involved.

So in 1992, before we negotiated the second phase of the action plan, we decided that we opened the door. We didn't have any choice. And I'm so happy we did because you will see why.

In the first agreement we made was with the umbrella organization, of which Marc Hudon is the President. He will be talking to you more about this umbrella organization afterwards. The first agreement with this umbrella was in 1995, and we renewed it on June 7th, 1999.

It very clearly establishes the roles and responsibilities of everybody working in this program.

So as you can see, the federal and provincial governments, our main role is to provide information to the public, to these communities, to publish state of the environment reports for each of the sectors of the St. Lawrence River.

And also – well, of course it's very important, because nobody does it – it's to provide core funding to Stratégies Saint-Laurent and the ZIP committees.

And also, I think it's very important, to continue providing scientific and technical support to them.

And Stratégies Saint-Laurent's role is to promote the participation, to increase the participation of riverside communities. And sort of as an umbrella organization, it facilitates and approves the creation and the activities of new ZIP committees.

The ZIP committees themselves, they are a committee representative of all the stakeholders in their area. They organize consultations and they help participants set local priorities during those consultations.

And then – not the least thing – they prepare ecological rehabilitation action plans.

What is so great about these ZIP committees is that in their charts, because they're all incorporated NGOs, is the fact that they are autonomous and also the fact that because it's multisectoral, in their charts, all these groups – environmental, socio-economic, municipalities, industries – they're all at the same level. The number of representatives is the same for each of these sectors, which is very important because no sector is sort of dominating the others.

Maybe you can see, on the north shore of Rive-sud de l'estuaire, there is no red. That's one space where we don't have a ZIP committee, and that's another space. But the rest – that means 1,200 kilometers of shores – is being covered by 14 ZIP committees. And this is the last one – Rive-sud de l'estuaire – and we're going to have a public consultation with this ZIP committee in a couple of weeks.

Globally, this program is the steps. So the governments, we do that. We provide, we write these reports. We've written all these reports, integrated them and published a regional one that's more adapted to the population. The language has been adapted.

And then we have a consultation with each of the ZIP committees where the people set their own priorities. And then from there, the ZIP committee works and write this action plan. Then, the action and the follow-up come.

Those are examples of priorities that have been identified during public consultations.

We have education, protection, restoration, conservation of landscapes and wildlife, pollution control problems, issues related to human health, fish consumption, quality of the water for swimming and other sports, quality of drinking water, navigation control, water level management, restoration of contaminated sites and studies to acquire new information.

The writing of the action plan, after the public consultation and the priorities, after it's written, it's approved by stakeholders. That means there's a validation of the content at one point before being released publicly and then before being implemented.

As of October 2001, the government has published all the state of the environment reports covering the whole St. Lawrence River. We've held 16 public consultations by 13 ZIP committees, and that's the reason why you have more consultations than ZIP committees. That means some territories covered by ZIP committees are so large that they need to have more than… they sort of cut their territories into different sections so that they respect the dynamics of their population.

And now, we already have 11 action plans being implemented and four are near completion to be implemented.

From 1993 until 1998, you see why we increased the amount of money that we gave them from 1.7 million dollars to 5.5 million dollars because with the money that we gave them, they've done more, much more than we expected than what was written in the contract.

We calculated – that's very approximate – 70 hours of volunteer work with 34 jobs, 90 environmental projects. That wasn't even in that phase to have an action. And they were already… while they were writing their action plans, we were doing projects at the same time.

I even know one committee who had almost done all these action plans even before it was released to the public. I mean, they were working on most of the projects being produced in their action plans.

Then they were able to get money from local sources and other government programs.

So in 1998-2003, what we are doing is implementing the existing action plans, providing technical and scientific assistance to help them do that. We have already created the four new committees that were supposed to be created during that period, and we've already held five of the six public consultations, the sixth one being in a couple of weeks in November. Six new action plans are being prepared and four are almost near completion.

Also, what we've got on top of the 5.5 million dollars for core funding, we have a program, a financial and technical assistance program mostly dedicated to the projects that are in these action plans.

But also, we're providing money to other groups that are presenting good projects and that are riverside community projects and also that are not in areas covered by a ZIP committee.

So the contribution of the government in these projects is 50 percent. Each project is to a maximum of 100,000 dollars. And the studies, they receive 70 percent of the money and up to 30,000 dollars. And so the budget is seven million dollars over a five-year period.

So far, in this program, 104 projects received four million dollars and 70 percent of these projects are directly related to these action plans from the ZIP committees.

And as you see, the total value of these projects is more than 10 million dollars, but 64 percent of these ten million dollars comes directly from the local partners and in-kind contributions. That means each dollar invested by their program, we get $1.60.

And it is approximately 4,140 person-days invested in volunteer work, 83 jobs created. This is what I have so far. But we are measuring a lot more indicators than that, such as environmental indicators. That's one indicator that we have is that they have accorded and protected 93 more hectares of land along the shores of the St. Lawrence so far.

So in conclusion, for this ZIP program, what is ahead? What are challenges of this model? First of all, as I have tried to tell you, it's the citizens that have initiated this model. It's the new… it's a change, it's a real change in relationship between governments and citizens. We call that new governance.

But there's still a lot of change, even in mentality. With the government people, we're trying to have more and more people from the government go and give talks to these people and get in touch with the ZIP committees because once they come back, they enjoy that. They feel the passion, they feel the motivation of these people and when they come back, even scientists, such as researchers, they'd like to go back and try to present their information in such a way that people can understand.

So we believe that the ZIP committees are a first step toward what we call sustainable communities.

One major thing at the part of this success of this model is that they work by consensus. They try to build a consensus among the stakeholders in their areas, which sometimes it takes more time. But at least once you've got it, then you're in business. And in the end, the projects work better.

I'm going to give you pictures that are more talking than my talking. So these are covers from three of the action plans.

Tree planting on Nuns' Island, which is in the Ville-Marie Comité ZIP. Again.

Now, I'd like to show that the ZIP committees are getting into partnerships with schools and building good, good, good relationships and they get a lot of help and they sensitize. But I think maybe they receive more from the kids than they provide them. The way they're talking about their special relationship is very interesting. Many hands lighten the load.

There was a big flood on the Saguenay River, and so they had to redo everything. Like the ZIP Committee had done a lot of work and everything was washed off by the flood.

Again, restoring the shores.

That's a very special project – I've seen it – on the Bédard River. Sixty thousand kilograms of garbage was removed from the river shores.

I don't know I have time to tell a story. This river is going through land belonging to farmers, and they got the permission of the farmers to do this.

The farmers, now they're able to go and sit beside the little river and listen to the birds. What it has done in this area is that there are many of those little rivers with farmers along them. They came to the ZIP committee, which is the Alma-Jonquière ZIP committee, to do the same thing. The farmers wanted to hear birds behind their own house and farms. So it's education, and I think it's wonderful.

A lot of kids are involved in tree planting on this river.

Now, you see what it looks like after shore stabilization and cleanup. It didn't look like that before.

So that's Chaleur Bay, and I don't know why the text doesn't appear on the slide. I have many slides.

This is concerning cooperation, enhancement and gardening in Chaleur Bay. They really restored about 350 kilometers of shore in Chaleur Bay.

That's the name of the garden, Hortus, which is an underwater marine garden. That's again the construction, during the construction.

And now, the garden grows. And they found in those big concrete things, they found lobsters. It's really a pleasure for the scuba divers. They worked very hard. They developed also a municipal park and they reclaimed the sandbar and the salt marsh near the Rivière Verte.

What's written in French is together, contributing to conserve and protect the ecosystem of the St. Lawrence.

So that's my presentation.

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

Thank you very much.

As with the earlier portion of this section, we'll hold the questions until both presentations are done.

The second presentation is by Marc Hudon, who is the President of the Stratégies Saint-Laurent.

Hopefully, I didn't mangle that too badly.

MARC HUDON
(Stratégies Saint-Laurent):

Good morning, everybody.

You just had a five-meal course with Yolaine, and I'm going to give you a bowl of oatmeal with overhead projection.

A lot of them, I'm going to go fast through them, and I'll pass a couple of messages along the way.

Commissioner Baldini, welcome. I guess the IJC, it's its first visit in Quebec in regards to the biennial and water quality ever. And hopefully, you'll come more often in the future. You're welcome.

Stratégies Saint-Laurent, you just had a presentation from a governmental perspective. I'm giving you one from the ground level at the community level. This is our logo. You see in the big picture the St. Lawrence and in the small one, the Great Lakes basin.

Next, please.

Now, over the years, when we began, we took care of our territories here in Quebec. Then as time went on, we discovered that gee, a lot of stuff happening on the river depends on what's happening upstream from us.

And we started looking up and getting involved upstream with for example Great Lakes United, the IJC – whenever we can follow up their activities – the Lake Ontario Board of Control, etc.

So we made this map. And I say we made it because I think it took 100 pictures to make this one. It was quite a feat to get it, but it is to show our members and wherever we make a presentation that the Great Lakes just above from us are very, very important.

Next, please.

Now, I apologize it's in French, but I will go very quickly because Yolaine said the main things.

Next, please. That's quick, isn't it?

I can be quick, don't worry. I roll fast.

Okay, Stratégies Saint-Laurent is a non-governmental organization. It's very important to understand that.

This is what Stratégies Saint-Laurent is made of. This is a democratic life, okay. We have one annual general meeting every year. We've got an administrative council. You'll see the composition in a bit. We've got an executive committee, very active regular meetings on the phone if we don't have one in person.

We have two commissions, the ZIP Commission which groups the 14 ZIP committee coordinators. That's where they share expertise and initiate ideas to recommend to the board of directors.

And we've got the environmental commission. That's the environmental groups, members of Stratégies or not, who sit together and think or initiate projects that address larger problems on the river. Take for example, contaminated sediments, agricultural problems, water levels. Those problems go beyond what a ZIP committee can do. They concern many ZIP committees.

The environmental commission has an important role to play.

The administrative council is made of, like I said, the 14 ZIP committees. We have six environmental groups and two other members. We've got at the office of Stratégies Saint-Laurent three people working full-time. There's a coordinator, an assistant coordinator and a secretary.

And we cover the entire St. Lawrence, from the Cornwall border, Ontario border to the Gulf, including Magdalen Islands.

Our mission – Yolaine said it.

Next, please. We ensure the people's participation at all levels of activity on the river.

Those are the two commissions. I told you about the ZIP committee.

Next, please.

This is the map of something similar to what Yolaine showed you.

Next, please.

We may come back to this one, so don't put it too far. Okay, so each ZIP committee is incorporated. It must be representative of its territory. So if you cover, for example, a 100-kilometre stretch of river, you must have people from all reach of the territory, as best as you can.

They must be multisectoral. You must respect the multisectorality of the composition of the board of the ZIP committee so there isn't, for example, 30 people from the municipal sector, two environmental groups, one industry. There must be an equilibrium found, and that is developed in the process of creating the ZIP committee.

The territory is defined and there is a coordination of two people in each ZIP committee.

The delimitation of the territory is defined, but keep in mind that it is not 1) easy to define and 2) easy to respect in light of for example territorial limits of MRCs and other municipal agencies. It's difficult to delimit the territory so that everybody agrees to it. But in most cases, it's done. But in fact, it's not that simple.

The mission is mobilization and consultation, of course.

Next, please.

The success is the involvement of the people.

Now, the six steps that each ZIP committee must go through are listed there.

First, they must mobilize people, get the recognition from Stratégies Saint-Laurent that this effort has been made. That is done with a preliminary ZIP committee, a temporary board.

Then, government comes, and – step two – presents the bilan, those reports that Yolaine spoke about earlier.

Then, after a few weeks or months of review by the local community people of those four reports in which they evaluate the pertinent – if the information is updated or if it's lacking – data based on the age of the information, of course.

Then, they are conveyed to a public consultation by the ZIP committee over a day and a half, an evening or a full day next to hear from the scientific people what the status is, question and bring information to the front in regards to what they think of those reports.

Following the public consultations, the ZIP committee has to set up its own rehabilitation action plan, as Yolaine said earlier.

And in some cases, some ZIP committees have three when others have two because of the size of the territory they cover.

And that's where the public really gets in. That means that for example, if something that you have at heart in your area is distressing for the environment and you bring it up to the ZIP committee and it is being picked up by the community present at the consultation and it's being prioritized as an action to be made within the rehabilitation action plan, then that problem will be addressed.

Those rehabilitation action plans are not just a plan. It is something that evolves in time. We hope every year, every second year, there has to be a mechanism to validate again from the public how the plan has evolved – what projects were made, which ones were not addressed in the set time frame, and the reason why, and so on.

So for example, a municipality that has at heart to do a few projects, it's interesting for them to come to a ZIP committee, present a project and have it accepted, validated by the local community because they get support for it, for example.

But if there is a lot of feedback that there are things missing to get a good realization on the project, then they will have to go back and get what's missing.

And then another step is to get the part done, to realize the projects, and the follow-up.

Next, please.

Okay, that's the last one, I believe. This is a schematic view of the ZIP program, Stratégies Saint-Laurent, le comité ZIP. You've got the St. Lawrence action plan, phase three. We had one, two, three.

You've got under the St. Lawrence action plan and community consensus committee, which regroups different governmental ministries and some ZIP committees and Stratégies Saint-Laurent.

That's where we exchange on how things are going as per our business plans or our reports, whatever activity each ministry is doing, and within the cooperation and the ZIP committees.

Then under that, within the ZIP program, you've got all the ministries – federal and provincial – that are going through Stratégies Saint-Laurent, then the ZIP committees and, in turn, the shoreline communities.

Maybe you can put back the Great Lakes color map. So this is for the operating stuff.

But I guess if I talk about the ZIP program, it is a real, real success, not because we're in it. I'm not selling the thing. But you have to be visionaries to have a program like this evolve over so many years.

When Yolaine said that citizens initiated it, yes, it's the environmental groups ten years ago that pulled the chain on the government to tell them listen, you cannot address the St. Lawrence environment anymore without the public's involvement.

Société pour vaincre la pollution, Union québécoise pour la conservation de la nature, la Société du Québec, STOP, la Corporation pour la protection de l'environnement de Sept-Îles, la Corporation pour la protection de l'environnement de Baie-Comeau, le Conseil régional de l'environnement, section 02, sont des groupes environnementaux du Québec qui ont démarré le programme ZIP, avec de l'argent du privé. Ils sont allés chercher, je crois, 760 000 dollars pour démarrer le programme.

Et par la suite, avec un travail incroyable de la part des gens à l'époque, le gouvernement a embarqué – et comme Yolaine l'a bien dit – continue de nous appuyer aujourd'hui.

Mais il a fallu une vision des groupes environnementaux. Il a fallu une vision des gens du gouvernement.

I spoke in French. That's okay. Nothing wrong there.

It took a vision…

It's because I want to make sure some of the people from outside understand the importance of the government ministries to be as visionary as the environmental groups were at the time, ten years ago.

On the Great Lakes, it's important to us. We cannot function here if upstream from the Montreal area, on the river, they're not doing a good job, downstream from Montreal, the river is going to suffer from it.

And it's the same reflection in regards to the Great Lakes. If we work hard at this end and we have big problems upstream, we pay for it down here also.

So it's a system where we all have to work together. And it's very important, for example, for the American federal government, the American state government, the Ontario provincial government on Lake Ontario to be visionaries and to accept as much as is humanly possible to delegate responsibility to the communities.

You kids today, you guys are the next generation. We do all this today because we love what we do. You shouldn't have to have as much difficulties as we do have today, us, in protecting and using the environment when the time comes for you to use it fully.

We cannot do anything without an opening from the government people, like Environment Canada did in Quebec, Environment Quebec did ten years ago, to help us.

So they accepted to delegate some responsibilities that were theirs. We have the bucks, we manage the environment and you people follow the trail. No. They accepted to give adequate money to support the action, to support the initiative from the perspective of the people living on the river.

That's what's needed – to accept to delegate. And there's lots of room to delegate, but you have to have money to support that.

I lost my chain of thought. Son of a gun!

Anyhow, I want to thank everybody here who have come to listen to this.

In regards to Mr. Baldini, about the priority of the IJC, I did take a couple of notes under the climatic changes.

We are very concerned about the funding, the support of the U.S. funding for the five-year study, and we hope that it will not end after year one or year two of this five-year study. I'm taking the time here to mention it.

It's also very important for us here on the St. Lawrence River that you take particular attention in adequate funding, in line also with the federal government to work on the cumulative impacts because it takes many years for us here to get them for something that happened upstream.

So thank you very much.

If it's all clear, we'll go for lunch. No such luck, eh?

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

As we had for the earlier section, we have a few minutes for questions and discussion. Please, if you have a question or you'd like to make a comment, please come to one of the two microphones on the side.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

While waiting, I would like to say something.

We are already preparing for the fourth phase of the St. Lawrence action plan after 2003. You've seen that it's ending in 2003.

So already, the reflection, the thinking about what's going to happen to all this big energy that has been… We have provided core funding. But then, what happens after 2003? We know that the money is going down and that new money is very difficult.

And we are trying to find ways to continue, and not just continue but to find new ways to continue this vision, to go beyond, and what is going to be the next step now, especially on what Marc said, about delegating more and more power from the government to the people.

That's how we're thinking about this articulation, how we're going to do it.

MARC HUDON:

I remember what I wanted to say earlier.

I wanted to mention to you that the ZIP committees, when it began ten years ago, we were building from nothing. It was hard for people to develop the vision also at their level.

If you compare with today, all the coordinating staff of each ZIP committee, they are so solicited in that they're a victim of their success. The more work you do, the more credibility you get, the more people bring you what they want to address.

And the same applies for the board of each ZIP committee. People are coming, knowing that they have a business plan to make every year, to present to us and to the government, to accept their business plan every year, to live up to their mid-year report and final report. This is accountability. We are accountable for what we do with this public money.

So when you sit on a board of a ZIP committee, there are big responsibilities; and when you have corporate people, municipalities and other sectors of local communities, it is big stuff.

And for the next generation, like I said, it would be nice to see where you're at in a few years, 20 years' time, ten years' time.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Thank you. My organization in Toronto supports similar programs on a watershed basis, and we've been very successful in getting the community involved and the agency people involved.

We have been less successful in getting the business community involved.

I wondered whether you have been successful in doing that and how you've been able to get them to the table.

MARC HUDON:

In fact, yes, we have been successful. It was very difficult a few years back.

But now, because of the seriousness of the government support – and when I talk about support, it's not just financial support. It's technical support. All the ministries, federal and provincial, involved in the ZIP program give technical support from their experts, scientific experts, and local communities.

Industrial people recognize that.

And so instead of coming to a ZIP committee facing the concerns of the people, there is a dialogue that develops over common problems.

And the government's scientific people are very useful to make the balance. It cannot just be the vision of what the industry says. We have an equilibrium in technical support.

And in big issues, it takes years sometimes on some tough issues to develop this equilibrium, the understanding by all parties, and then the financial to restore some area.

But today, what we find – I spoke to you just now about big issues, sediments, contaminated sediment and so on. But I'll give you an example. We had a big company who came to a ZIP committee because on their property, they have two lakes that nobody uses because they are within a fenced area of a huge site. They said to the ZIP committee we want to develop a program so that the committee can get involved with using these clean lakes.

So they pumped the money in and the ZIP committee goes and gets money from municipalities that are interested in joining in.

So today, the industries are coming to us, knocking at the door to develop projects, whether it's – I take an example – a bike trail along the river, for example, and things like this because they see that it's a give and take game. You have a vision of environmental groups that use the pressure, and that's needed in society. Sometimes we need that.

And the ZIP program is based on consensus building. There's a price to pay in consensus building because sometimes, it takes longer to get things done than you would if you came and hammered on the thing.

So the community accepts the time it takes sometimes to develop the thinking and the agreement to find the solution and build something on a more sustainable manner, in the long term.

As time goes, I can say for at least the ZIP committee where I sit at and a few others, you're talking an annual turnaround budget of three, four, five hundred thousand dollars in projects.

