February 20, 2014 — Researchers who conducted tests have known for at least eight years that lobsters at the mouth of the Penobscot River contained “hazardous” levels of mercury, but consumers were not told until the state announced it this week.
The long-term study that led the Department of Marine Resources to declare Tuesday that it will close down lobster and crab harvesting in a 7-square-mile area shows that lobsters in the area have had mercury levels, year-to-year since 2006, that are higher than the state deems safe to consume.
The banks downriver from the former HoltraChem Manufacturing Co. plant in Orrington still contain mercury, decades after the company stopped dumping chemicals into the waterway leading to the bay, according to the study.
The study, first ordered by a federal judge in 2003 and completed by a team of three scientists in 2013, says that mercury contamination in the sediment and wetlands has been declining slowly since HoltraChem began discharging mercury waste directly into the river in 1967, but is “still high enough to be hazardous” to plants and animals and the people who eat them.
The revelation about contaminated lobsters is a black eye to the state’s most valuable fishery, which has endured low prices in recent years. But the closure of the area where the river empties into Penobscot Bay applies to only a small fraction of the more than 14,000 square miles in the Gulf of Maine where lobsters are harvested.
State Toxicologist Andrew Smith, who was called in to analyze the study’s findings after they were first shared with the Department of Marine Resources in November, said lobsters from that small area had high mercury levels, but most lobsters caught along Maine’s coast have less than half the amount of mercury contained in canned chunk light tuna, and less than one-sixth the mercury of canned white tuna.
“Really, people should have no worries about eating lobster,” Smith said. “They should be looking at it as a seafood (with mercury levels) well below what they typically consume.”
Mercury is toxic to humans and, in high doses, can attack organs and neurological systems such as the brain, peripheral nerves, the pancreas, the immune system and kidneys. Unborn children are especially sensitive to mercury’s toxic effects, and excessive exposure can lead to mental disabilities, cerebral palsy and nervous system damage.
Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald