State warns that Walleye Fest participants aren’t being properly warned of toxic dangers

Tittabawassee Township Supervisor Rick Hayes, an active member of the Freeland Lions Club, is busy preparing for this weekend’s Walleye Fest, the Dow Chemical-sponsored community event that promotes sport fishing in a waterway that also happens to be one of the region’s most contaminated.

Earlier this week, an organizer of the festival told Michigan Messenger that the Lions Club would donate some river-caught walleye fillets to a local food bank. While Hayes denied that the group is planning to donate fish to the needy, he also indicated that he was unaware of the state’s restrictive walleye consumption advisories issued for the Tittabawassee and Saginaw rivers last May.

According to the Michigan Department of Community Health, children under 15 and pre-menopausal women should not eat walleye larger than 18 inches in size. A previous advisory recommended this population group eat no more than one meal a month from walleye larger than 22 inches.

Hayes may be typical of people in the region when it comes to knowledge of fish advisories. A few years ago, Hayes was part of a committee that created a popular unofficial walleye festival hat with the embroidered statement “Dioxins My Ass.” But he may also be partly responsible for some people not knowing about the risks of eating walleye.

According to state officials, Tittabawassee Township has resisted posting needed fish advisory signs in Freeland Festival Park — ground zero for this weekend’s walleye celebration.

Allan Taylor, a geologist with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality‘s waste and hazardous materials division who has been working on dioxin contamination issues in the area since 1991, told Michigan Messenger that he feels the current level of signage is inadequate, especially since the posted signs have outdated information about the risks associated with walleye consumption.

Officials say that under an agreement with the state, Dow Chemical, which is responsible for the watershed’s dioxin contamination, promised to pay for fish advisory signs but has balked at fulfilling this agreement and has refused to provide necessary funds. Mary Draves, spokeswoman for Dow Chemical acknowledged that the company has come to an impasse with the DEQ over funding for fish advisory signs.

“I am not aware of anything further that we will be doing on this,” she said.

Currently, the signs are more or less the only official way to communicate the dioxin danger to the public. Budget shortfalls in the late 1990s prompted the state to end its policy of distributing fish advisory information to people who buy fishing licenses.

In addition to concerns about fish consumption, people who visit Freeland Festival Park for the weekend’s festivities — which features a Special Olympics hot dog cook-out, a teen dance and battle of the bands, a rummage sale and beer tent — could be exposed to dioxin present in the soil.

An expensive remediation project involving removal and replacement of topsoil was completed in the park in 2005, but periodic river flooding means some areas may be contaminated with dangerous levels of dioxin, as is the case with a nearby park in Saginaw Township where the EPA is supervising removal of soil that contained dioxin at concentrations as as high as 5,900 parts per trillion. The state’s safe level for dioxin is 90 parts per trillion.

Visitors to the Freeland park “could potentially be exposed to dioxin levels in excess of the state safety standards,” Taylor said. In a 2007 letter to Tittabawassee Township officials, the DEQ urged additional signs and cleanup at the park and noted a soil sample showed dioxin at 5,000 parts per trillion.

“Until we get entire river system addressed,“ he said, “there is never going to be 100 percent certainly that areas have not been decontaminated. … That’s why it’s important to have ongoing monitoring. We want to get in front of exposure.”

Groups call for state, federal action on Walleye Fest dangers

In response to Michigan Messenger’s earlier report on Walleye Fest, some are asking the state and federal government and Dow Chemical to take steps to prevent people from being harmed by contamination.

Dow is in the midst of a controversial process of negotiating its dioxin clean-up responsibilities in the watershed and Michelle Hurd Riddick of the Lone Tree Council said that company should not be allowed to sponsor a walleye festival as it suggests that the river and fish are safe. “I want to ask EPA: ‘Are you going to set back and let the polluter frame the issue around the safety of the fish?’ ”

Rita Jack of the Sierra Club appealed to Dow Chemical on a statewide environmental message board: “[P]lease consider donating organic grass-fed hamburgers, with all the fixings, to the food bank, instead of the tainted fish. It would go a long way toward repairing the image that many people have gotten about this.”

“Michigan must stop the contaminated walleye festival,” blogged environmental writer Dave Dempsey. “[T]he State of Michigan has an affirmative duty to halt this attack on public health. If the tourney goes ahead, the state has a duty to file a reckless endangerment charge.”

DEQ spokesman Bob McCann said that the options for his agency are limited.

“All we can do is provide information and recommend that people understand the risks.”

Kory Groetsch, a MDCH toxicologist, said there is no certainty that walleye festival participants will have access to information about the risks posed by contamination of the river and the fish.

“We have some new fliers and we hope to have them up there with the folks who are putting it on,“ but he added: “We’ve never had any collaboration with them helping hand them out.”

Groetsch said that some in the Freeland area make light of dioxin exposure.

“It’s not a situation where you get exposed today and tomorrow you have to run to the hospital. Some folks just can’t get beyond that. They say that there is no proof the dioxin has health effects. But we have never had a study done in this area that would look for health outcomes.”