UNIDENTIFIED:

I would like to ask when municipalities come to the ZIP committees, do they bring proposals, or are you involved in proposals for infrastructure, which are the larger costs that municipalities pay? And do they listen to your comments on what effluence should be and what kind of degree of treatment should be involved?

MARC HUDON:

If you talk about infrastructure, to my mind, the only infrastructure they come about is for example wastewater treatment facilities like septic tanks, for example.

If you talk of a larger treatment facility, like a secondary treatment tank, aeration tank and so on – no, not so much.

But if you talk about effluent from those, from existing facilities, yes they do come to give an update on how well they operate. It's very important for them to make sure that the population knows it's doing well. Or if it's not working well, why it's not.

In the Montreal area, it's certainly a very big issue. And the big issue in the regions are the septic tanks for which municipalities don't have records of how well they operate. They don't even know how many they have on their own territory.

The ZIP committee, with the assistance of the Environmental Commission, did a whole survey of each ZIP committee of what they had on each territory for septic tanks.

And we got a closed door from the federal government, from the government to get support because it's a jurisdiction that belongs to the municipality. They have to make… we're not there to replace the governments. We're there to support in whatever ways. But it's their job to address that.

UNIDENTIFIED:

I have a question regarding high-intensity farming operations. We have them in Ontario and I understand you have large high-intensive farm operations in Quebec which discharge or dispose of incredibly high amounts of animal waste, which very often is laced with pathogens.

It's become such an enormous problem that both the federal government and provincial governments so far have not been able to get a handle on.

And yet, the scientists tell us that the discharge of these operations equals hundreds of millions of population elements in the rural environment.

How is ZIP addressing it in Quebec?

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Well, it doesn't address the whole problems, everything. But there is one action that's being done right now. It's to create what you call agro-environmental clubs with one agricultural specialist, a knowledgeable person that sort of coaches the group of farmers on the practices, on all kinds of practices.

And that's how we educate, sensitize all the farmers.

We are starting to create those clubs, as we call them in Quebec. It's part of the action, the St. Lawrence Action Plan. I don't know exactly how many of those clubs already exist, but that's one way to do it.

It's education. There are a lot of the things, what you just said. Some techniques exist, but it's how you have the farmers use them. It's by knowledge, knowledge transfer.

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

That will wrap up this section. We have one more talk before lunch. I'm going to thank Yolaine and Marc.

I've heard a lot about ZIPs before, but I've never seen a presentation on them. It's much more successful than zip codes.

Our final speaker of the morning session is John Jackson. He is the past President of the Great Lakes United and is the current Canadian Co-Chair of the Lake Superior Forum.

He is going to speak about Lakewide Management Plans – the Lake Superior Example, “Examining Progress toward LaMP Goals”.

JOHN JACKSON
(Lake Superior Forum):

Thank you.

Twelve years ago, the IJC had an incredibly exciting meeting, not that this one isn't also. But it was unprecedented in terms of the IJC's previous history in that there were over 1,200 people who attended this meeting in Hamilton, their regular biennial meeting. Over 1,2000 people came out, citizens from across the entire Great Lakes – St. Lawrence River basin, who came out to talk about the need to clean up the Great Lakes.

The commitment was in the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement to have virtual elimination of persistent toxic substances, to achieve zero discharge of those particular substances in order to protect the health of people and in order to protect the health of the wildlife and all those other creatures that we share this amazing basin with.

And at that meeting of over 1,200 people, there was an energy and a vibrancy coming out. The commissioners actually sat through 11 hours of the public coming forward to microphones like these and speaking about their concerns and the solutions that they felt we had to have in order to keep this as a basin that we can all be well in and thrive in.

One of the outcomes of that, one presentation from a person from Lake Superior – from Thunder Bay, actually – said you know, we've made the commitment to zero discharge. We said we're going to get there. We really haven't begun to make serious progress on that.

Let's do a demonstration zone. Lake Superior – and you saw on Marc Hudon's map, at the far end of the basin – is the cleanest of the Great Lakes. Some people like to refer to it as pristine, but it certainly is far from that, unfortunately, but it is by far the cleanest of the Great Lakes.

Let's on that lake, where it is the cleanest of the lakes, set an example of how we can do zero discharge that all the rest of us who live in other parts of this basin and other parts of the world can learn from in order to make serious progress in terms of moving to these serious goals that the governments and the people of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River have committed themselves to.

And out of that, two years later, the governments of the United States and Canada, of Ontario, of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan made a commitment to have a special program for Lake Superior, the binational program.

One component of that program was for it to be a demonstration place for zero discharge.

What I want to address today is some of the lessons that we have learned from that that will be of use to all of us, regardless of where we live in Great Lakes basin.

I've been very lucky to have been able to work on that program with the citizens' groups over the past ten, 12 years now. It's actually ten years old now that the program was last signed.

And I'm speaking today, actually the concerns I'm going to raise and the suggestions I'm going to raise are actually concerns that are shared by the members of the Lake Superior Forum. And the Forum is similar to the ZIP committees that were being talked about in the last session, multi stakeholder including industry, including environmental groups, including people from the universities, from municipalities, the wide spectrum of different views and interests around the basin.

Our decisions, as with the ZIP committees, are made on a consensus basis. That's been one of the really exciting parts about that program is seeing… Many people say if you're going to use consensus basis, you're going to end up with watered down things.

It doesn't have to be that way if you take the time to do it seriously, take the time to do the research, take the time to think it through, be patient and realize there's going to be time involved here.

You can come up with very powerful recommendations through a consensus process, which have much more impetus behind them in terms of getting implemented.

One of the first things that the Forum focused on was setting concrete goals for zero discharge. We had the commitment from the governments to have zero discharge, but we didn't have dates. It was for certain nine designated substances.

But we didn't have dates. We didn't have a schedule for getting there. Not just an end date. But here are the interim steps.

What percentage reduction do we want by a certain year so we could really know that we were making progress and not just get to the last couple of the years and say oh my goodness, we blew it!, but to know that we could measure along the progress.

And the governments actually asked the Forum to come up with that schedule and develop that for each substance of concern.

It took us a couple of years actually to come out with all those and get them all pulled together. We did come up with those and the governments then adopted them in terms of the goals that we as the Forum had developed.

Now, the work is in terms of getting those implemented.

What I want to talk about is some of the concerns that we have and some of the barriers that we feel we must learn to overcome if we're going to really achieve those sorts of targets around zero discharge.

And there are problems. I'm involved not simply in the Lake Superior LaMP but in LaMPs throughout the Great Lakes basin, as well as in a lot of the RAP processes.

I think they are common problems that we all see.

Our first major concern is around we need a strategy. It's very fine to say okay, we've got targets. By a certain year, we're going to achieve a certain thing. But we need an integrated strategy for achieving that.

Unfortunately, the frustration that we feel as we work in this process is that the documents that are brought to us in terms of what the governments are planning to do for example are very heavily a shopping list of a huge number of things without any prioritization of which are the most important ones for us to focus on in order to get there, without any commonality among the jurisdictions of which ones we're going to focus on first.

For example, Minnesota has done an incredible amount of work around mercury and let's get mercury out of certain products, be they thermometers, running shoes, all kinds of things that we need to get mercury out of.

Look at the Ontario jurisdiction and that hasn't been a focus of our work in Ontario at all.

But we're living in an integrated ecosystem and if we are going to protect Lake Superior or if we're going to protect any of the other areas that we live in, it doesn't matter which government jurisdiction I live in in terms of what I need to have done in order to achieve the goals.

We have to be working in a common way around the basin.

But the strategy and the programs being developed – unfortunately in Lake Superior, and we see it in the other jurisdictions as well – don't integrate these in and come to a common voice of saying we as all the governments around this particular basin think these are the items that are most important to focus on now.

What it tends to heavily be is programs that people in most jurisdictions or governments in most jurisdictions were already planning on doing and making that list. But maybe that's not what we need.

If what we were already doing was enough, well, we can just all go home, take the weekend off. It clearly isn't enough. And therefore, we need to be looking at new solutions, at new integrated programs.

A second area of concern that we have in the Forum and have made recommendations around is that we've designated certain materials and the governments have designated certain substances as ones that we have to get to zero discharge on.

But there's a concern that there may be proposals and indeed have been proposals around all of our areas for programs, for facilities that may release more of those substances than they currently are, or a new facility that may release a particular kind of toxic substance that we've designated for zero discharge.

The Forum spent a lot of time addressing how do we deal with proposals for new or expanded sources? It's critical. We clearly can't achieve our goals if we don't address those problems.

We came out with a recommendation to the governments that if a project comes forward that it's decided they will issue a permit to that would release those designated substances, the permit must include in it an enforceable plan, not simply a plan or a proposal, but an enforceable plan that shows how that particular company or municipality will achieve zero discharge by the targeted date that we have all agreed to in the Lake Superior program.

So that we don't again keep adding more things, they have to show a plan to make sure it won't happen. And that's got to be implementable and enforceable in law.

I'll give you the example of something working in a way that's inconsistent with this. This is in Minnesota with their mercury policy which came out in July 2001 – so very recent.

It addresses new mercury releases, for example. And mercury is one of our major substances of concern. It says: “New mercury releases will be allowed so long as no impacts on local water bodies are predicted.” Are predicted. Not a precautionary approach.

And besides, we've set as a target – because we say we can't take more risk – that we want to have no sources of mercury as a result of human activities. So this is contrary to that precautionary approach that we're talking about.

Another major concern that we have in Lake Superior – and it's again a problem in a lot of other places is out of basin air sources. It's very difficult for us to deal with. The commitment that all parties in Lake Superior have made is to say we can't point the finger elsewhere and say you've got to clean up, you're the problem, but that we in the Lake Superior basin have to take the responsibility for showing leadership of how we're going to do zero discharge of our own sources within the basin.

But simultaneously with our doing that, we want to make sure the actions are being taken in the rest of Canada and the United States that reinforce what's happening here because we can never achieve that zero discharge goal, we can never achieve the virtual elimination of persistent toxic substances unless the activities are happening elsewhere on this continent and across the globe.

Let me give you an example of one of the contradictions that we're running into. Toxafene is a major substance of concern in Lake Superior. The source of toxafene is a pesticide that was very heavily used in the past in the cotton fields in the southern United States and came up to Lake Superior through the air as we talked earlier about this problem of substance coming through the air.

Now, in the southern United States, they have the waste from having produced toxafene in the past, the waste from having used toxafene in the past, in old landfill sites. They're having to try to clean up those landfill sites because they're creating local problems.

One of the concerns that we've been raising in Lake Superior is the cleanup process itself in some way contributing to air emissions coming up to Lake Superior from these old cleanup processes?

When we wrote to the E.P.A. – and I think that region four in the southern United States – they responded with talking about the concentrations during the cleanup of toxafene in the air are within the acceptable range.

But that's not the concern we're talking about. That's critical. That's important for people living there and breathing that air. It is critical. But the concern that we have is what is the total quantity of toxafene being released into the air during that cleanup process, which then comes up to the Great Lakes, or at least part of it comes up to the Great Lakes? And what contribution will that make to our ongoing problems here?

And while region five, based in Chicago, is working to achieve the zero discharge, region four is not clearly connected in terms of understanding the impacts that it has not just in the local area, but far distant across the entire continent.

So we have a real concern that we need to find ways to more adequately focus on the out-of-basin air sources.

Another major concern that we have is the need to move beyond the traditional – in the case of Lake Superior – nasty nine substances that we talked about.

The source of medical stats, the presentations that you saw first thing this morning in terms of our newest understanding about health impacts on wildlife and on people are going to a whole new range of substances, be they endocrine disruptors or whole new types of substances.

We have to start putting these into our core programs in the LaMPs, in the RAPs, in the ZIPs.

It isn't enough anymore to simply focus on that traditional list that we had. We have to move on to other substances while we continue our work, continue the task on the traditional nine or 11 that the list may be.

Finally, the RAP–LaMP link and the ZIP–LaMP link that we must talk about. On the lakewide plans, we're moving towards goals that are lake wide, and in there are a lot of RAPs that are working on dealing with their specific local concerns, part of which is cleaning up contaminated sediments.

We have to make sure that what we decide is adequate in the RAP is good enough to achieve the goals of the LaMP.

Now, let me give you an example. In Lake Superior, we've set targets for having no sources of mercury to the lake from sources that came from human activities.

We have a RAP in Marathon, on the north shore of Lake Superior, in Ontario, which has major quantities of mercury in contaminated sediments in the basin.

And the RAP has not confronted the need to clean up or get rid of those sediments so they don't keep releasing the predictions for the next 200 years into Lake Superior. It hasn't confronted that difference in the goal between the two jurisdictions.

The other major problem of course that we all confront – and Tom Baldini referred to it in the opening – is the need for resources. He said we could be in chaos if we suddenly had this huge amount of money. But I could tell by the glint in his eye he was hoping for that chaos to arrive.

(laughter)

We desperately need the resources to do the job. And unfortunately, in all jurisdictions, we're finding instead that we are having to struggle and fight to keep the resources that we already had. What a tragedy! Just to try to hang on. Not to make progress. We've got to break out of that.

We also need new regulations, not just voluntary programs, but new regulations to move us there.

The final thing I want to address is again not specific to Lake Superior. It's something that comes out of my work as an activist with Great Lakes United and other groups across the basin for many years now.

And it's really to follow up on what David Carpenter was talking about this morning.

David Carpenter talked about the work that was being done in New York State in terms of connecting health impacts that we see with people in terms with the regions where certain types of facilities are, and so on.

And he said that the stimulus that resulted in them developing that program were the Health Canada reports that came out two years ago. And what these are are reports that looked at a) each area of concern on the Canadian side of the basin and said what are the health statistics that we have that show up there and did then an analysis of what were significantly elevated types of problems.

What we so desperately need and have made no progress in in the past two years in Canada is make some links between those things that we're seeing and what could be the possible sources, and what does that mean for our cleanup work?

I'm not a scientist, but I can look through those reports and have certain questions rise in my mind as I start comparing them.

Let me give you just one example.

Looking at the statistics in there for infantile cerebral palsy, for example, we find in the Health Canada data significantly elevated levels in Thunder Bay, in the St. Clair RAP, which is the Sarnia area, and in Cornwall, down here on the St. Lawrence River.

And if you look in the description in the back of the Health Canada reports of what they describe as cause of infantile cerebral palsy, one of the causes that they say is prenatal exposure to methylmercury may result in cerebral palsy.

You then start thinking about these areas and realize that each of those communities where we're seeing a significantly elevated – it's 99 percent degree of significance, according to the Health Canada studies – each had a chloralkalide plant which are known as having been major emitters of mercury in the past.

It poses a serious question in my mind that we need to investigate further is what are the causes of these? Is it just an accident with methylmercury that the chloralkalide plants that release mercury were into those communities where we're seeing those escalated areas?

And also, what does it tell us in terms of cleanup activities? None of those plants are operating anymore. But we're still seeing the effects happening. There's still mercury in the sediments. Can we just allow those to continue to wash out or hope they'll be covered over with sediments, as we allow that to wash out and perhaps be creating more instance of things like cerebral palsy?

We don't know the answers for sure. We need more investigations of that. But we can't just spend our time investigating it either.

There's enough warning there to tell me we've got to get in there and get rid of those sediments and not just hope that somehow over time they'll gradually dissipate because how many wildlife, how many people are we sacrificing in the meantime?

So thank you.

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

Thank you for the thought-provoking talk.

If you have questions for John, please catch him during the lunch period. We have a very quick session. Are you going to be around here this afternoon?

JOHN JACKSON:

Probably.

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

Okay. There is another discussion period around 2:30, I believe, in the next session. You could be part of that.

For all of you, lunch is on your own. It's from now until one o'clock. There are restaurants back in the hotel. There are a couple of restaurants down to the ground floor and two floors below it. Are there other ones around here?

(BREAK FOR LUNCH)

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES
(Environment Canada) (Afternoon moderator):

May I have your attention, please? I'm your moderator for this afternoon.

I have the pleasure of introducing 15 students from the Regent Public School who will be each presenting something on the Severn Sound Area of Concern.

So let's start with them.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Bonjour. Regent Public School, working together with the Severn Sound RAP.

Who are we? Regent Public School is a very accomplished school. Our school is made of roughly 300 students. We have been working with the Severn Sound Remedial Action Plan for several years to enhance the quality of water in the Severn Sound watershed.

Where are we? We are located approximately two hours north of Toronto, Ontario. Midland is located in Simcoe County on the south-eastern shore of Georgian Bay. Severn Sound watershed is a 1,098 square-kilometre area that includes Midland. There are many rivers, streams and creeks near our area that…

UNIDENTIFIED:

Can you talk in the microphone, please? Just say your second part, there.

UNIDENTIFIED:

The Severn Sound watershed is a 1,098 square-kilometre area that includes Midland. There are many rivers, streams and creeks near our area that contribute large amounts of freshwater to the Great Lakes.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Projects in action. Birdhouses. Birdhouses were built last year in the winter.

UNIDENTIFIED:

They were built to rejuvenate the bird population for spring when most birds are coming back.

UNIDENTIFIED:

They were also built to raise money for the Great Lakes Teen Summit in Buffalo, New York. And along the way, we started to understand more about our environment.

UNIDENTIFIED:

We also participated in an invertebrate study last year by the Hog River.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Our class participated in cooperation with grade seven and eight classes in our school.

UNIDENTIFIED:

We learned of how our ecosystem is affected by pollution and what the tolerance levels are in the Severn Sound watershed.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Lead poisoning. Since 1991, over 30 trumpeter swans in the Wye Marsh area have died of lead poisoning. These are only the swans in the Wye Marsh and in surrounding areas.

UNIDENTIFIED:

It only takes three lead pellets to kill a male trumpeter swan. Trumpeter swans are more likely to die of lead than any other waterfowl. This is due to their long necks that can reach the lead pellets when they have not fully sunk into the sediment.

Lead fishing tackle is a major problem also among the waterfowl.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Wye Marsh and RAP are working together to help the swans and other waterfowl.

UNIDENTIFIED:

The difference. The average fish would not be able to tell the difference between non-lead sinkers and jigs and lead sinkers and jigs. Neither would the average fisherman.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Communities in bloom. On July 15th, 2001 our school won an award for the cleanest schoolyard.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Our principal, Mr. Giron(?), went to attend the ceremony.

UNIDENTIFIED:

The award ceremony was held at Midland's Little Lake Park.

UNIDENTIFIED:

The award is called The Mayor's Award. For two years, our school had a horticultural club to help improve the environment.

UNIDENTIFIED:

We participated in tree planting, beach sweeps and other community cleanups.

UNIDENTIFIED:

We have planted trees, hoping to make our yard more environmentally friendly for our community.

UNIDENTIFIED:

A shared thought. Buffalo, New York, was the location of the 2001 Great Lakes Student Summit.

UNIDENTIFIED:

That adventure was not only exciting but interesting. We learned, we taught and we promised.

UNIDENTIFIED:

We learned about the other communities and the Great Lakes.

UNIDENTIFIED:

We taught people about our area of concern and what we are doing to try to decrease the amount of pollution in Severn Sound.

UNIDENTIFIED:

In Buffalo, we made 12 future generation promises.

One promise we are successfully completing is we promised to join in community cleanups, beach sweeps and other restoration efforts.

UNIDENTIFIED:

The TransCanada Trail. The TransCanada Trail is a trail across Canada.

UNIDENTIFIED:

It will be the longest trail in the world with an impressive length of 17,250 kilometers.

UNIDENTIFIED:

The trail will encompass every province and territory in Canada.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Around 1,500,000 volunteers are helping build the trail.

UNIDENTIFIED:

People from all around Canada are donating 36 dollars to build another meter of the trail.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Our school has donated money to create another part of the trail.

UNIDENTIFIED:

The primary problems in our area. (Inaudible) aquatic plant production has been caused by high nutrient levels caused by sewage and treatment plant inputs, agricultural activities, shoreline development and many other sources.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Tree planting. Regent Public School has planted 3,000 trees in the last three years. We have planted young white pines and cedar trees. We planted the trees to help rehabilitate the ecosystem.

UNIDENTIFIED:

How trees help the water. The trees are helping to bring back animals and different types of vegetation to our area. The trees are helping to reduce bank erosion from the stream. They are shading the stream which cools the water. This enhances fish species.

The plants are filtering pollutants in the stream, which in turn will help the Great Lakes and will keep the ecosystem balanced.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Adopt a trumpeter swan. Regent Public School has adopted a trumpeter swan. We have named her Bigglesworth. She weighs 12 kilograms and is one and a half years old. By adopting a trumpeter swan, we are helping to bring back the population of trumpeter swans in our area.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Basic facts about trumpeter swans. Trumpeter swans are the largest of the world's six swan species and are also North America's largest waterfowl. Adult trumpeter swans can weigh up to 30 pounds. They also have a wingspan of up to three feet. Getting hit with the wing of a male trumpeter swan has the same amount of force as getting hit with a baseball bat.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Trumpeter swans are originally native to Ontario. There are only approximately 500 trumpeter swans still in Canada, which is part of the 16,000 still in North America.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Trumpeter swans are a vulnerable species.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Lead shot project. The whirligig. The Wye Marsh and RAP have made a machine called the whirligig. It has an arm on it that attaches to a metal cage. The basic concept of this machine is to shake the ground so the lead pellets sink deeper into the sediment and out of the reach of swans and other waterfowl.

The whirligig helps reduce the number of swans treated for lead poisoning even though it is still a major problem.

Dawn Foxall developed this machine in 1995.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Take a little lead out. All it takes is one lead sinker or a jig to kill a loon. Regent Public School has provided a free lead exchange. You can trade in your lead tackle for lead-free tackle. This saves the swans from eating the lead and in turn reducing the number of deaths.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Trumpeter swans sculpture. Regent Public School has donated 100 dollars to the town of Midland's new swan sculpture, which was unveiled on October 12th, 2001.

The money from the swan sculpture will finance educational and environmental programs at the Wye Marsh.

UNIDENTIFIED:

How we are helping. The legacy continues.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Our accomplishments. The trees we planted in the past three years have enhanced air quality and filtered the water. It beautifies the area and also gives animals a natural habitat.

UNIDENTIFIED:

The birdhouses that we have established will provide opportunities for nesting in hopes that certain declining bird species may repopulate.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Shuffling off to Buffalo. While attending the Student Summit in Buffalo, we learned what other schools around the Great Lakes were doing regarding pollution. We used this opportunity to inform others what we were doing to help our environment.

This Summit has shown us various school projects that are under way to enhance the Great Lakes water quality.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Our pond study. During our invertebrate study, we learned what kind of wildlife lived in the stream. Our study included cloud cover, water clearness, wind speed according to the Beaufort scale and pH levels.

The water showed a moderate amount of pollutants. This meant a highly sensitive life, such as the stonefly, would not be able to survive.

However, we saw many water shutters, frogs, whirligig beetles and minnows, which are all sensitive animals.

This balanced our scale between tolerant and intolerant animals. We concluded therefore that the water was at a medium tolerance.

UNIDENTIFIED:

We submitted this valuable information to the Canadian Wildlife Federation so future planning may occur. This will help enhance the environment and allow more sensitive species to live in the area. We are hoping to make the Severn Sound area a place where all types of species can live in harmony.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Regent Horticultural Club. Our horticultural club has worked diligently to enhance the environment surrounding our school by planting trees and creating gardens. The Communities in Bloom Committee recognized the school's efforts by rewarding them with the mayor's award. The Club has become on a broader scale with the Town of Midland.

UNIDENTIFIED:

For the future, we hope and dream.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Trumpeter swan adoption. In adopting a trumpeter swan, we hope that more trumpeter swans will come to this area and they will soon be a common sight.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Take a little lead out. In having a take a little lead out booth, we hope to encourage fishermen to use lead-free tackle. Swans and other waterfowl will be protected from the lead.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Tree planting. In planting trees, we hope to stop the pollution in Great Lakes and tributaries so that in the future, we will be able to drink and swim in the water of Georgian Bay and surrounding area.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Invertebrate study. In taking an invertebrate study, we hope that scientists will be able to use the information gathered to classify the water quality.

UNIDENTIFIED:

TransCanada Trail. By adopting a portion of the TransCanada Trail, we are preserving a piece of history for others to enjoy.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Communities in Bloom. By planting trees in a garden in our school's front lawn, we have provided a friendly environment for the future.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Bird feeders. In making bird feeders, we hope to reintroduce a variety of birds into our area. We hope that this will expand the range of winter feeder birds.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Birdhouses. In making birdhouses and hanging them along the Hog River, we hope to increase the population of brown wrens and bluebirds in our area.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Great Lakes Student Summit. In going to the Summit, we hope that students will learn about the Great Lakes and try to make a difference.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Success in Severn Sound. Severn Sound is one of the 17 places on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes known as an area of concern.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Collingwood, Ontario has been the only area to be delisted so far.

UNIDENTIFIED:

In the year of 2001, Severn Sound area is hoping to be the second area to be delisted.

UNIDENTIFIED:

The Severn Sound Area is considered a model to other RAP areas. Work will continue in the Severn Sound area to continue the healing process.

UNIDENTIFIED:

The end, but really only the beginning.

GROUP:

We can all make a difference! Merci beaucoup.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

I don't know if you know that you just happened to be in front of something very special. You just heard angels talk, okay. Kids are angels and they're showing us the way, and I hope we don't disappoint them.

Now, for the second speaker, I would like to introduce Mr. Keith Sherman, who is the Coordinator of the Severn Sound Remedial Action Plan.

Please welcome Mr. Keith Sherman.

KEITH SHERMAN
(Severn Sound RAP Coordinator):

We have just a brief technical interlude here. The first part of my talk has been very ably taken care of and eloquently taken care of.

What I would like to do is just give you a bit of background on the Remedial Action Plan process.

We identified the problems. As you saw them, two main problems were identified at the first stage of the RAP process.

The stage one document was submitted in 1989 to the governments.

The Remedial Action Plan, the stage two of the process, the stage two report, was developed and submitted to the governments in 1993.

As part of that process, we laid out several delisting objectives for the Remedial Action Plan for the area of concern.

In that time, we tried to develop a series of delisting objectives which were specific, reproducible, defensible measures to respond to each of the use impairments that applied to the Severn Sound area. And eight of the 14 use impairments could apply.

So at the time of writing of the stage two report, the methods for assessing several use impairments were under development. And as we saw in this morning's presentation, methods will be under development forever, essentially under review, under development and new techniques will be coming out.

What I would like to do today is simply to go through and to provide you with some of the indicators that we're using in the Severn Sound area of concern and point out some of the information that we have so far.

I have to flip my glasses on every so often. When I started the RAP, I didn't need glasses.

The Remedial Action Plan, the area of concern, if you look at Severn Sound, physically there are some features that are necessary in order to properly consider the delisting objectives.

First of all, Severn Sound is not a simple lake. It's complex. It has a number of bays. Some of those bays are almost tributary to the rest of the Sound.

The eastern end of the lake is very shallow, two to four meters, and it deepens as you head out towards Georgian Bay. And the dark blue area, up where the Georgian Bay area is, is about 43 meters deep.

We call that the doormat to Severn Sound because it's the last basin before the lakebed rises by a series of islands that are at the entrance to Severn Sound.

The other aspect is the fact that the contact between Canadian Shield and the sedimentary areas of southern Ontario run right down the middle of Severn Sound.

We heard about the problems that were identified previously. The main two problems are eutrophication.

This has been a constant problem in Severn Sound until recently. The extensive algae blooms basically started in the spring and lasted through to the fall with very characteristic communities of eutrophic systems. Both the phytoplankton and the zooplankton were a characteristic of that.

The remedial actions included looking at the issues that you saw previously plus we looked at sewage plant discharges, private sewage systems, urban stormwater, agricultural sources and marine activities, all of which were to control phosphorus sources and reduce the phosphorus, the controlling nutrient in Severn Sound.

Now, this is one of the key areas of remedial action that we pursued.

The other main problem that was identified early on was that there had been a loss of habitat and that fish populations were degraded in Severn Sound. There were a number of shifts that took place from since the mid-70s. In the mid-70s, predator species such as walleye and northern pike, largemouth bass, were a significant portion of the catch in typical trap net catches from that time. It was a destination fishery in the province for walleye.

In the mid-80s, the walleye population declined dramatically to very low levels, and it dropped off of the fishing radar screen for walleye.

The other change that happened was black crappie became quite plentiful. Black crappie are a sunfish which are often associated with eutrophic situations.

Let's try that again. The remedial actions associated with that problem hinged around rehabilitating the degraded habitat, both in tributaries as well as coastal habitat.

These are two areas in Severn Sound. We have done extensive tributary work and we are working on a number of projects for coastal habitat.

Another problem that we were concerned about is that Severn Sound actually is one of the few areas of concern that did not have an in-place pollutant problem at the time. We do have a concern, a surveillance concern for contaminants in the area, as well as bacterial contaminants.

When anyone develops an objective that will measure the response of an ecosystem to some remedial action that you put in place, there are these ideals that you have to keep in mind. I call them ideals. They are not really ideals. They are things that you should really strive for if you want to delist an area of concern.

I will let you read those. Basically, we are looking for scientific defensibility. We are looking for some idea of the pre-existing conditions and reference measurements of indicators that you're using. We are also looking for tools to predict the response to the ecosystem that will help with explaining the cause or the cause-effect linkage behind the changes that you're seeing.

And also, we are looking at the… In a perfect world, you would want to have all of the remedial actions completed so that you can say okay, as of 1996, all the remedial actions were completed. Now, let's go to 1997 and start measuring the difference.

Most involved with RAPs and ZIPs and other areas I'm sure will agree that that doesn't happen. And in some cases, you do set in motion processes such as stormwater and combined sewer overflow restoration works.

One of the facts – I don't know whether it's still true or not – but I heard of a Toronto RAP person once say that they were very excited about this. They just developed a storm sewer plan with the metro works at the time that was a one-hundred year plan for restoring and changing all the combined sewer overflows in Toronto and making the infrastructure incorporate stormwater best management practices.

Recently, I heard that that might be set back a little bit with some of the cutbacks and delayed. For those in the class, could you please tell your children or your children's children to watch out for the end of the Toronto Remedial Action Plan in probably the year 2200 or something like that?

The last area of making sure these measurements are good is to control the measurements that you're making for other factors. In an ecosystem, you are faced with a constellation of factors that are going to vary. The ones that you are looking for in order to measure success and measure restoration have to be the ones that you select out and you have to somehow control for the others so that you can know that you have made a difference.

So what I'd like to do now is go into some of the use impairments and just give you some examples of how I think we have made some changes or how the Severn Sound area of concern is an area that, at least with many of these use impairments, we have a good track on the kind of contaminants that we saw as problems in the first place, or the kind of problems that we saw.

Here we have a guide to eating sport fish page. This has been made up for walleye. It shows mercury. It's based largely on mercury in walleye. The top line shows the area of Georgian Bay, Severn Sound. The second one is for Collingwood Harbor, and the rest of the areas are areas of Lake Huron, North Channel and the other parts of Georgian Bay.

You can see that there is a fish length scale along the top. A clear fish means that anyone can eat as many meals as they want of that fish. You can eat up to eight meals, according to the risk assessment that was behind this, per month. If you can find walleye to eat eight meals per month in Severn Sound, don't tell anybody else.

The other aspects of the scale is where you have four, that means four meals per month and two means only two meals per month. It's a risk assessment and it's primarily aimed at women of childbearing age and young children.

What this is saying is that the mercury information is telling you that you can eat fish in Severn Sound as much as you could eat anywhere in Georgian Bay, Lake Huron, North Channel. In fact, in some places, they are cleaner.

We have looked for sources of mercury. We don't think that we have those sources in Severn Sound and what we're looking at is a regional problem.

For PCBs, we think that carp is the best-monitored use in Severn Sound. We've looked at all the other fish. Carp are the ones that did have PCBs when we arrived on the scene. And as it's shown here, carp in any size, even up to a meter long carp that was submitted in this sample size, are free of the PCBs over five hundred parts per billion.

So we end up with the ability, if you like carp, you can eat any size carp. That's not true anywhere else in the Georgian Bay – Lake Huron area.

As I said before, we have had very dramatic changes in shifts in the fish community. This three-paneled figure just shows the year-to-year changes in fish community.

The top panel is predatory fish and the red part of that panel is walleye.

The middle panel is benthic fish. And just to point out, the blue is for brown bullhead, a very common bottom-feeding fish.

And the bottom one is panfish, or sunfish.

The red parts of the bars are for black crappie.

So you can see that as black crappie waxed, then brown bullheads waned, and so did walleye. Brown bullheads have increased in recent years. Black crappie are disappearing, but so are walleye fluctuating.

We don't have all the answers to this, but we do think that harvest is one of the problems with that.

So in the fishery, more than anything else I think, we have some additional questions to ask before we can say which way Severn Sound is going.

An added calculation from the walleye information that we have is that the mortality rate is increasing. This tells us that there is a problem with harvest because the fish themselves are quite healthy.

Benthos is another indicator that we're looking for. This is largely from the point of view of eutrophication.

In 1994, the burrowing mayfly Hexagenia was found only in one location in Penetang Bay. All the others locations tested for should have had Hexagenia but did not.

In 1998, following major changes in the sewage plants going into Penetang Bay and in some sampling that was going on in other parts of Severn Sound, we found that these burrowing mayflies were present throughout and that they were very much causing a stir as their emergence was getting onto storefronts and waterfront restaurants and so on, causing problems.

So this we think is a good sign of recovery.

Generally speaking, contaminant levels in Severn Sound, open water deposition sediments are near or below the lowest effect level of the guidelines. There are a couple of exceptions of this, and they have been tested further and they are neither available, nor are they causing problems with toxicity or uptake.

Our expected open water quality was to get to a phosphorus concentration that was less than 15 micrograms per litre in the open waters, and 20 in the south end of Penetang Bay, or the inner end of Penetang Bay.

All the other parameters flow from that water clarity and the amount of algae or chlorophyll.

These were the targets that were put out at the beginning.

In the phosphorus area, we are meeting the phosphorus targets and doing better than the phosphorus targets in most areas of Severn Sound. In the inner part of Penetang Bay, we are just meeting the target for total phosphorus.

Chlorophyll is very good and better than we thought, and there's a reason for that, which I'll get to.

Secchi Disk, a measure of water clarity, is also doing better than we had expected. We were aiming at three or more meters Secchi Disk.

The reason why we don't have three or more meters in Sturgeon Bay is because it only has two and a half meters of depth. So the Secchi Disk is sitting on the bottom.

Now, those confounding factors, those other factors. Zebra mussels also infested Severn Sound in recent years. What we have done is constructed a simple model that would allow us to evaluate what would Severn Sound be like without the zebra mussels because zebra mussels also affect phosphorus and algae and water clarity.

The bottom line is the measured result for just taking phytoplankton bio-volume as a measure. The line above that is the modeled result. If we did not have zebra mussels, this is where we would be.

In terms of the phosphorus concentration, we think this is a very conservative approach because we didn't give. The model needs some tweaking. It's an evaluative tool, but we think that there is a gap between measured and what we should be seeing in the absence of zebra mussels.

However, we are very close to the targets even with the model.

Biomass of zooplankton is also declining and the zooplankton Bosmina longirostris typically made up 80 percent of the older years of biomass because it's a very good eutrophic indicator. Now we are finding that it makes up a much less proportion.

And I'm going to have to skip.

The last one is on habitat. We're doing quite well on habitat. I think we've made some major changes there.

So I think what I would like to conclude with is that the Severn Sound RAP has been a strong community effort which has included the commitment of the federal, provincial, municipal governments, local organizations and individual volunteers.

My hope is that the delisting of the AOC will signal the designation of Severn Sound as an area of sustainability where the significant investment in restoration of the ecosystem can be cared for by future generations.

I think you've seen some evidence of that already starting today. I'm hoping that it will be that way in the future.

Thank you.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

There will be a discussion period after two more presenters.

The third presentation will be from David Cowgill, of the U.S. E.P.A. He's working at the Great Lakes National Program Office, and his presentation is entitled “Overview of Sediment Remediation in the Great Lakes Basin (U.S.)”.

Please welcome Mr. Cowgill.

DAVID COWGILL
(U.S. E.P.A., Great Lakes National Program Office):

Thank you very much.

Before I start, I would like to thank the Commission for the invitation to come speak today on a subject that has been discussed at many IJC meetings in the past in varying degrees.

For those of you who have been staying with this issue for a long time, you'll see a lot of familiar materials and you will see that the pace is probably steady over time, but hopefully increasing. We'll look into that.

I'd also like to acknowledge and compliment the students here today. I thought their presentation was very impressive and I can't imagine a better-behaved, more attentive group of students than yourselves. You ought to commend yourselves for a job well done.

Again, I'm with the E.P.A. Great Lakes National Program Office, in Chicago. Our office, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, monitors the open waters of the lakes and provides demonstration grants on a number of different things, as well as preparing reports summarizing the quality of the lakes.

I'm going to mention a couple of things that were actually presented at the IJC meeting in Milwaukee when the Sediment Priority Action Committee gave a presentation on its work.

But in general, of the 14 beneficial use impairments, as many as 11 of them can be tied back to sediment in one way or another. The sediment problem has been pervasive throughout the areas of concern and the contaminants in the sediment that get into fish has led and contributed to fish consumption advisories as well as a threat to commerce as an impediment to navigation and increasing water treatment costs.

Again, this is on the IJC website. One of the documents prepared by the IJC SedPAC group was entitled “Overcoming Obstacles to Sediment Remediation”, and it went into a fair amount of detail about why sediment remediation progress has been slow. And I'm just going to touch upon the subject headings and then move on. But for those of you interested in reading that, it is on the IJC's website.

Some of the main categories of obstacles were limited funding, the regulatory complexity, lack of a decision-making framework that makes making those decisions about remediation easy, limited corporate involvement, insufficient research and technology development, and limited public and local support.

And I just might add that the combination of those obstacles varies dramatically from site to site, from one area of concern to another. In fact, from person to person, as you discuss the subject, there will be different opinions as to why, which of those is the most important at any given place.

So why do we care about this? Just a quick review. Contaminated sediment can damage aquatic ecosystems, can lead to fish tumors and abnormalities, can result in lost fisheries resources and therefore lost recreational value, can result in human health effects. We heard a little bit about that earlier this morning. And that is whether or not there are fish consumption advisories because as we all know, many times people ignore them.

Impacts on harbors and then other lost beneficial uses including habitat loss.

I think everybody's probably familiar, but just looking at the dots on the map for the Great Lakes areas of concern, it gives you just a quick idea about the spatial extent of contaminated sediments.

Next, please. Just a little marketing here. This is a boat that our office operates to try to especially design for sediment contamination monitoring, that rig on the end is to be able to take deep sediment cores to help get a three-dimensional picture about the contaminated sediments in an area. Is it just six inches of contamination on the surface or does it go down ten, 20, 30 feet in depth? This just shows people operating the sediment vibro-coring device that we use.

The mud puppy is the name of the boat, and it has visited almost all of the U.S. areas of concern at least one or more times.

Again, just a post-lunch picture. This is a picture of just a sediment core actually from Indiana Harbor, Indiana, sliced down the centre. There was actually a plastic sleeve around that which is open on either end of it. But you can see how oily it is and you can imagine the concentrations of petroleum hydrocarbons and other contaminants in there.

So just quickly, in order to get to remediation, you have to understand the problem you're trying to fix. A three-dimensional picture of the sediment chemistry is one thing, as well as looking at sediment toxicity.

Sometimes depending on the nature of the sediment, there can be contaminants present that could be more or less available, and so that you want to do toxicity tests to measure a biological response.

The benthic community structure just takes a look at what organisms are living on the bottom of the sediment. You saw the previous speaker talking about Hexagenia, which is not tolerant to pollution. You can get an idea by looking at what is there about the severity of the contamination.

And then contaminant transport sediment, though you think of it, is just mud on the bottom of a river or a lake. It tends not to stay put. And I'll talk more about this.

The next slide, please. Just one thing that's important to remember, and there has been a fair amount of research over the years about the importance of large events. What if the material, clean sediment starts to come into the river and bury the dirty sediment? Maybe everything's okay. Maybe you don't need to worry about it.

But studies have shown that under large storm events, when there is an increased energy in the system, there can be a tremendous amount of contaminated sediment mobilized and transported either from upstream to downstream or from the river into the lake, thus affecting contaminants in the fish and perhaps extending the period of time when there would be advisories necessary.

Again, we really have a chance to do something about the sediment when it's in the rivers. Once it gets out into the open lake, it's really impossible to deal with.

So time is of the essence.

So for remediation, which is what I want to focus on here, what are roughly speaking some of the steps?

As I mentioned, you have to identify the presence of contamination. You have to know what the nature of the contamination is, both to figure out whether it's causing problems as well as to design some kind of a solution to the problem, figure out what are the objectives, look at alternatives which can be very controversial and difficult, come up with a design once you've figured out what the remediation should be, implement it.

Then one of the things that the SedPAC group observed after looking at all the sediment remediation projects on both sides of the border over the years is that we tend to put all our energy into identifying the problem and we celebrate when we clean something up.

We tend not to go back and measure the ecological recovery associated with that, which can be very important as we try to describe why it's a worthwhile thing to do in other locations.

And so there was a sort of a self-criticism and a recommendation that that should be an integral part of any cleanup project.

On the U.S. side of the border, most of the sediment cleanups that have been done to date have been done under some regulatory program. There is more than one out there. They differ for a variety of reasons.

The Superfund program, violations of the Clean Water Act, permits which can result in an enforcement action, and under the Resource Conservation Recovery Act, the corrective actions program has lead to some cleanups.

The Fish and Wildlife Service as a natural resource trustee has also completed some sediment cleanups most recently in Saginaw – which is also a provision of the Superfund law – that different agencies led.

There have been some voluntary or partnership cleanups. I think most notable is probably the Ottawa River in Ohio, which was cleaned up as a voluntary partnership effort.

The Ashtabula partnership in Ohio is also not yet done, but there is a lot of energy going into that.

I might mention, just to benchmark, are we taking the right approach in the Great Lakes or are we missing something?

There was a National Academy of Science report released in March of this year and it was a very long report that addressed PCB remediation of contaminated sediments containing PCBs.

Some of the points that they brought up is you should made site-specific decisions. You should involve affected parties as partners. You should give more consideration to social, cultural and economic impacts.

Control the sources first. I didn't mention that, but that's a general principle. You don't want to have recontamination occur after conducting an expensive and difficult cleanup project.

Balance short-term and long-term risks. In other words, during a cleanup project there may be some temporary increased risks. You have to balance that over 20, 30, 40, 50 years' worth of improvement that might result.

Document the performance of the remedies. I mentioned that earlier. And then establish a risk-based decision framework.

I would say that though the various programs in the US under which sediment remediation is done differ, I think in the Great Lakes, we're quite consistent with that overall set of recommendations.

So what are some generic options? No action required. Actually, we often think of that as a particular hot spot. Do you take action or do you not? And often, it's debated as if that were the main option. But if you think about all these areas of concern, many of them include very large areas.

We focus on the hot spots. We talk about cleaning up the hot spots. But if you were to take your pencil and shade in the areas in an area of concern in a river or harbor area where you really aren't going to do anything, I would say that in many of these areas of concern, the no-action alternative will be chosen just because the contamination isn't that great compared to other areas.

Capping just means taking clean sand or sediment and burying the more contaminated stuff to limit the flux of contaminants and the transport of contaminants.

Natural attenuation. If the substances in the sediment tend to break down naturally, then perhaps over time it will go away. It's been very controversial as to whether substances like PCBs do go away on their own. There have been studies showing that they go away very, very slowly, but it tends not to be a very quick process.

Dredging and disposal of some kind.

And then in-situ treatment. I would say on the U.S. side, the lion's share of these projects has dealt with dredging and disposal – removing it from the aquatic system where the material is actively cycling in the system and taking it somewhere else.

This is just a picture of a hydraulic dredge that was used at one of the sites I believe in Wisconsin.

Next. Okay, so some summaries. On the U.S. side, in the Great Lakes basin, there have been over 35 completed projects, about three ongoing. This changes from day to day as things are wrapped up. About 12 or more are in the planning stages.

As part of the sediment goal in the Great Lakes Binational Toxic Strategy, there has been a commitment on both sides of the border to track and report progress toward that goal. As we get sediment projects cleaned up, we'll track both the volume of material moved, the mass of the major constituents, the major tier-one chemicals in that material.

Also, we'll provide a narrative description of things that have been done in that given year, whether it's even things that would proceed the actual cleanup, such as source control, as well as the cleanup itself.

In 2000, there were five of them in the U.S. Not the entire AOC, the Fox River, Manistique River, USX vessel slip in Lake Michigan, the Pine River and the Saginaw River.

Next.

So over the last four years – and this is not including the present year, this is 1997 through 2000 – I don't know if you can see those numbers: 97,000 cubic yards removed in 1997; roughly 938,000 cubic yards in 1998; 250,000 in 1999; 368,000 in the year 2000.

We have information that goes back farther than that, but that just gives you a sense of the volumes we're talking about.

You won't be able to see this, but I mentioned that we would track and report the quantity of total volume of sediments removed as well as the mass of chemicals in that sediment in the Binational Strategy progress reports.

This just shows though the latest form that that will be taking. It goes area of concern by area of concern. If there are multiple cleanups in a given area of concern, each one will be listed and identified showing what the volume of material was.

Where we have information about PCBs or mercury or dioxin present in that material, we'll try to account for the mass of those chemicals that have been removed.

Also, on the far right column, there's an ultimate disposition of the material which says was the material destroyed? Was it land filled in a disposal facility? Was it perhaps transported out of the Great Lakes basin to a landfill or something like that?

Treatment technology absence, I'm almost done here. Just a couple of technologies that are being looked at that are destructive. One is the Minergy process. It's a classification process. There was a demonstration in the Fox River this past August with the E.P.A., Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the Minergy Corporation as partners.

Cement-Lock process. There is the Trenton Channel which is part of the Detroit River demonstration scheduled for this summer of 2002 with E.P.A., Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, and the Gas Technology Institute as partners.

So what are some of our hopes and dreams for the future, for doing a better job? I guess I was going to say that maybe the watch words on this subject is little by little does the trick. I think if you look around the room, you'll see some people have been sticking with this for a very long time.

Hopefully, many more will join the fun over time.

There has been a bill introduced in the U.S. Congress called The Great Lakes Legacy Act of 2001 that would provide funding for sediment cleanups in the Great Lakes area of concern, as well as there was 50 million dollars per year is what is…

(TAPE CHANGES SIDES – NO OVERLAP)

DAVID COWGILL:

… of the environment and sustainable development, which talked about the Great Lakes program and progress.

I know that the Canada – Ontario agreement is out for review in draft form, addressing the potential future for areas of concern.

And the Great Lakes Commission has, on the U.S. side, been advocating for a significant increase resources to try to accelerate the pace of cleanup progress in the Great Lakes.

With that, thank you very much.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Thank you very much, Mr. Cowgill.

Now, I'm going to introduce Mr. Steven Nadeau, who's a lawyer at Midler, Schwartz and Conn in Detroit.

He's also the Coordinating Director of the Sediment Management Workgroup, who's working on the Manistique Harbor Sediment Site in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

So the title of his presentation is “Sediment Management at the Crossroads: An Emerging Risk-Based Approach”.

Please welcome Mr. Nadeau.

STEVEN NADEAU
(Coordinating Director, Sediment Management Workgroup):

Good afternoon. I'm very pleased to be here today.

One of my roles in life is to work with the Sediment Management Workgroup. It's a very interesting time in the sediment arena.

Sediment issues really have been rising to the forefront, and some of the reasons are that the issues with sediments are very different than what we're used to dealing with land and groundwater. They're very complex.

We have ecological risk issues. We have construction issues. We have different assessment issues. And where it took us decades to figure out what to do with contaminated soil and groundwater, at least there were things that you could put your hands around, you could delineate soil, you could see what you were doing when you were trying to go out there and dig the soil up. This is much more complex, much more scientific areas for discussion and study.

The remedies themselves are very difficult to implement in the context of dredging. The costs have been staggering in some of the larger projects, so it's really caught everyone's attention.

One of the other reasons we've seen a lot more focus on sediments is that a lot of the remedies land remedies are being wrapped up. A lot of the soil, big landfill sites and groundwater contamination problems have been pretty well taken care of or are being cleaned up now.

And one that I think I heard earlier today mentioned was that there is no unified approach right now.

That shows you the sites listed on E.P.A.'s map as potentially contaminated in terms of sediments, and that's based on limited sampling. So for every dot, there is probably ten more that you could put on that map. You can see the desert doesn't have too many at this point.

But the indication of why that map is really not even a good picture is you look at the mining states like Idaho, there is one dot up there. We know that there are site that have mine tailings that are impacting entire watersheds that are just humongous, and those aren't even on the map.

You have seen the map with prettier colors that David presented earlier. That shows right here, in our own Great Lakes, we have several areas of concern that we have to address in the very near future.

Some of the headliner sites right now include the Fox River, which just had the proposed plan announced. That will be subject to public comment.

That proposed plan asks or proposes removal of 7.25 million cubic yards of sediment from the Fox River.

An undertaking of that magnitude would take probably ten to 15 or 20 years, although some of the optimists have suggested it's a five or ten-year project. But you can imagine how much effort that would take over a stretch of 30 plus miles of river. It's just mind-boggling. And there's going to be a lot of discussion and debate on that. I'm sure David will hear quite a bit about that at headquarters at Region Five in the next few months.

New Bedford Harbor is a large area of impacted contaminated sediments. Everyone is familiar with the Hudson River.

Commencement Bay, not to leave our West Coast friends out, the Housotonic(?) River, Massachusetts, and Manistique Harbour is a site that has been dredged and looks like it's pretty well wrapped up at this point.

In terms of what's going on at a policy level, there has also been a lot of activity because of the new focus on sediments. I'm just going to mention a couple quickly.

One that kicked it off was the April 1998 issuance of the E.P.A. Contaminated Sediment Management Strategy, which was really a general principle document.

It suggested that a lot more detail needed to be developed on guidance on how to deal with the problem nationally, which is an effort that is under way now.

On the fourth bullet, you will see there is guidance document that should be out next year, which we hope and expect will give us a lot more detailed ideas on how to solve these problems and how to address them on a more uniform basis.

In addition, there was the report that you heard about, issued by the National Academy of Science Committee of last year. That gives a lot of good ideas and suggestions on how to deal with the problem.

And most recently is a set of management principles that E.P.A. is working on that should come out within a month that at least gives ten macro-management ideas on how to deal with the problem.

The Sediment Management Workgroup was formed in May 1998 by originally companies that had to deal with sediment issues who wanted to get together and not reinvent the wheel and pool our resources and try to identify how to address the problem.

But the criteria for membership is not simply that you be a company that has the issues, but any potentially responsible party, as we like to say in the States.

What that means is we were very fortunate to add a couple of governmental organizations. We have the Army Corps as a member and the U.S. Navy as a member. We also have a series of trade and industry associations and research groups. So we have a real diverse membership.

We have 38 members now, and growing.

The goals of our organization are consistent with other stakeholders interested in the development of the issue. We really want a foundation based on sound science and based on risk assessment and risk management decision-making.

Those are words that we hear a lot about from a lot of different people, but we believe quite strongly that they really need to be followed very carefully in order to get to the correct answer.

And so our mission is to advance risk-based scientifically sound approaches for evaluation of sediment management decisions.

Our objectives are to collect, develop, analyze and share data and information on the effectiveness of sediment management technologies and approaches.

Our initiatives include a decision tree and in the amount of time we have today, I could talk to you for about two days, so I'm going to have to really… What I want to do is give you ideas of what resources we can provide to you.

We have a web page that you'll see in a moment, which you will be able to get this entire presentation and download. We'll put it on the web page in about a week.

We developed a decision tree, which is a computer interactive model that allows you to go through a site from the day you arrive to the remedy selection. It's interactive, so if you go down to a certain box and you say yes, no, you then follow the trail all the way along like the normal decision tree. Only it's interactive and it gives you dialogue boxes on how to get more information.

We published that in 1999.

That's an example of how the boxes would get you down through the pathway of the site.

Now, we also published nine technical papers. They've been reviewed by folks at E.P.A., Army Corps, the Navy and other states, and we've had very good comments on the papers. They've been very well received.

What we did is we said if you had a sediment site, what would be the key issues you had to deal with? We identified nine key areas. Then, we went out and found the best experts we could find and asked them to write papers.

Again, all these papers are on our web page and they're fully searchable. You can punch in a word and look anywhere on our web page for any topic. If you have any research to do or you want to get a better feel for this, there is a wealth of information that you can obtain in there.

E.P.A.'s management principles I'm not going to try to go into in detail because you can pull them up the computer here, and I gave you a link. The key thing is our web page, which I will give you now, and then it'll be on there again. It's www.smwg.org .

We were a little concerned, when we started the organization with the acronym in registering on the web, on the Internet, because we ran into the Smoking Mountain wedding guide. So we had to be a .org, and not a .com, which was fine with us.

Now, there is a great scientific debate going on right now. In Mr. Cowgirl's presentation, I heard some very interesting comments about where we've been and where we're going. There is a debate and there are two sides to the story.

Our group is not an anti-dredging group, although some would like to pin that label on us. Our group is an even playing field group. Our whole mission is to suggest that at the beginning of the site, you don't jump to a conclusion that you should dredge or not dredge. You need to create a series of steps to evaluate the site conditions.

What we did is developed a series of questions. We feel that if you answer all these questions fairly and scientifically, you will get the correct answer. But if you jump ahead because you think you know the answer, you're going to get in trouble.

We did a study. One of our members did a study and found that there were at this time of the study 50 or remedies for sediments that had been completed over the past few years. Of those 50, 46 were dredging remedies.

Part of the reason is they were much smaller sites and it was very obvious, well, we've got a problem. Let's just go grab it.

One of the other consequences of that, as other speakers have pointed out, is no one really went back and tested to see did that really improve the situation?

Intuitively, you would say we have contaminants in the environment. We took them out. It has to be better. But there are several pitfalls there, and these questions help get you through to make sure you don't get sidetracked by some of those pitfalls.

The first one, are ongoing external sources significant, and can these be readily controlled? If you can't control the source, if you clean it up, no matter what technology, what method, and it's still being contaminated, you're really wasting your time. You've got to make sure you don't have a very significant, ongoing source.

Secondly, does the presence of contamination present unacceptable risks? You can have contamination in soil or groundwater or in sediments that does not pose an unacceptable risk. It may not be ideal, but it may not have a way to get into the ecosystem or affect human health. So that's a threshold question.

Thirdly, are there any readily implementable solutions that may be initiated prior to the final remedy that will reduce the risk posed by the sediment contamination in whole or part?

You may find there is an obvious problem that can be addressed early on. You shouldn't have to wait until the end of the entire study period, as long as you're sure that it's not going to be inconsistent or disruptive with your final solution.

The next important question is will risk become acceptable via natural recovery? And if so, over what time frame?

What we suggest is that you should establish a baseline and figure out what's going on right now and figure out if you let nature take its course – and I don't think a lot of people think there's really a lot of biodegradation going on of certain bioaccumulative chemicals like PCBs or mercury.

But at the same time, although they may not be degrading, they may be getting a protective layer from Mother Nature from new sedimentation.

Then you've got to go to the next step, which is figure out how long it's going to take to reach a reasonable level in terms of reduction risk. And then the next step is can active remediation significantly accelerate the achievement of acceptable risk?

So if you can dredge a particular water body and in five years, your project is done, and in six years or in four years, the natural recovery rate continues, then you want to critically evaluate whether an active remedy where you are removing basically the whole ecosystem when you are fixing the problem doesn't make sense.

So what we're suggesting is take the time to figure out what's going on and compare all the alternatives.

Now, the key question in all of this seems to be sediment stability. I have heard many speakers suggest that sediments are inherently unstable.

The funny thing about sediment issues is there is a lot of counter-intuitiveness going on and sediment stability is one. If you see a picture of a flood and you watch grandma's house floating down the Mississippi River, you think oh my God, we've ripped out all the sediment. We've done studies now – and this is actually, believe it or not, we're just on the edge of the science here.

It's like asbestos in schools. We took out asbestos in the United States in a lot, a lot of schools. And after we did this, at great expense, the scientists finally said you know, if we encapsulate this, it's a perfectly safe remedy. And we probably did a lot of work we didn't need to do.

My fear as a parent was when they took the asbestos out of my kids' school, they did it the last week of August and the kids started in September. I hope they did a good job with the inward air gradient.

But in this context, we did a model of the Lavaca Bay hurricane. It was a forestry hurricane. The Bay is only about 16 to 18 inches deep. It's very, very shallow. Your expectation in a hurricane is that you ripped the heck out of the bottom.

What we found in doing the study there, and mercury was the issue, was that only the top four or five centimeters – centimeters, not feet – were disturbed even in that shallow water body.

And when you look at the river that's raging down that's brown, it's brown because all the sediments are coming and run off from land.

So there's no one-size-fits-all. It's site specific. You may find a site where there is sediment that's not stable, but you've got to identify that. What we're suggesting is you've got to look at each site, make a scientific judgment, don't make any assumptions and then you may find the site has three characteristics.

Deal with teach component of that site. You may have a dredging part. You may have a capping part. You may have a natural recovery part.

When you think of it, virtually every dredging remedy has a natural recovery component. And the reason why I say that is studies have also shown in the situations where testing has been done afterwards you can't get all the contamination out.

In Manistique Harbour, the unofficial results right now suggest that the average official sediment layer, the top part of the sediment after the dredging, is going to be around seven parts per million.

Before the project started, it was 14. And so if you ask a scientist if seven is good enough to get the fish back down, I think most scientists will say seven is not acceptable. It's not going to do the job unless you get natural recovery or an in-person recovery by putting something on the top.

So that's an important question to factor in the decision-making process.

What we did is we came up with some key questions or key steps that you should consider going through. Conceptual site model is critical in the sediment arena.

This slide here gives a little bit of an idea.

You need to know do we have a true hot spot? A hot spot meaning an area of contamination that's above acceptable risk that's contributing to harm. If you have contamination that's five feet down and is not bio-available and the critters aren't getting there, the food chain is not impacted, it is not an unacceptable risk, unless you have a sediment stability problem.

You can see how complicated it is. You go through one wicket and then you get it stuck in another one.

Then you have to ask the sediment stability question.

But what we find is people are so used to knowing that the dredging remedy is out there and it's worked, you go to a site and figure I've got a hot spot.

I'll give you an example. There is a river in New York, up near the St. Lawrence that is basically almost like a lake. It's called the Grassed River. The water just barely moves along. That river has PCBs in it, unfortunately. The PCBs are very low level and they are over the entire river.

One of the companies involved had a spot where their pipe came into the river and they in 1995 spent over five million dollars removing PCBs where that pipe was because that was the hot spot.

They then put fish out in cages afterwards. Before and after. The fish levels did not materially decrease after that project.

The reason is the fish weren't seeing just that spot and most of the PCBs in that spot were buried. What the fish are sensing and ingesting is the entire acreage.

So one philosophy would be all right, let's rip out the entire river.

Another, which has been suggested, is in that situation you would ask two other questions. Can you use natural recovery? If you're getting enough sedimentation and the levels are going down, and that's been documented. Unfortunately, in that river, there is not enough motion to bring sediment in. There is not enough influx coming from farms and everything else.

So then the next question, is capping the solution? Should we put an enhancement onto the existing process and speed up the process where clean sediments on the top will be there and then the fish will recover?

So that's an example where you have to really know what's going on with the conceptual site model and define it carefully.

Bioaccessibility. We're back to the dancing screen. Again, that's a question of whether the contamination is a problem or not because it's either on the top or not. And if it is, sometimes it's accessible but not bioavailable because it's bound to a sediment it's not going to release.

Natural recovery. Just briefly, this is the process where you need to evaluate if there is sufficient natural recovery, natural sedimentation. Sometimes, you do have a breakdown of contaminants. But a combination of those sometimes will be the appropriate solution.

What you can do with studies is determine the timeline, as I mentioned. When will the system recover with dredging? When will it recover with capping? When will it recover naturally? Then you can compare and see what the answers are.

Sediment stability. I'll mention right now if you have any interest in sediment stability, there is going to be a joint workshop in New Orleans in January jointly sponsored by the Sediment Management Workgroup, U.S. E.P.A., Army Corps, U.S. Navy. It's going to be a three-day intense technical conference and it's going to be dynamite.

We've got 19 experts from all over the country. They're going to do an in-depth review, and the info on that is also on our web page. We have a lot of resources for you, if you're interested.

Risk management. There is a distinction between risk assessment and risk management, risk assessment being the more traditional figure out what all the risks are and what they translate into numerically. Risk management is I have identified the risk. How do I solve the problem in a way that makes sense?

And that's something that we really urge be considered a very critical part of the project.

One last thing here on dredging effectiveness. I'll show a chart. This is an example of where we need to learn more about the success and the implication of the success or lack of success.

The Fort Outfall achieved a number around just under ten. And you can see that the second bar over is ten. So some of those projects didn't get down to ten.

I've been told that if you don't get down to one – this is all PCBs – if you don't get down to near one, you're pretty much not going to see the recovery you need with the fish.

So we asked the question is dredging effective in reducing risk? Because if you don't get enough of the PCBs out or if you leave PCBs or mercury, whatever it is, in the water body when you're done, then you may not have accomplished your goal.

When you dredge, you saw the one picture. It had that big auger. You put that in under the water. You can't see what's going on. And no matter how careful you are, I don't think anyone can realistically say you're going to get everything that's down there.

And if you don't, and if typically most of the high contamination is down deeper from the 70s and the 80s, now you remove anything that's above it, it stirs up and you get a lot of it, that's great. But it may be worse when you're done than when you started. That's a question. It's not a conclusion. But it's a fair question to be asked.

And so I appreciate the opportunity to be here today. Take a look at our web page. I'll be around for a little bit after if you have any questions. We have a lot of information in there and there are ways to get a hold of me on the web page.

Thank you.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Now, we are starting the question period or comments for the three presenters, and also to the students of Regent Public School, or their teachers.

Who would like to start?

There should be some questions. Even the students can ask questions. Yes, a brave person.

UNIDENTIFIED:

I want to know from the students, you've obviously been very involved in this yourselves recently.

How do you see this being passed onto students that are going to be taking your place because you're obviously going to move onto other things? Is there any kind of plan you've got in place to deal with that?

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT:

Our class has been split up. We've got over grade nine and we've got up to grade five I believe this year. So we have a whole rotation of students going through.

Plus our teacher and our principal are both very involved in this, so they will be keeping the tradition alive.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT:

As well as by attending conferences like the Student Summit in Buffalo, we are educating not only necessarily people from our area, but all around the Great Lakes area on what they can do. So we're passing it on to them as well.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Come to the microphone, please.

UNIDENTIFIED:

My question is for the sediment that is being dredged, what happens? How do you decontaminate the soil? What do you do with it?

STEVEN NADEAU:

What happens typically is the sediment is brought back onto shore, either directly or through barges, and then it has to be dewatered. So a lot of drying time typically is involved.

But because treatment of the material is so expensive, most times it's then land-filled, either in a commercially available landfill or in a specially-built landfill right near the water body, which is not a great use of our resources either to be piling up these mountains of sediment.

One of the other factors is a question we have to ask ourselves is if we're picking it up from one place and we're just moving it to another, what the NAS Committee has said is look at all the risks and all the benefits and all the negatives of each remedy. So if you have a removal program in the Hudson River, for example, the remedy that's been proposed is not only to dredge but then to backfill because someone said we've done such a good job of showing that you can't get it all.

If you have a residual that's too high, let's do two remedies. Let's dredge and let's cap – 57,020 yard trucks of clean soil coming back in through the community.

What the NAS Committee has said is study that too. Consider all the ramifications and consider whether the landfill where you put it all is going to be okay in 50 years or in 100 years.

Unfortunately there is no magic dust yet that anyone's found to destroy most of these. We are hoping.

DAVID COWGILL:

If I could add just a couple of things. One is in general, and again in the U.S. side, most of the projects, because of the expense, have involved dredging and disposal. So you're basically taking it from an uncontrolled environment, a river or harbor, to a controlled environment, to an engineered site.

However, there have been sites where decontamination technologies have been applied. It depends. Most of the sediments in the Great Lakes have a mixture and it's very rare to just have one chemical that's a problem.

So if you had one chemical, it's easier to target a particular technology to do something about it, if money were no object.

Usually, there are metals present as well as organics. You might have a technology that works well on organics, but the metals in the treated product might still be unacceptably high and it could create a problem.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

More questions?

UNIDENTIFIED:

Yes. I think David mentioned this. The Trenton Channel in Detroit, this coming summer, there will be a Cement Lock treatment tried. I presume there is no treatment, I should say treatment aspect to it.

Could you describe what it is, please?

DAVID COWGILL:

Probably not adequately, but I'll attempt to.

This particular process is a relatively close system where they heat the material to destroy the organics and to turn the solids into material that can be mixed in with Portland cement and can be used as a commercial product. They've demonstrated this in the New York – New Jersey Harbour.

This would be a demonstration project to just see how it would behave with the Trenton Channel materials so that if the levels in the residue were very high, then it wouldn't be acceptable to use it in any beneficial way.

If however – and I guess some of the studies they've done elsewhere have shown that the metals left behind oftentimes are similar to the concentrations of metals in cement products, and so that it's really not a bad thing.

If that's the case, it makes application of advanced technologies more cost effective because it's not just a total expense. There's actually some cost recovery in the product.

Also, if there is no disposal site required, if you can actually virtually eliminate the organics and then recycle the solids and the metals into some productive use such that you don't need a disposal site nearby, that's an attractive thing. The attempt is with that technology too to capture any kind of air emissions and condense them so that they don't go out into the environment.

So we'll see. That's why we do demonstrations is to test that.

UNIDENTIFIED:

I'm wondering how you determine when the sediment is contaminated and when not anymore. Do you have any criteria or threshold values to compare the environment concentrations to? Are you doing in-situ testing? How do you determine it?

DAVID COWGILL:

Are you talking about just site assessment in the field, when you measure sediment in the environment?

UNIDENTIFIED:

When do you determine that sediment on the site is contaminated and when do you make the decision it's not anymore?

DAVID COWGILL:

Good question. It's not as simple as it might seem. There is no one list that everyone uses for all circumstances.

On the U.S. side – and there was an IJC workshop that the SedPAC group convened, and the one obstacle that was listed was consistent decision-making framework. Is there one way of evaluating sediment, to answer that question, or not?

There is no one thing, but we try to identify as a group binationally what are the common elements that you should look at. On the U.S. side, there are certain regulatory programs where there is a numerical threshold – 50 parts per million PCBs under the Toxic Substances Control Act.

If it's above that, there are certain things you have to do. If it's below that, there may be other options.

But again, the assessment looking at not just the chemical contamination, looking at toxicity, looking at the stability of the material and looking at the benthic communities – the critters that live there – year in, year out.

UNIDENTIFIED:

So you're basically doing a chemical comparison and a benthic community assessment, the whole range?

DAVID COWGILL:

And toxicity tests and looking at bioaccumulation potential, and whether it stays put.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Yes? To whom is your question?

UNIDENTIFIED:

It's on sediment technology. The question is that basically in Canada, we have seen very little progress made in tackling sediment remediation.

And fully appreciating the complexities, the question is is there a lot of exchange of information and technology taking place? Our impression in Canada is that the United States is more advanced in the technology development for it.

Are there any binational discussions taking place where sediment remediation has to take place between Canadian and U.S. jurisdiction?

And the third question on that is do Canada and the United States apply the same interpretation on this highly dubious concept of risk management?

STEVEN NADEAU:

I'm not sure I can cover all those, but I can tell you that if Canada is behind us, then you have the benefit of learning from all of our mistakes, which is usually how it happens.

But because this area is now really just emerging as a high priority, we're just starting to collaborate. There is something in the States that's open internationally to anyone that's interested called the Sediments Remedial Development Forum, or RTDF, Remediation Technology Development Forum.

Companies and E.P.A. and Army Corps and anyone that's interested in the issue, scientists, can go to meetings.

There is a cross-reference on our web page you may be interested in seeing. They are looking at the technology side. They are looking at site assessment. They are looking at remedial options. They were involved in the Grassed River that I mentioned in upstate New York. There is a pilot study going on.

There are two pilots. One is on capping. They did a checkerboard in the river and they had about eight cells and they tried different techniques.

So the RTDF is one good technical exchange. Companies and industry and the agencies are trying to collaborate on the decision-making side too.

And our group, for example, has been meeting with E.P.A. for three years, suggesting policy ideas, technical information. We've had a great dialogue and we've really seen a lot of understanding gained by everyone involved. So that's open to anyone that's interested, as long as you can find the right pathways.

What you might want to do, on our web page, you can get into a number of other cross-references. There is an Army Corps web page that's outstanding. They have all kinds of information on dredging and capping and other technologies. So there is quite a bit out there.

DAVID COWGILL:

If I could just add a couple of things. There is a fair amount of technical exchange across the border. A number of years ago, the E.P.A. had a technology demonstration program called the ARCs program and the Canada's Great Lakes cleanup fund was funding demonstration projects.

We had people participating in technical committees back and forth.

About five or six years ago, with Environment Canada and E.P.A., we had sponsored a so-called trinational workshop where the Dutch were also cosponsors, and they do a fair amount of work on dredging and looking at technologies. There were other speakers from other countries as well.

And about six months ago, through the binational toxic strategy, because one of the goals is addressing contaminated sediments and exploring whether virtual elimination can be applied to contaminated sediment remediation, there was a workshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to bring in people to check in again to see what is the state of science and engineering and technology.

So that will continue. We'll continue to compare notes and hope somebody discovers something good.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

We have time. Go ahead.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Thank you. My question is for the students. I'm wondering, given what you've learned working on the Severn Sound RAP, what one piece of advice you might give to our political and agency decision-makers – some of whom are in this room today – one piece of advice you might give us for managing our environment in the future.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Don't be shy. Tell them!

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT:

Some students might not care, but other ones… I don't think some of them, like just the grade eight class, I don't think they really wanted to participate too much in this. But if you get the right students and the right class, they're really enthusiastic. I know we've spent a lot of time on this. So I think you just need to look for the right group.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT:

I guess I'd say if you can get students involved – because we are the next generation – so if you can educate us now, we'll be ready for when we are adults and we can present to the next generation. And it's also good because we're real cheap labor.

(laughter)

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Oh boy, you're teaching us, eh? Do you have more to say?

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT:

I think that more schools actually can get just a little more involved if they have more horticultural clubs put into them. That's how a lot of the people in our school actually came to know what we were actually talking about, by just learning how important the planet really is to us.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Thank you very much.

The next question, please.

QUESTION:

I'm just wondering, by listening to the presentations this afternoon, why is it that the polluter pay principle was not there in terms of looking at who's responsible for the contamination and who's going to pay for it? I think that is totally absent from the presentations that were done this afternoon.

STEVEN NADEAU:

Well, you're right. It was totally absent. We were focusing on some of the policy and the science issues. But it's a very big part of the problem.

And one of the reasons, if you look at some of the most contaminated rivers, they are in urban areas and they are basically the remnants of 50 or 100 or 150 years of industrial activity. What you will find in many of those is if you went up and down the river and tried to say who is responsible, first of all, it would be hard to figure out who did what.

And the other problem is you have hundreds of companies that are no longer in existence. And in the United States, the solution that we have right now, which a lot of people don't…

(TAPE CHANGES SIDES – NO OVERLAP)

STEVEN NADEAU:

It's a system that does force people into real battles and they spend more time debating that sometimes than looking at the cleanup or the science. That's a problem we face and it's a problem I'm sure in every country. How do you assign that responsibility when it's from decades and decades and you can't really many times trace whose stuff is what. That's a problem we all face.

The last question on the risk management approach, the National Academy of Science Study has a whole chapter and recommends a specific reference for risk management approach that they suggest that the agencies take a look at. So it's the National Academy of Science Study.

DAVID COWGILL:

In brief, I would just say you're right. I didn't have it in there, but it is part of E.P.A.'s policy that the program that Steve mentioned is one of the regulatory programs and approaches it that way. They vary from program to program.

UNIDENTIFIED:

It's also a big difference for Canada because we don't have any Superfund regulation. And so that may be a bigger issue for us up here.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Go ahead.

UNIDENTIFIED:

I have a question basically to the whole podium right now. I would like to ask you to look in a crystal ball and be the experts for now in the future.

If I look back in 1909 in the Boundary Waters Treaty, one of its purposes was “to maintain the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the Great Lakes basin ecosystem”.

Sixty-nine years later, in 1978 in the Great Lakes Waterfall Agreement, its purpose was to “restore”, not maintain anymore, but “restore the chemical, physical and biological integrity”.

Twenty-three years later, this year, I'm hearing today in a public forum “continue restoring”.

Now, you're the experts in the projects and the students will be the future experts in it. When do you expect the restoration efforts will be completed?

UNIDENTIFIED:

That's a good question. You mentioned 2200.

KEITH SHERMAN:

I think the question is a decision on what is a healthy ecosystem. And if you have measures of what that healthy ecosystem is in today's science and today's technology, you presumably have the technology to reach those objectives.

The other question is if you're looking at an area of concern, you have to look beyond the borders of that area of concern quite often, when you're dealing with meeting delisting objectives, because the problem that you're trying to solve is not just a localized problem.

Mercury is an excellent example of that where mercury in the Great Lakes basin is changing and that has helped the Severn Sound RAP. If there was a particular source of mercury in Severn Sound, it would have shown up and we would have been able to deal with it, as is the case in terms of detection of mercury problems in other AOCs.

So I think the question is in some cases, if you set in motion a process that's maintained, like the urban stormwater management strategy example, if it takes another 20 years to do that, or if it takes another 100 years to do that, as long as that strategy is being pursued, I think you can vary the amount of funding that you put to it as funding becomes available, or as new technologies become available.

We started out with a 35 million-dollar price tag in the Severn Sound stage two for stormwater management, which was one of the biggest ticket items, almost bigger than sewage plant upgrades. And we did a special study of how much we actually had to do which just got reported in 1999.

That study concluded that it would take about five million dollars to take care of urban stormwater and meet the same target that we had developed in 1992. So in studying a problem, you end up finding better ways of doing it.

So I think you're going to end up getting a healthier ecosystem the more we spend time thinking about it.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

I'll take two more questions.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Could the students answer my questions first, please? Because so far I didn't hear an answer.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Because you've been asking a lot of questions and I'd like to give the chance to other people. UNIDENTIFIED:

I know. That's fair. But so far, I haven't heard an answer to my question.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Well, you talk to the presenters afterwards.

UNIDENTIFIED:

I just wanted to make two quick observations. One was to tie this morning's discussions into the discussions we are hearing about dredging now. And that is the chemicals that we are dealing with when we're talking about the chemicals that are polluting the sediments are persistent chemicals that will be around for a long time. And the more we look at them, the more problems we're finding that they cause with our health and what not.

And we're talking about solutions like natural attenuation. In a lot of cases, that consists of having them wash downstream and disperse. So when we measure the concentration here, it's not so concentrated here. But they're dispersing into our lakes and adding to the global pool. That's another thing we heard this morning. They're adding to the global pool and not going away.

There are still problems that we need to deal with. So when we're looking at risk, we need to be able to consider those factors as well. And any in-place strategy to deal with sediments is going to deal with that, whether we think they're being buried now or not.

And the other quick observation was the Minergy technology up on the Fox River. That pilot study actually went really well, and it's over. We are still waiting for the air monitoring studies, or sampling to come back from the site program. But they're thinking they can get the cost of that Minergy process down to the equivalent of land filling. And so that would be a way to permanently destroy PCBs.

If the air monitoring comes back and it's good, that would be a way to permanently destroy PCBs at a cost that is comparable to land filling.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Thank you. Is it a comment or a question?

UNIDENTIFIED:

I hope I can make it fast. It's both. The first thing I want to say is after 150 years of us with the industrial revolution putting all this crap into the water, it's nice to actually see some efforts being made in cleaning it up, doing the studies and doing something right about it.

The second comment I wanted to make which made my heart kind of go and make me kind of shake was well, who's responsible? Who's going to pay?

I think that each of us here should actually take a look at ourselves and what we purchase as consumers because they are the ones, the industry are the ones who are producing it for us. Maybe we should start making wiser decisions.

That's one comment I wanted to start making, because there are by-products with polyester, there are by-products with everything we see around here. Let's make wiser decisions now, today, so they don't have to do this tomorrow.

The last thing I wanted to know is with the students and with the pickerel and walleye people, what was so fun about it that made you want to work on it?

You were saying that they lucked out in getting a good grade eight class. I don't think so. I think somebody did something right in bringing your attention to it and making you want to work on it.

How do we do that to everybody else in the future?

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

What was the trigger?

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT:

What probably happened to start it off was we got to go to Buffalo.

(laughter)

And then from there, we just got more and more interested. I know I learned quite a bit and I just had a lot of fun.

I think it's probably our teacher. She encouraged us right from grade seven I guess, two years ago, or three years ago, we started planting the trees. And we did invertebrate studies and ever since then, I guess the whole school has slowly become more and more involved with it.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT:

I would also say too a key – for me, at least – and something that can be carried on in the future to attract others is with all the problems that have been created because like you said back there, it's been 150 years of problems. It's easy to get overwhelmed and say oh no, what are we going to do?

So if you can look at some of the positives of what we have done and what we are doing to fix things, then it can pick you up and get you motivated to keep working on it.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Thank you very, very much.

I want you to applaud them very, very much, very, very loudly – all of them., the presenters and the students. I think it's one of the best sessions I've ever attended.

We have a 20-minute break now.

(BREAK)

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

We'll start. The next presenter is Barb Martinovic, and she is working at the Department of Biology of the University of Ottawa.

Her presentation title is “Effect of Environmental Contaminants on Corticosterone and Vitamin A Levels in Tree Swallows Nesting in the St. Lawrence River, U.S.A. and Canada”.

Please welcome Barb Martinovic.

BARB M. MARTINOVIC
(University of Ottawa):

Thank you.

Along the St. Lawrence River, there's a stretch of water that runs about 80 kilometers long, that goes from Moses-Saunders down to Lake St. Francis that's considered an area of concern.

This is primarily due to the fact that there are a number of contaminants, such as PCBs, dioxins, furans, mercuries, PAHs that have been found in the sediments, the water and biota from here.

So what I wanted to do was take a look at the effects of some of these contaminants on tree swallows that are nesting along the St. Lawrence River area of concern. And primarily, I wanted to look at corticosterone and vitamin A.

Contrary I think to the French explanation to my title, the gentleman that translated it came up to me and said so you did a study where you looked at tree rings and vitamin A and corticosterone in trees. I said no, tree swallows. It's a bird.

So my study is with birds – not with trees.

It was done at the University of Ottawa under the supervision of Dr. David Lane and Dr. Christine Bishop, who is with the Canadian Wildlife Service. So I will just put my thanks out now.

The Canadian Wildlife Service was a huge help in this project – they put in most of the financial support – as well as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who put in a lot of money and sent people over to help me do dissections and things such as that.

And also, the Akwesasne Mohawk territory were interested in the project and helped out quite a bit.

So why are we interested in these contaminants? I'm interested in three of them primarily, which are dioxins, or polychlorinated dibenzodioxins. We have PCBs and furans.

And number one, these are persistent contaminants, as we've heard throughout the course of the day. So they're also in the environment for a long period of time.

They are lipophilic, which means they adhere to fatty tissues. What happens then is you have these bioaccumulating through the food chain.

Also, number three, they've been known to elicit toxic effects. For example, dioxins have been labeled as a toxic compound affecting reproduction, thyroid problems, heme blood synthesis and hormones.

So this is the St. Lawrence River. I just wanted to go through some of the study sites that I had chosen. We wanted to study sites based on a gradient of contamination. It's really difficult to find a controlled site. In the natural environment where you're doing field studies, a lot of people don't tend to understand this. Where is your zero contaminated spot? Well, we have close to, as close as we could get.

So starting from our lower contaminated sites, we have Cooper Marsh, located to the east of Cornwall. We have Hosik(?) Creek, which is ahead of a tributary that drains into the Saint-Lawrence. We have the Upper Canada Bird Sanctuary, which turned out not to be so uncontaminated. We had Cornwall Island, which is located directly across the river from General Motors, and they have a PCB landfill site there.

We have Turtle Creek, which is the General Motors site. We have boxes directly adjacent to their PCB landfill site.

We have the Raquette River, located here, Grassed River North and Grassed River South, which are located basically close to the Aluminium Company of America and also Reynolds Metals.

This is just a picture of one of our sites. This is Cornwall Island. You can see one of our bird boxes in the forefront. Across the river is General Motors.

This is a picture of one of our control sites later on in the season.

This is the Cooper Marsh site. Oh, it's backwards. I can go through this backwards if I have to.

We use the tree swallow as a sentinel species. The reason for this is number one, it's an aerial insectivore. So it basically feeds on insects that are emerging from the St. Lawrence River, the majority of insects. What we saw them feeding on were stoneflies.

So what happens is many of these invertebrates overwinter in the St. Lawrence and spend part of their life cycle close to these contaminated sediments. So then when they emerge, they have these adhered to their fatty tissue themselves and then they bioaccumulate.

Tree swallows have been used in the past in a number of studies along the St. Lawrence River and in the Hudson River. So they're known to bioaccumulate PCBs, mercury, dioxins.

And also, they are cavity nesters, which is great because when we put out bird boxes, they readily will use them. It can get really easy to monitor reproduction and to take blood samples.

As I mentioned, I wanted to look at two biomarkers. The first is called corticosterone. What corticosterone is it's a glucocorticoid, which basically means it's involved in the production of glucose.

It's important as it affects growth immune function and enzymatic activity and there are two primary forms. There is corticosterone on the left, and then cortisol. Corticosterone is the form that is found in birds, reptiles, amphibians, rats and mice as well.

Cortisol is the form that's found in humans and also in some fish species.

So because this is a stress hormone basically involved in fright or flight response, it makes it a good biomarker to use to look at endocrine disruption because if you expose an animal to stress, levels of these hormones should go up. So you can see whether they are fluctuating, whether they are depressed or increased.

Some studies in the past have indicated that corticosterone levels in animals exposed to organochlorine contaminants have been altered and depressed.

For example, herring gulls, the embryos collected from the Great Lakes, Angela Lorenzen and our colleagues found that corticosterone levels were negatively correlated with organochlorine contaminants such as PCBs, dioxins and furans.

And then mud puppies, not the boat as previously shown, but the amphibian mud puppies were found to have depressed levels of corticosterone collected from the St. Lawrence River and also from the Ottawa River.

In addition, when they exposed these animals, these mud puppies to stress, they were not able to increase their corticosterone levels.

So our study designed for this project involved, we had 20 bird boxes that we put up per site and aimed to get ten – so a sample size of ten per site. What we did was we monitored the nests throughout the season, so we knew when they were going to be 16 days old, to be consistent with age. We went to the box, took out one of the chicks and immediately blood sampled this chick, which means blood sampling within one minute of retrieval.

All the birds were blood sampled in the jugular vein, about 100 micro litres of blood.

The bird was then exposed to a standardized stress test that's been used in the past by Wingfield and his colleagues. So what we did was we put the bird in a bag in a box for ten minutes. We took the bird out. We re-blood sampled it again. The same amount. The blood was put on ice.

The bird was euthanized. I'm glad the children are gone, actually. The bird was euthanized and sampled for contaminants such as total PCBs, non-ortho PCBs, dioxins, furans, mercury, organochlorine pesticides.

Then the blood sample was taken, centrifuged. The plasma was extracted and used by radio amino assay to look for corticosterone levels.

The second biomarker I wanted to look at is vitamin A.

Vitamin A is a fat-soluble essential vitamin and it's mainly found in two forms. There is retinol and retinol palmitate.

Retinol is the form that's found circulating in your blood and it's bound to carrier proteins.

Retinol palmitate is the form that's found in your liver, and over 95 percent of your vitamin A is stored as retinol palmitate in the liver.

It's important because it's involved in reproduction, growth and vision, among other things. And so this is one of the other biomarkers we looked at.

It's backwards, but that's okay. There have been other studies that have been done, looking at vitamin A and finding that there's been both elevated and depressed levels of vitamin A in animals exposed to organochlorine contaminants in field situations.

So there have been studies done with ospreys that have been one day old. This is a study by John Elliott and his colleagues in British Columbia that have found that osprey chicks that were collected from British Columbia that had high levels of PCBs had low levels of retinol in the liver. So low vitamin A levels in the liver.

Tree swallows that were collected right from the St. Lawrence River where we're currently doing this study – Christine Bishop started this study in the early 90s – found that there were negative correlations between liver retinol and EROD activity, which is an indicator of exposure. However, there was no correlation with contaminants.

There were two parts to the project. The first, we wanted to see what the dietary retinol levels were, because of course this is going to fluctuate in effect to what the concentrations are in the animal.

At eight days old, we went to a box and we took out a bird. We put a ligature around its neck, which meant we put a twist-tie around its neck, and just enough so that it could breathe of course. But when the parents came to feed it, that food would be lodged in its throat. We left it for about 15 minutes.

We kind of hid, came back to the box, and then this actually has an insect bolus in his mouth. And then so we extracted the insect bolus, took the ligature off the neck and then froze the sample in liquid nitrogen.

At 16 days, we went to the box and extracted a bird that hadn't been used in any of the other biomarkers and we basically euthanized this bird. And there were other parts of studies done, but we were primarily concerned with the liver and the kidney, which we took out and froze for analysis of retinol and retinol palmitate by high performance liquid chromatography.

So what are some of the results? Total polychlorinated biphenyls, total PCBs done on an individual basis were found to be highest at Grassed River North, Turtle Creek and Grassed River South, with concentrations reaching up to about 70 micrograms per gram. This is whole bird wet weight basis.

As you can see also, there are fluctuations between years. Sometimes it would be higher in 2000 than in 1999.

For non-ortho PCBs, some of the higher concentrations were reached at Turtle Creek in 2000 at a concentration of 400,000 nanograms per kilogram. This is whole body wet weight, based on pools, a pool of three birds per site in 1999 and two pools per site in 2000, just to increase the sample site. It's basically based on a money constraint, why you can't do individual PC or dioxin and non-ortho PCB congener analysis.

So for dioxins then, we found that the highest concentrations were found at Grassed River North in 1999 and they reached up to about 80 nanograms per kilogram.

And then for furan levels, we found that the levels were highest at Grassed River North, Turtle Creek and Grassed River South. And the maximum levels we found in the birds were about 120 nanograms per kilogram, wet weight whole body.

For basal corticosterone levels measured at the time zero, we found that the concentrations varied among sites. But mainly, the highest concentration we found for basal level were at Hosik Creek and they reached up to about 37 nanograms per ml of plasma.

Then for stress corticosterone, at ten minutes, I should also mention what I did was when I found the results for the ten-minute stress corticosterone, I subtracted that from the zero because there's a lot of fluctuations, and zero doesn't necessarily mean that it's zero nanograms per ml.

So to have a more accurate account of what the actual increase is, we subtracted the ten minute from the zero.

And as you can see, these fluctuated among the sites. Some of the higher ones were in Turtle Creek, Raquette River, but we also have some of the higher ones in Hosik Creek as well, our control site.

But what we did find when we looked at a correlation between dioxins and stress corticosterone at the ten minute level was that it was positively correlated with dioxins.

For retinol in the liver, we found that there was also fluctuations among sites. Some of the higher levels were at Grassed River South in 2000.

For the storage form of vitamin A, we found that there is also a number of fluctuations among sites. Cooper Marsh, one of our control sites, had a high level. Turtle Creek also had high levels, though. Hosik Creek had high levels. So there wasn't any specific pattern. There wasn't any difference between the contaminated and the control sites.

For kidney levels of retinol, we found that there were also some fluctuations among sites. Grassed River North had some high levels here, as well as Hosik Creek and Grassed River South.

The retinol palmitate levels in the kidney were also fluctuating among sites. The Canada Bird Sanctuary was fairly high. Cooper Marsh was fairly high in 1999. Turtle Creek.

However, if you look at Grassed River North, it's fairly low for retinol palmitate.

We found that there was no correlation between contaminants in either retinol or retinol palmitate in the liver and the kidney.

However, some studies have looked at the ratio of retinol to retinol palmitate because retinol is converted into retinol palmitate.

When I did this, I found a borderline correlation between kidney retinol over retinol palmitate and dioxins – a positive correlation. So I just thought I'd mention that, but it's just borderline significant.

So what are some of the reasons that could explain for these observations we've been seeing? This is just a complicated slide showing you that it's the endocrine pathway here from the pituitary to ACTH down to cholesterol, which is a precursor for corticosterone. There are a number of different areas that can be disrupted.

Most of the studies that have found depressed levels of the corticosterone have said that they think that there is either a cut in the pathway here. So there's a decrease in enzyme activity that's converting cholesterol to prednenolone, to corticosterone.

Also there has been some theory saying that adrenocorticotropic hormone, which is released from the pituitary and targets the adrenal gland to release corticosterone, is being disrupted or is less active.

Now, in our study, we found that there were higher levels of corticosterone. So of course, what does this mean?

There have been some studies in the past done with rats, by Goreskina's(?) colleagues that have found that corticosterone levels have increased in response to dioxins. And what they think is happening is that because corticosterone produces sugar in a process called gluconeogenesis, that TCDD or dioxins, are actually impairing gluconeogenesis and therefore driving corticosterone to increase because the animals are hypoglycaemic.

Then for vitamin A, one of the major theories is that because retinol is bound to retinol binding protein and also to another carrier protein, trans retin in the blood, that if it's displaced by PCBs and dioxins which have been shown in past studies, that this will lower the level in the plasma, and this will lower levels ultimately.

However, of course we found a slight relationship, a correlation between kidney levels of retinol and retinol palmitate and in dioxins. What could be happening is what happens when you do have a release of retinol into the system, it's going to go to the kidney because this is a major filtrating organ. So that could be one explanation.

So in conclusion, just to recap, we found high levels of non-ortho PCBs, dioxins, furans and total PCBs in the tree swallows. We found that there was a positive correlation between stress corticosterone at the ten-minute level and dioxins.

This is the conclusion. I just also wanted to say that a lot of past studies have done toxicology where they have looked at the endpoint of death or deformities and things you can actually see and are easy to see in animals.

However, with all these contaminants that are circulating in the environment, there are more sensitive biomarkers that are coming out and it's important to realize what else can we look at other than just daphnia cultures in a lab.

We need to know what it's doing in the environment, which is difficult at times, but I think it's important. So thank you for coming and listening.

Thank you, Barb.

Now, I want you to know that the next presentation is going to be given in French by Geneviève St-Amour, de l'Université du Québec à Montréal.

Le titre de sa présentation, “Expositions et consommation de poisson parmi les femmes enceintes dans le sud-ouest du Québec.”

Donc, sans plus tarder, Geneviève St-Amour.

GENEVIÈVE ST-AMOUR
(Université du Québec à Montréal):

Alors aujourd'hui, je vais présenter les données préliminaires d'une étude qui a été effectuée à l'Université du Québec à Montréal par le Centre d'étude des interactions biologiques entre la santé et l'environnement.

L'étude porte entre autres sur la consommation de poisson du Saint-Laurent et les niveaux sanguins de contamination chez les femmes enceintes du sud-ouest du Québec, précisément.

Toutefois, cette étude là fait partie d'une étude plus grande qui va tenter d'examiner les changements hormonaux et le transport placentaire du calcium chez ces femmes enceintes en fonction des différents contaminants chimiques.

Alors, l'objectif de l'étude, c'est d'évaluer les niveaux sanguins de contaminants organiques et inorganiques dont le plomb, le mercure, les différents BPC et pesticides dans le premier et deuxième trimestres de grossesse des femmes du sud-ouest du Québec en relation avec leurs habitudes de consommation de poisson.

Alors, au niveau du recrutement de la population féminine, on a recruté des femmes qui étaient enceintes jusqu'à 24 semaines de grossesse dans deux CLSC de la région, soit à Valleyfield et à Huntingdon, pour ceux qui connaissent la région.

Les femmes qui ont accepté de participer ont d'abord été examinées pour des critères d'exclusion tels que l'exposition au travail parce que certains femmes, par exemple, les pompistes, sont directement exposées à des produits chimiques. Certaines médications aussi qui vont influencer les niveaux hormonaux, au niveau de l'historique médical et du lieu d'accouchement.

Alors, juste à titre indicatif, on a commencé cette étude là en novembre 1999. Jusqu'à aujourd'hui, on a recruté 158 femmes pour le premier questionnaire. Je vais vous expliquer la méthode éventuellement. On veut se rendre à 200. Alors, on espère avoir terminé le recrutement en janvier 2002, c'est-à-dire janvier qui vient.

Alors, au niveau de la procédure de l'étude ou du contact qu'on a avec les femmes, on a tenté de recruter le plus de femmes possibles pour le premier trimestre.

Malheureusement, ce n'est pas évident parce qu'il y en a beaucoup d'entre elles qui savent qu'elles sont enceintes à partir des fois de la 13e et de la 14e semaine. Mais soit qu'on les recrutait au premier trimestre ou au deuxième trimestre, jusqu'à la 24e semaine de grossesse, comme je l'ai dit tout à l'heure.

Tout d'abord, elles devaient signer une formule de consentement. Ensuite, on leur faisait passer un premier questionnaire. Il y avait un échantillonnage biologique du sang maternel et de l'urine. Et puis à l'accouchement, on refaisait aussi ces mêmes échantillonnages biologiques tout en prenant le placenta, le sang du cordon, le sang de la mère et l'urine.

Et deux ou trois semaines après l'accouchement, on va dans les domiciles pour leur faire passer un deuxième questionnaire et prendre les derniers échantillons biologiques qui consistent en les cheveux de la mère.

Alors pour la méthode du premier questionnaire, les informations qu'on allait relever, c'est l'âge, le niveau de l'éducation, le revenu, l'histoire résidentielle, le travail actuel ou historique du travail, l'histoire médicale, l'utilisation ou la consommation d'alcool et de tabac. Puis aussi la provenance de la consommation d'eau, c'est-à-dire il y a beaucoup de puits artésiens, mais il y a aussi l'aqueduc municipal pour certaines.

On posait des questions aussi sur l'histoire obstétrique, c'est-à-dire le passé en fait médical de la femme.

On recrute de l'information sur la consommation de poisson. Puis de cette information là, on veut savoir les espèces, la fréquence, mais aussi des poissons qui viennent du Saint-Laurent, de d'autres lacs et rivières, des poissons du marché frais et en conserve ou surgelés.

Puis on pose des questions aussi sur la consommation de produits de la chasse de la région ou d'autres régions environnantes.

Alors, le premier questionnaire – j'ai oublié de le spécifier – fait référence directement aux données préalables à la grossesse, alors que le deuxième questionnaire va faire référence aux données durant la grossesse.

Alors, le deuxième questionnaire, plus spécifiquement, on demande des informations sur le travail parce que nous aussi, on a un retrait préventif au Québec, et ça va concerner par exemple les femmes qui sont exposées à des produits chimiques, qui travaillent debout. En gros, ça ressemble à ça. Alors, on les retire du travail avant la fin de leur grossesse.

Et puis on demandait de l'information sur les données médicales, la médication, la consommation d'alcool et de tabac, et encore une fois sur la provenance de l'eau de consommation.

On demandait des informations sur les détails obstétriques, sur l'accouchement et aussi des données sur le nouveau-né, dont le poids, la taille, le périmètre crânien, etc.

Et puis on demandait aussi les mêmes informations que lors du premier questionnaire, mais ceci durant la grossesse à propos de la consommation de poisson et la consommation des produits de la chasse.

Alors, au niveau des échantillons sanguins, les opérations standardisées étaient suivies par les infirmières des CLCS et des hôpitaux. Le sérum était centrifugé au CLSC local. Le sang et le sérum étaient congelés à –20°C et les analyses ont tout été effectuées au Centre de toxicologie de Québec. Les analyses ont été effectuées par « batch », c'est-à-dire qu'on envoie environ une trentaine d'échantillons à la fois.

Au niveau des analyses sanguines, pour donner des indications sur les substances toxiques qu'on a analysées, au niveau des métaux, on va analyser le mercure total et le plomb. Bien, le mercure total et le mercure inorganique, et le plomb.

Et ceci dit, pour les gens qui ne le sauraient pas, on peut avoir à partir de ces deux mercures la quantité de mercure organique, parce qu'il existe plusieurs types de mercures. Et le mercure organique, c'est celui d'intérêt en santé environnementale, d'abord.

Et pour les autres analyses sanguines, bon, on a étudié 14 je crois congénères de BPC et plusieurs pesticides dans le sérum.

Et puis pour spécifier, les choix de ces pesticides là ont été effectués en fonction des différents pesticides qu'on retrouve actuellement dans le Saint-Laurent et particulièrement autour des lacs auxquels nous travaillons, c'est-à-dire le lac Saint-Louis et le lac Saint-François.

Alors, la population, j'ai deux types de population. En fait, c'est la même population, mais pour le premier questionnaire, j'ai 158 femmes qui ont été recrutées. Donc, j'ai des données pour 158 patientes.

Pour le deuxième questionnaire, j'en ai 101.

Alors, pour en donner les grandes lignes, les femmes sont âgées entre 15 et 39 ans. Elles ont un niveau d'éducation entre six et 19 ans. Le poids 1 spécifie le poids avant l'accouchement. Je l'ai mis en kilos pour essayer de faciliter la compréhension. Alors, c'est entre 42 et 124 kilos. Et après l'accouchement ou à la fin de l'accouchement, je devrais dire, c'est entre 55 et 142.

Le revenu. Pour le revenu, j'ai mis le pourcentage des femmes dont revenu familial est en bas de 24 999 dollars, et ça correspond à 29,7 pour cent.

Puis probablement que la plupart d'entre vous vont accrocher au niveau de la consommation de cigarettes. Les fumeuses avant la grossesse, ça correspond à 45,3 pour cent et durant la grossesse, ça correspond à 43,9 pour cent. C'est très élevé, mais ça correspond à d'autres études qu'on a faites dans la région.

Et puis si on regarde avec les données du Québec aussi, la plupart des femmes vont fumer entre 20 et 35 ans, et ça correspond à peu près aux données qu'on a ici.

Puis il y a 41,8 pour cent des femmes qui sont rendues à leur première grossesse.

Alors, au niveau de la consommation de poisson, comme je l'ai dit tantôt, nous, on étudie principalement, ou notre objectif premier était d'évaluer la consommation de poisson des lacs Saint-Louis et Saint-François.

Alors, il y a 28 pour cent de la population qui mangeait de ces poissons là avant leur grossesse.

Ça n'a pas considérablement diminué durant la grossesse. Sauf qu'il faut faire attention parce qu'ici, on ne fait pas exactement référence à la même, même population étant donné que le nombre d'individus est différent.

Pour les autres lacs, ça passe de huit pour cent à six pour cent; les poissons surgelés, de 72 pour cent à 60 pour cent; le poisson frais, de 46 pour cent à 31 pour cent; et le poisson en conserve, de 62 pour cent à 56 pour cent.

Alors, pour donner des indications sur la quantité consommée, j'ai présenté le tableau ici. Alors, ça représente le nombre de repas par mois pour les différentes catégories. Alors, je pense qu'on peut s'attarder principalement au niveau de la médiane sans toutefois oublier les maximums, parce que ces femmes là sont quand même incluses dans les analyses.

Et alors pour le Saint-Laurent, pour avant la grossesse, ça va de 1,5 repas par mois à 0,5 pendant la grossesse; autre région, de 1,5 à 1; frais du marché, de 1 à 1. En fait, ça reste identique. Le poisson en conserve, de un repas, 75 par mois à un.

Justement, je voudrais attirer votre attention ici sur le fait qu'il y a plusieurs patientes qui vont augmenter leur quantité, même si ça ne se reflète pas dans les résultats, mais il y en a beaucoup qui ont diminué. En fait, ça se pousse vers les extrêmes. Il y en a qui diminuent leur consommation de poisson en conserve et il y en a qui l'augmentent considérablement jusqu'à un repas par jour de poisson en conserve, et spécialement au niveau du thon.

Alors, au niveau des poissons surgelés, la médiane de la consommation va rester la même, de un à un.

Alors, au niveau des analyses sanguines, on remarque qu'au niveau du mercure organique, que la médiane pour le premier trimestre est de 0,81 et elle est identique au deuxième trimestre. Vous allez remarquer que les N ne correspondent pas nécessairement avec les données que j'avais tout à l'heure. C'est que comme j'ai dit, on n'arrive pas à recruter toutes les femmes au premier trimestre. Alors, c'est pour ça que ça diffère. Et puis le délai pour les analyses aussi est quand même assez considérable.

Alors, pour le mercure organique, les données sont identiques aussi pour le premier et le deuxième trimestre, de 0,4 à 0,4. Et pour le plomb, de 1,04 à 1,04.

Ce qu'on a remarqué, c'est qu'il n'y a pas de différence significative entre le premier et le deuxième trimestre de grossesse pour le mercure et pour le plomb. Et dans cette étendue d'âge – ici c'est écrit de 15 à 37 ans, c'est une erreur, car c'est de 15 à 39 ans – ça ne va pas varier non plus avec l'âge pour les différents métaux, c'est-à-dire que ça n'augmente pas avec l'âge, comme plusieurs contaminants.

Alors, au niveau des métaux et de la consommation de poisson, on a remarqué qu'il n'y a pas de relation entre le mercure total, le plomb et la consommation de poisson, que les niveaux de mercure organique sont plus élevés chez celles qui consomment du poisson et augmentent en fonction du nombre de repas. Et ça, c'est bon pour le poisson du Saint-Laurent, le poisson frais du marché et le poisson en conserve.

Alors, ici, il faut faire attention. On parle de sources de poisson, c'est-à-dire zéro source. On n'en consomme pas une des sources que j'ai énumérées tout à l'heure, deux des sources, trois des sources. Puis on fait référence au nombre de repas par mois.

Ce qu'on peut remarquer, c'est qu'effectivement, le mercure organique va augmenter chez les femmes en fonction du nombre de repas par mois des différentes sources.

Alors, au niveau du profil des congénères de BPC, ce qu'on remarque – on n'a pas poussé encore beaucoup les analyses – mais ce qu'on remarque, c'est que les plus fréquents sont le congénère 138, 153 et 180. Et ça correspond directement avec les données des différentes études qui ont été effectuées directement dans l'eau du Saint-Laurent et dans les sédiments – du moins, pour cette région là.

Au niveau de la rechlore(?), la rechlore, c'est un indice pour les BPC. Comme c'est difficile d'analyser la totalité des BPC, on va utiliser des indices. À titre indicatif, c'est qu'on utilise le congénère 138 et le congénère 153 qui sont les plus fréquemment retrouvés dans l'environnement pour se servir de ces deux données là pour en faire un indice, puisqu'on remarque effectivement que la rechlore va augmenter considérablement avec l'âge. Et pour la classe d'âge ici qu'on a, elle va quintupler. Alors, c'est quand même considérable.

Et puis le R2 égale à 0,45, ça signifie que la variabilité de la rechlore par l'âge est expliquée à 45 pour cent. En fait, que l'âge explique à 45 pour cent la variabilité de la rechlore de notre échantillon.

Alors, pour la rechlore 1260, on remarque qu'il y a une tendance d'augmentation entre le premier et le deuxième trimestre. On dit tendance parce que le 5 Rand est à 0,09 et le poisson frais du marché est le principal contributeur à la rechlore 1260 ajustée par l'âge.

Puis pour les autres sources, on n'a pas de résultats significatifs.

Alors ici, on a le même tableau que tout à l'heure, sauf qu'on l'a pour la rechlore 1260, puis on remarque la rechlore 1260 corrigée pour l'âge. On remarque qu'il y a la même évolution au niveau des sources de poisson. Et puis je répète ici qu'on fait toujours allusion au nombre de repas.

Alors, voilà les pesticides. Ça non plus, on n'a pas poussé encore les analyses.

Ce qu'on peut dire jusqu'à présent, c'est que les niveaux sont plus ou moins élevés, c'est-à-dire que qu'ils se rapprochent beaucoup en fait de la limite de détection. Puis ce qu'on voulait monter par ce tableau là, c'est qu'en fait, il y en a qui sont absolument non détectables.

Toutefois, on va s'attarder aux principaux – en fait, probablement à tous, mais au début ou dans les mois à venir – aux principaux que l'on retrouve.

Alors, comme conclusion préliminaire, on pourrait dire que même si les niveaux de contaminants sont faibles comparativement à d'autres études chez les femmes enceintes ou chez la population en général, ils augmentent en fonction de la consommation de poisson des différentes sources.

Puis le BPC va aussi augmenter avec l'âge entre le premier et le deuxième trimestre de grossesse.

Lorsque nous aurons plus de données, on va analyser la relation entre les poissons, mais on va tenir compte de la fréquence principalement, mais aussi des types de poisson en fonction des niveaux de contaminants. On n'a pas encore assez de données pour pouvoir effectuer ça.

Puis ce qu'on pourrait recommander ou ce qu'on pense qu'on tend vers, puisque ce sont des données préliminaires, c'est peut-être que les recommandations devraient prendre en considération la quantité totale de consommation de poisson, en considérant les espèces de poisson et la fréquence dans le but de bénéficier des aspects sains du poisson et de minimiser l'absorption des contaminants.

On dit ça parce qu'évidemment, la plupart des recommandations sont effectuées en fonction d'une seule espèce et ne tiennent pas compte de la totalité des espèces consommées. En tout cas, ici, au Québec, c'est comme ça que se passe.

Alors, voilà. C'est tout. Merci beaucoup.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Merci, Geneviève.

Our third speaker is Dr. Bill Bowerman, from Clemson University. His presentation title will be on “Lakewide Management Plan Indicators: Current Status”.

Welcome, Bill.

DR. WILLIAM BOWERMAN
(Clemson University):

Thank you.

As you can see, all good professors have good graduate students. When you're assigned to talk two weeks before you make it, you go in and you say who wants to get on a paper?

So Anna Barricott, Amy Rowe and Faith Wiley helped me out greatly with this talk, and so did their search of the Internet.

Usually, I'd be giving a talk like the previous two, but today, I get to talk about LaMPs.

Hopefully, by the end of the talk, I'll be able to talk about or tell you what a LaMP consists of, what is a LaMP indicator? What is the status of LaMP indicators? Do the current LaMP indicators really measure progress under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement? And where do we need to go from here?

Well, since I got assigned this two weeks ago, the first thing I turned to was the Water Quality Agreement. So I decided to see what is supposed to be in a LaMP?

Under the Water Quality Agreement, LaMPs are for open lake waters. They are to reduce loadings of critical pollutants. They are to restore beneficial uses, the 14 that were also included with the RAPs.

One of their purposes is also not to allow increased pollutant loadings where specific objectives under each LaMP are not exceeded. I thought that was an interesting thing to find out about LaMPs.

There are several different parts of what a LaMP is supposed to consist of, at least under the Water Quality Agreement, as it currently exists.

There has to be a definition of threat to human health or aquatic life posed by critical pollutants.

It needs to evaluate information on concentration, sources and pathways of critical pollutants.

It has to have a schedule of load reductions of these critical pollutants and determination of the load reductions to meet the Agreement objectives.

Also, it needs to include an evaluation of current remedial actions and identification of additional remedial actions and an implementation schedule, identify which agency or entity will implement this, a process for evaluation, a description of surveillance and monitoring activities, and a process to recognize the absence of critical pollutants, i.e. when can we delist the LaMP?

What we did is we took the Water Quality Agreement, we took those parts of the LaMP and we evaluated the five LaMPs, the information we could get.

Lake Erie, when I talked to the people from Ohio, they said they're still working on their ecosystem objectives. They are determining what their alternative state of the lake is to be. That will be translated into specific objectives. Then, their indicators for their LaMP progress will be chosen.

If anybody has better information than this, I'd definitely be willing to take it.

Lake Michigan was somewhat kind of confusing trying to figure out what exactly where their indicators. There seem to be two sets of environmental indicators and there was a goal for the first set, which is to promote discussion and reach agreement about which environmental indicators will be monitored, including plankton, amphibians, birds, fish and mussels.

They have a second set, and their goal is more detailed indicators that may be included as the LaMP process develops, which include a lot of actual things that live in the lake – salmon, lake trout, rainbow trout, planktivores, sea lamprey and benthivores.

Also in Lake Michigan, they include the mass balance approach. We all know about the Lake Michigan mass balance study, which studies sources, movement and fate of any substance that enters the lake system. The amount of chemical is equal to the amount that enters minus the amount that's in sediment, broken down or removed out of the system.

The goal of the mass balance is to quantify the chemical sources and their rates of physical, chemical or biological change.

Lake Huron. They generated a list of potentially important indicators based on the SOLEC 2000 document. They held a session at SOLEC 2000 and identified a list of additional potential indicators.

I was informed by someone from Environment Canada that Lake Huron initiative is not an official LaMP, but it is something that they are considering. They have a number of indicators that are being selected.

Their list, they have 53 indicators in four different categories – critical pollutants, physical habitat, fisheries or other issues.

And if we strictly go by what's in the Water Quality Agreement, of these, 13 of the 53 critical pollutant indicators would meet a LaMP criteria.

None of the physical habitat criteria, none of the fisheries or none of the other issues would meet LaMP criteria under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

So 13 of the 53 that they are considering would actually meet what's in the Water Quality Agreement.

Lake Superior. Detailed indicators are being developed by the binational program. They produced a document, Ecosystem Principles and Objectives, Indicators and Targets for Lake Superior.

They have a list of best indicators. There are 45 of these. They are in various categories – chemical contaminants, aquatic communities, terrestrial wildlife, habitat, human health, and developing sustainability.

Of these, six out of the six of the chemical contaminants met the criteria. One of the five aquatic communities criteria met the LaMP criteria. Three to maybe four of the terrestrial wildlife met the criteria, none of the habitat, all of the human health, and none of the developing sustainability.

I kind of used Lake Superior to indicate some of the things that would not meet the criteria under the present language in the Water Quality Agreement. They either don't have anything to do with critical pollutant loadings or they really have no link to the open waters of the Great Lakes.

Some of these would include forced fragmentation, nocturnal owls, white-tailed dear, rough grouse, or common loons. Some that I was somewhat surprised were not on the list included herring gulls, bald eagles, mink and otter that typically are on other lists.

Lake Ontario was a very, very interesting one to take a look at. They set up a set of criteria and the criteria they did to take a look at their indicators included that it was consistent with SOLEC and their ecosystem objective working group criteria. There had to be data from existing monitoring programs. There had to be historical data. You had to have an ability to characterize ecosystem health on a lakewide scale, they were relevant and important to the public, and that they were accepted or recognized monitors by monitoring experts.

Lake Ontario has a total of 11 monitors. Under critical pollutants, they measure concentrations in water, young of year fish, herring gull health, lake trout.

Under the lower food web, they're looking at nutrient loadings, zooplankton and prey fish concentrations and smelt for the prey fish.

For the upper food web, they're looking at health of herring gulls, health of bald eagles, health of lake trout, health of mink and health of otter.

Now, this is coming from an eagle guy. The only one that's a little questionable up there is the health of the bald eagle for Lake Ontario only because we have one nesting pair that is actually interacting with the open waters of Lake Ontario.

So when I went through this matrix then, just to kind of give you a cover slide, there were about 45 indicators out of Lake Superior. A little less than half were under the criteria for the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

There are over 57 that are being considered for Lake Huron. About 12 are there. Basically, all of the Lake Ontario ones are there.

I couldn't really make any heads or tails about what exactly was going to be a LaMP indicator in Lake Michigan. And Lake Erie's are still under development.

So this kind of gives you a state of where we are right now.

Do the indicators that we have measure progress? They're pretty well not developed enough to really measure progress in most lakes. Lake Ontario has the best-defined program that's most consistent with the Water Quality Agreement. It's measuring pollutants, persistent toxic substances in their loadings.

Where might we go from here? In addition to going back to Annex 2 for guidance, some additional suggestions are to go back to Lake Ontario's criteria for selecting indicators and see what they've done.

Look at epidemiological criteria when evaluating indicators. There has been a lot of work done by the IJC in terms of epidemiological criteria.

Look at cause-effect linkages and use some of those to look at what your indicators may be of the loadings and the recovery.

Develop a few good indicators instead of a lot of indicators that may not measure anything related to the open waters of the Great Lake.

I think with the way our economies are going and the lack of monitoring money that we have available, it just made a lot more sense when we looked at what Lake Ontario did, looked at existing monitoring programs, looked at historical data and went to just a few monitors that they could actually probably defend long term to other agency people as their indicators.

Another good source, and we tend not to see a lot of this used.

We had a conference in Windsor the IJC did in 1996.

In 1998, this whole volume was looking at trends of contaminants and effects of persistent toxic substances in the Great Lakes. That whole journal volume includes presentations that were done on water concentrations, fish concentrations, sediment loadings, effects on different biota, including humans.

It may be a good place for the LaMPs to take a look when they're looking at indicator species.

And with that, I'll give you back my time.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Thank you very much, Bill.

Can Geneviève and Barb come up here, please, for the question period?

BARB MARTINOVIC:

One of the earlier presentations that was made was talking about sampling in different areas and sampling one sediment sample collected from different spots.

But as we can see, even in the tree swallows, where their nest boxes are and where they are feeding, from one site that's like maybe a few kilometers down from another site, there is a huge difference and huge gradient in contamination.

I think it's important to make sure that there's a good representation of what the riverbed looks like, or the lake, or whatever, for contaminant load.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

You can ask questions to Geneviève in English and she'll answer to you in English, no problem.

Wow, those presentations were very clear!

UNIDENTIFIED:

I have a question of Bill.

I'm not quite sure what to take from your presentation. Does this mean that the LaMPs are in trouble in terms of they're ineffective or ground to a halt, or something? Or is it that there's something wrong with how we pick our indicators, or both?

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

Well, I guess the impression that I came after we were looking at the indicators and then going back again and reading what was supposed to be in a LaMP is when we scoped out the lakewide management plans, the scoping may be broader than the question.

I participated up in Sault Ste. Marie when they were looking at the indicators with the Lake Superior Binational Program, and a couple of us that were more of the biota people were kind of saying where's the LaMP in the Lake Superior Binational Program?

Because it's so large, it's beyond – people are trying to manage the entire Lake Superior basin. I think sometimes, what's supposed to be in the LaMP gets lost with all of these larger concerns.

The ones we kept coming back to were what do ungula populations have to do with the open waters of the Great Lakes? It may have something to do with land quality or maybe something that can attract other people into think about the whole Lake Superior program.

It's not that it's not a good idea to manage the entire Lake Superior basin, but the LaMPs are supposed to be – at least under the Water Quality Agreement – specifically just towards the open waters.

And I think there's been confusion about not just the ecosystem approach, but what is the actual ecosystem we're looking at? Is the ecosystem the ecosystem that's based on the interaction of the open waters of the lakes, or is it the basin ecosystem that we're trying to plan for?

I don't know if we have been given the mandate by the two parties to go beyond the open waters. At least, under the Agreement, it doesn't seem that we have.

So I think if we lose sight about what the Agreement says, then we may be diluting what the Agreement is about in terms of monitoring.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

So it's not a clear watershed approach, then.

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

No.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Okay.

UNIDENTIFIED:

I have a question.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Yes. For whom?

UNIDENTIFIED:

Being involved in the Public Advisory Committee process for remedial action plans, and although in Annex 2 of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, the LaMPs and the RAPs are thrown into the same annexed, there has always been an incredible confusion on the monitoring that's supposedly happening and there is not much communication between the public and LaMP.

In Ontario, they are sort of a secretive group. Once very ten years, they come out and do a public presentation and then one doesn't hear much of them.

But the public has never, I don't think, really understood how the two elements work together because whatever happens out in the big open lake, which is often mostly a federal jurisdiction, and what happens environmentally near the shore, which is the RAP, an awful lot of it is provincial jurisdiction or municipal.

How do these two work together because whatever happens out in the lake sometimes originates near shore or it might come the other way, from atmospheric depositions or what have you.

The public really don't understand how the two work together, and whether it is working well or whether there is enough public information going out on those issues.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Maybe there are some other persons in this room to be able to answer this question.

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

I was going to say, Bruce, this is your job.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

So we'll have to leave this question unanswered for the moment.

Okay.

UNIDENTIFIED:

I have a question about the link between sediments and say the PCBs that the swallows would be exposed to. I was wondering how far stoneflies fly and how far sparrows will go, or the birds will go to get these insects?

I was wondering the observations that you made say at Hosik Creek, if maybe some of those insects might be from further in the St. Lawrence River or something like that.

BARB MARTINOVIC:

Well, depending on the amount of food source that's available to them within a small area.

Like, if you look at the data and you can see Cornwall Island is about ten times less than Turtle Creek, which is just across the river. So we also did some insect sampling and there was an abundance of insects at each site sampled.

As well, tree swallows, when they feed their young, because it's the 16-day old tree swallow chicks that we are looking at, which are basically in a box until they are ready to fledge. So when the parents feed them, it's local feeding – within two kilometers. I mean, two kilometers can sometimes be a large stretch for feeding. But if there is a local source, then they're going to be feeding there.

So it's fairly locally indicative, as opposed to… I mean, there are some other indicator species like fish and what not. But fishery, you have them moving around all the time. It's one of the more closely local feeding indicator species, I guess.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Thank you.

BARB MARTINOVIC:

No problem.

QUESTION:

I have a question for Bill about the LaMP indicators.

I have been following the Lake Superior LaMP closely for about ten years, and there is confusion between the Binational Program and the LaMP, the mandate in there and the mandate from the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement for LaMPs.

What I'm wondering is if you had a recommendation for the folks who are charged with carrying out the Binational Program through the vehicle which is given to them, that being the LaMP, and to come up with some monitoring indicators that would really actually work.

One of the stumbling blocks that you identified is the indicators, and the ones in the Lake Superior LaMP are all over the place.

If you could give me some suggestions.

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

Well, I guess when I was looking, or part of this process, when we were at Sault Ste. Marie, it seemed like – and I probably could get accused of this with the eagles too – but it seemed like everyone that had their pet projects that they're trying to get continually going on got thrown into the list. It was like a researcher's frenzy of long-term possible research dollars.

And I think when you look at the list, there are many things that just absolutely make no sense to a LaMP process.

And if the parties amended the Agreement to be more of a larger scope on this, it would be great. You could get more money to do a large comprehensive basin type plan, but I don't know. I've not seen that being a mandate. I mean, we've got the Agreement and as long as the Agreement is met, I think that's what the IJC would be looking toward, at least when we review these types of indicators.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Well, then what indicators would work for the Lake Superior LaMP? Your short list.

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

There's a number of them that I've identified before. I don't have that up right now.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Maybe I can follow up with you and get a copy of this.

WILLIAM BOWERMAN:

Okay.

UNIDENTIFIED:

Thank you.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Yes, Bruce?

BRUCE WALKER:

Bruce Walker, de STOP, pour Geneviève.

Dans votre excellent exposé, j'étais premièrement tellement frappé par la statistique que 43 pour cent des femmes ont fumé pendant leur grossesse. Ça, c'est absolument incroyable. Peut-être que vous devriez faire une demande de subvention auprès de Santé Canada pour faire une autre étude.

En ce qui concerne la consommation de poisson, dans vos questionnaires, avez-vous posé la question quelle espèce de poisson elles ont consommé?

GENEVIÈVE ST-AMOUR:

Oui, on a posé des questions par rapport aux espèces. C'est juste qu'on n'a pas fait les analyses encore parce qu'on n'avait pas assez de données.

Puis il y a aussi le fait que je n'ai pas eu le temps de les faire parce que j'ai su lundi que j'étais pour faire la présentation.

Mais ça fait partie des plans à venir, sous peu.

BRUCE WALKER:

Et une deuxième sous-question. En ce qui concerne la consommation moyenne de poisson par les femmes enceintes, est-ce que c'est une consommation élevée par rapport à la consommation de la population en général?

GENEVIÈVE ST-AMOUR:

De la population en général, de tous les types confondus ou d'un type de poisson en particulier?

BRUCE WALKER: Oui.

GENEVIÈVE ST-AMOUR:

Parce que ça dépend si on fait référence aux autochtones, par exemple.

BRUCE WALKER:

Oui, oui.

GENEVIÈVE ST-AMOUR:

C'est certain que la population en mange beaucoup moins. Mais la population autre qu'autochtone, je dirais que c'est à peu près équivalent. Sauf que c'est la provenance du type de poisson, nous, qui nous intéressait. C'était le lac Saint-Louis et le lac Saint-François.

BRUCE WALKER:

Oui, absolument. Merci.

GENEVIÈVE ST-AMOUR:

Bienvenue.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Bon, I think we are through with the questions.

I want to thank our three presenters for their very, very interesting presentations.

Now, we have a last but not least presenter coming from Russia. Her name is Elena Kuzevanova. She's from Irkutsk, Russia. She is going to talk about Lake Baikal as an example. She works with the Baikal Ecological Network.

And now, the two persons are here. She is with Susie Schreiber, from Waukegan, Illinois, on the Area of Concern Citizens' Advisory Group.

Let us welcome Elena.

SUSIE SCHREIBER
(Area of Concern Citizens' Advisory Group, Waukegan, Illinois):

Let's wait for the students to get back in because we've already had a preliminary overview with them, and I don't want them to miss this.

But it's really very nice to be here. You realize that the State of Illinois might be known as Illinois. It's the western part of your French exploration and your French forts. We have quite a bit of French history, and I will say in my hometown, in our Memorial Day parade, we have historical flags and they start with who owned the property first. And the first flag leading is the fleur de lys.

About a year ago, I had a question from a colleague who said did I know anyone who could help some people in Lake Baikal, Russia – which is in Siberia, just north of Mongolia – to assist them in their figuring out the process for cleaning up their lake and protecting their lake?

I thought well, here is my name and here is my e-mail. Let them just send an e-mail and we'll figure it out.

And from about a week from that e-mail, we were by then making telephone calls. Then shortly after Thanksgiving, my son went over and met Elena Kuzevanova and her husband, Victor. And from that point on, we ended up working towards developing a sustainable educational partnership.

And with that, I will turn it over to Elena, who will share with you via her overhead slides the educational exchange that we are presently developing.

We invite any of you to see us throughout this meeting and talk to us if you want to become involved.

Elena.

Oh, one other thing. Elena is 12 hours off from where you are. So this is about 4:30 in the morning for her. So if she falls asleep, just remind her.

ELENA KUZEVANOVA
(Baikal Ecological Network, Irkutsk, Russia):

Dear colleagues, I am grateful to the International Joint Commission organizers of this conference and personally to Bruce Girshner for the invitation and for the opportunity to make a presentation about our partnership between a United States public organization, Waukegan Harbour Citizens Advisory Group, and the Russian non-governmental organization, Baikal Ecological Network.

I work at the Limnological Institute of Siberia, Department of Russia Academy of Science and live in Irkutsk City, which is situated 70 kilometers west from the Lake Baikal shore.

The main objective of the Limnological Institute is the fundamental investigation and studies of Lake Baikal ecosystem and the other objective is the delivery of scientific knowledge to people, to educators, to students, decision-makers and the public.

In 1999, the Limnological Institute was involved in the international project of the European Union – ecological information and public awareness promotion in the Lake Baikal region. I was a local area coordinator of this project.

At the very end of this project, participants of the project decided to create a non-governmental organization, the Baikal Ecological Network, for further project implementation and development.

We realized that Russia is expecting big economical growth and usually, this growth is connected with the overexploitation of environment. So we decided to find out the developed regions with a broad experience in solutions, in making decisions of environmental problems for big lakes.

So it's natural that we come to the Great Lake area of the American continent.

And from our personal connections, we found the organization Waukegan Harbour Citizen Advisory Group. And this organization for us is very interesting because they successfully work on implementation of the remedial action plan of one of the areas of concern, Waukegan Harbour, of Lake Michigan.

And I would like to say that our partnership and cooperation was made possible because of big energy and new ideas and the organizing ability of Mrs. Susie Schreiber, the chair of Waukegan Harbour Citizens Advisory Group, as well as support from members of this organization.

During my first visit at the beginning of this year to the area of Lake Michigan, from my presentations and discussions, we found that the American people and the Russian people, they did not have very much information on Lake Baikal and Great Lakes and Lake Michigan. Sometimes this information is not very correct.

And moreover, from the big and long route from country to country, this information sometimes becomes outdated.

So for this reason, we decided to make a partnership agreement to develop and exchange information, exchange information on successful processes for effecting and maintaining clean water resources, to establish and sustain methods for developing and sharing educational materials and programs, to assist in this process, to establish and sustain methods for developing and sharing technologies for clean water resources, and to create a databank of methods, materials and research activities in place on both lakes.

At the first stage of our cooperation, we decided to create an Internet site about the cooperation in two or maybe three languages – Russian, English and Spanish – in order to collect, receive and deliver the substantial environmental information about what is going on around our lakes, which problems exist and how they are being solved.

So one of the objectives of my second visit to Canada now and to the United States is to develop an Internet page of our partnership between Waukegan Harbour Citizens Advisory Group and Baikal Ecological Network.

From our discussion, we decided to put information about Lake Baikal, about general data of Lake Baikal, about Baikal as a world heritage natural site, about water quality of Lake Baikal, threats to Baikal, industry and people which live on the Lake Baikal, about omul, which is commercial and endemic Baikal fish, and about Baikal seal, nerpa, about environmental education, and legislation for the protection of Lake Baikal.

So I would like to present some of this data briefly in this report.

So the general data about Lake Baikal. Baikal is situated between Irkutsk and the Buryat Republic up north from Mongolia. It's about 200 kilometers north from Mongolia. It's a large storage of fresh water in the world. It contains about 20 percent of fresh non-glacial water and about 90 percent of fresh water of Russia.

It is the deepest lake in the world. The maximum depth of the lake is about one mile. You can compare it with the Great Lakes depth.

This is the most ancient lake in the world. It's about 25 million years old.

And I would like to show you the threats of the Lake Baikal.

Susie, could you help me?

This is a very nice picture from National Geographic journal.

I would like to show you the biggest threats of Lake Baikal, the biggest industry is the cellulose plant which is situated on the south shore of the Lake Baikal.

Then other threat is the biggest tributary of the lake, Selenge River, which is going from the Mongolia through the Buryat Republic, to the Lake Baikal. This is the biggest tributary and the big delta of Selenge River. And because there are some cities on the shores of the Selenge River, there is some contamination which goes to the Lake Baikal.

Another threat is the trans-Siberian Railway, which goes around the south part of the Lake Baikal, and the Baikal Railway which goes on the north part, about maybe 50 kilometers on the shore, along the shore of Lake Baikal.

Another threat is the area of air pollution which is situated along the Angara River, because a lot of industrial and chemical industries are there.

So we have this problem on the Lake Baikal, but still now, the water quality on Lake Baikal is very pure. It's almost distilled water. Salt content is very low, about 96,4 milligram per litre. And transparency of water of Lake Baikal is up to 40 metres.

Oxygen concentration. In the Lake Baikal, water is very high – up to 12 milligrams per litre.

And concentration of metals and organic toxic substances are 100 times less than the worst established level, limit of concentration of first class water, drinking water.

So you can compare the population which lives on the shore of the Lake Baikal with the population which lives on the Michigan Lake shores. There are only 140,000 people who live on the shore of the Lake Baikal.

If they stand, for example, hand in hand along the shore – I try to explain this to the children – they cover only one-eighth part of the Lake Baikal.

But if the population of Lake Michigan stands hand in hand, they cover six times around the shore of the lake. So you can compare the influence of population on the Lake Baikal and on the Lake Michigan.

And on the other part, we have only four industries which are situated on the shore of the Lake Baikal. The biggest is a pulp paper mill and the other, it's a mine for the production of marble, a gravel-making factory, and one for storage.

You can compare how many industries are situated on the shores of Lake Michigan. I saw it during my visit, for ten kilometres, steel companies, oil companies and so on, and so on.

So we are so happy not to have this. But you know, because of that, we are lucky and Lake Baikal is still very pure. But you know, the economical situation here cannot grow because we decided to create a law which will protect and protects Lake Baikal against the pollution.

And during nine years, there was a lot of fighting between people, between local administration and federal administration. And at last, in 1999, the federal law on the protection of Lake Baikal was signed by President Yeltsin.

I would like to show the next transparency. We would like to put the information about food chains in Lake Baikal, because this is important information. Food and energy goes from the phytoplankton through the zooplankton to the omul. This is the commercial and endemic fish of Lake Baikal and through the skalpans(?) to the nerpa, and goes to the people.

So this is a very important thing. This small fish, golomyanka, 40 percent of its weight contains fat. So it's a food chain because nerpa eats almost golomyanka. So nerpa is pretty fat.

So if we have contaminations, especially organic contamination, it will go directly through this food chain through the golomyanka, through nerpa, to people.

The next one, please. I would like to show the pulp and paper mill. This is not very interesting, but it's only one point on the Lake Baikal.

The next one, please. We would like to put on the Internet some information about the numbers and biomass of commercial and endemic fish of Lake Baikal, omul. You can see that the number of omul is pretty stable for about 15 years. This is the commercial catches. You can see the commercial catches changed very much, from last century until now.

The next, please. This is the Baikal seal, nerpa. This is a baby. We would like to show and to put on the Internet the information about numbers, the abundance of nerpa on the Lake Baikal because especially in the last years, people are worried, concerned and interested about numbers.

And last year, even Greenpeace came to the Lake Baikal and tried to count how many nerpa lived on Lake Baikal.

I have to explain this information.

These first four points are from one method. The second points are from other methods of counting. This is not an increase in the numbers of nerpas. It's just because of different methods of counting of nerpa.

And so the Greenpeace point means that the numbers of nerpas are about the same – between 600,000 and 140,000. We cannot say that it's going down because the methods are scientific but very inconsistent.

We only can say that in the last years, people were trying to catch nerpas without a licence. This is a real problem because we have no good control system against this process.

The next, please. I would like to show you, to understand what kinds of positive changes occurred in the environmental situation on Lake Baikal now. There's a specialized tourism study to be developed on the Lake Baikal.

It's very important because it's one of the ways to make a business, an environmentally oriented business on the Lake Baikal.

A new business, the production of bottled drinking water has been under development during the last ten years on the Lake Baikal, and I've brought this small bottle of Baikal water. We can read crystal clear, without gas from the depths of 500 meters. The quality of the water has a licence from the Institute of Frezenios(?) of Germany.

So this is a pretty good business for the future. It's a very environmentally-oriented business.

On the Lake Baikal region, the public environmental activity is being developed. Now, we have about 100 non-governmental organizations which are very interested in developing the environment in our region.

Under the initiative of public organizations, Lake Baikal Day, a special day of annual celebration and cleaning of Baikal, was established three years ago. The local administration support the celebration of this day each year.

Educational environmental programs are being developed very quickly especially because of International Foundation for the Biodiversity of Russia.

The main legislative basis for the protection of Lake Baikal was established in 1999. I talked about this.

This year the government of Russia has developed and signed a special federal program for the protection of Lake Baikal on Baikal natural territory. This is a very important and a very new step of the Russian government.

The next, please. Another very important thing is that the Irkutsk Academy of Science, together with administration, they developed this plan of reconstruction of pulp and paper mill.

We hope that in ten years, we will have good results of this program.

Next, please. This is another very good document. At the end of August this year, we got this governmental order. And now, we really hope that we will not have industries on the shore of Lake Baikal as there are on the shores of the Great Lakes. This is a big progress in our legislation in Russia.

So that's all. I would like to say thank you very much for your attention.

The last words: I would like to give this sample of Baikal water to our new generation as a symbol to keep crystal clean freshwater of all lakes in the world, please.

SUSIE SCHREIBER:

I would like to follow Elena's presentation up on Lake Baikal to explain why it's a two-way street. It's very important, as our young people today have explained, to get people interested.

In the Waukegan Harbour area and in Lake County and Northern Cook County, Illinois, we have identified several schools who are participating in this.

We were able to fairly inexpensively get an old telephone and some Radio Shack 50 feet of telephone wire. And after Elena presented to their school in downtown Waukegan and in Libertyville, Illinois, her objectives on Lake Baikal, I presented some of our Waukegan Harbour objectives so the children understood their own concerns with which they had to deal.

About a month later, the children had formed a list of questions, and those questions I narrowed down into a short bullet list, e-mailed them to Victor and Elena.

Then, we set up a phone conversation for about 40 minutes in which you did not hear one word out of a normally extraordinarily noisy eighth grade class. They were absolutely sitting on the edge of their chairs.

I tell the story many times. Victor and Elena, midway during the conversation, said Susie, we have been answering the questions. Is anyone there? And the whole room just lit up in great, big smiles and said “Hi, Dr. Elena.”

They were waving their hands and just big grins. And then they were very quiet because they kept waiting to hear if they were going to have selected one of their questions. And it was like they're answering mine now! And you could just see this big, big grin.

So we really understand that it generates a lot of enthusiasm for the students, many of whom are Hispanic in our area, to understand our watershed, our harbor and our lake and the importance in the global sphere. By connecting with Lake Baikal, we represent not 20 percent of the water on the Great Lakes or 20 percent in Lake Baikal with Elena, but together, 40 percent.

And we look forward to the day when we can include some of the lakes in the continent of Africa and other areas of the world into this partnership.

I certainly would like to thank those of you who are present today and some of you who are in here, your organizations and agencies, who helped us establish this last spring when Elena came to visit.

She's got a huge schedule ahead of her. I hope that her sleep time works into it.

Thank you all for being here and for helping us with our partnership.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

Well, thank you very much to both of you. This is nice to see the networking between the United States and Russia and the students, especially with the students.

Now, we are arriving at our conclusion. I invite Dr. David Carpenter to come this microphone and give the last words.

DAVID CARPENTER
(State University of New York at Albany):

Just a few words because it's been a long day. We've heard about LaMPs and RAPs and ZIPs and zip codes.

But I think what struck me over the day is that we covered subjects that are very much like those that have been part of the major grant that I've had over the last two years through the NIEHS Superfund Program where we had to be dealing with issues of human health, human and animal health, effects of contamination on the ecosystem, methods of remediation and cleaning up the mess, and very importantly, outreach to the community.

I think our second session this morning on the ZIPs impressed me very much. Of course, we do involve the community in the LaMP process, the RAP process.

But I think we, as environmental scientists, whether we come from the engineering point of view or from the health point of view, we can do our thing in our ivory tower, but if we don't communicate with the public, if we don't involve people in the decision-making process, we will be ineffective.

I'm just delighted that the class was here today. I think that first of all, it's really important that we pass the torch of being concerned about the environment to the next generation.

And the reality is this is so much fun. This is so exciting. I think most of us in this field, we can't imagine doing anything else because the problems are number one, interesting; but number two, they're important.

Now, I want to close just with a few personal reflections. Of course, this reflects my own bias because I am a public health physician and my major focus is on human health, although I do a lot of animal research as well.

But the question of how we respond to hazardous waste, whether it be contamination in the Great Lakes, contamination in Lake Baikal, wherever, the real issue is how does this affect the animals that live there and the people that live around it?

We have heard today of the effects on the tree swallows. We have heard about the avenues of contamination into people. We have heard about the diseases that people get when they are exposed to these contaminants.

Our focus has been around the Great Lakes. That's appropriate because that's what the IJC is all about.

But I think that the challenge for all of us, going a little further, is just what was mentioned a few moments ago. These are global issues.

Now, because of where I live, I've been very caught up recently in the whole debate about the Hudson River, of the horrendous amount of PCBs that were dumped in the Hudson River, which stopped in the early 70s.

Ninety percent of them still are in the Hudson River. So much for the river cleaning itself and for these things just going away.

Well, let's ask the question where are the other ten percent?

Let me say first of all very, very small amounts of those PCBs have been destroyed. Most of that other ten percent has distributed around the world. A lot of it has washed out into the Atlantic Ocean. A very large amount of it has gone into the air, has volatilized and has spread around the whole earth.

I just had the occasion a couple of months ago to go to St. Lawrence Island, Alaska. This is in the Bering Strait. It's 40 miles from the Russian coast. This is a group of Siberian Natives whose main diet source is seal, walrus and whale. And these are among the most contaminated people on the face of the earth because of the PCBs that migrate from the Great Lakes and the Hudson River and the various sites in our part of the country.

So I would ask you to think of the fact, I think from all of the information that we have now that maybe we didn't have ten years ago, there are effects of these classes of substance on human health that are occurring at the levels that you and I have in our bodies, whether we have any particular reason, any particular source of excessive exposure or not.

And unless we destroy these things, unless we get them out of the environment, what's going to happen is everybody on the face of the earth is going to be contaminated to more or less the same equal levels. Our IQs are going to be depressed. Our endocrine systems are not going to work right. We're going to be suffering increased instance of cancer. This is not a solution.

I think from my perspective – and I've been very much involved in the debates about dredging around the Hudson – the human health impacts and the ecological impacts of these substances are so serious and so great that doing nothing is simply not an option.

I think I've heard several conversations here today. We've got to get these things out of the places where they contaminate people and wildlife.

Now, what to do with them is an enormous problem because simply dredging them, putting them in a landfill is not going to destroy them. We need to develop the engineering technologies that will allow us to destroy these substances in a cost-effective fashion. We don't have that technology right now.

But I think this is a challenge for you guys from the school. Find ways in which we can get rid of these things, where we can take contaminated sediments and without spending a fortune, we can take the contaminants out and have clean soil and put it back, where we can eat the fish without worrying about it and where we can eat our Big Macs without having PCBs in them.

So we have an enormous challenge. I think it's been a very profitable day, with very diverse subjects. I'm sure sometimes people think that's not my bag.

But with the school class here, with Elena here, from Russia, and with some really very exciting, new information, I hope that we will all go home feeling more challenged than ever and that we'll work very hard with both governments, with the provinces and the states, to find ways of really cleaning up the Great Lakes, not just continuing to study forever, but to actually begin to do something about getting rid of these contaminants.

Thanks very much.

YOLAINE ST-JACQUES:

So that's it. Thank you all for your intensive participation.

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