In 1966, workers at a chemical plant in Hopewell began secretly and illegally dumping a toxic pesticide into the James River.
That pesticide, Kepone, began drifting downstream, concentrating mostly in an especially turbid stretch from the mouth of the Chickahominy River to Fort Eustis. It inundated the surface sediment and the flesh of popular food fish and the valuable oysters that filter-feed on the river bottom.
Allied Chemical Corp. continued to poison the James for years, until Life Sciences Products took over production in 1974, operating out of an abandoned gas station. Production stopped only after factory workers began showing serious neurological damage, or what workers called the “Kepone Shakes.”
In July 1975, the state ordered the factory to shut down. In time, Kepone production was banned worldwide.
But the damage to the James River and its ecosystem was already done.
The governor closed the entire river and its tributaries to fishing to protect public health. It was an economic disaster for watermen; some fishing bans lasted nearly 14 years.
Estimates were that it could take as little as 10 years or as much as 100 for nature to purge Kepone from the James.
Turns out, it’s closer to 45.
A new analysis by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science found that Kepone levels in fish samples have dropped “exponentially.” So much so that the pesticide could be undetectable, or nearly so, in all samples by 2020 or 2025.
Not that Kepone isn’t still in fish — nearly two-thirds of the striped bass and white perch that researchers analyzed still had traces in their tissues. But none were above the federal “action level” for human food.
And Kepone is still in the sediment — it’s just no longer sitting right on the surface, bioavailable to oysters and fish, but buried in the mud. And every rainstorm and hurricane that washes new sediment into the waterway buries it even deeper.
“The good news out of all this is that it’s decreasing,” said Michael Unger, an associate professor at VIMS who co-authored a report on their study.
But that good news is tempered, he said.
“This is a contamination issue that happened 40 years ago, but we’re still measuring it in some of the fish samples,” said Unger. “So it’s a long-term process for these concentrations to come down.”
Silver linings
Allied Chemical was fined $13.24 million in 1977 by a U.S. District Court judge for the illegal dumping — at the time, the largest fine ever under the Clean Water Act. But, under a settlement agreement, $8 million of that went to create the Virginia Environmental Endowment.
“The Kepone incident was really on par with the Cuyahoga River in Ohio catching on fire,” said VEE Executive Director Joseph Maroon.
In 1969, the Cuyahoga in Cleveland was so polluted that sparks from a passing train ignited oily debris on its surface. It wasn’t the first time the river caught fire, but that incident helped spur Congress to pass the National Environmental Protection Act, which led to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“The country was really just beginning to be awakened by environmental consciousness,” Maroon said. “And out of the Kepone tragedy, the silver lining was the establishment of the VEE.”
Since then, the endowment has spent $29 million to fund almost 1,400 environmental grants, he said. It was the VEE that suggested VIMS check on Kepone levels in the James last year as a fitting way to mark the 40th anniversary of its founding. The endowment funded the effort.
Numerous Kepone surveys have been made in the river over the years. VIMS monitored annually from 1975 to 2000, then a handful of times afterward once contamination levels declined. In all, they’ve tested 13,000 fish in the James and Chickahominy.
But there hasn’t been a survey since 2009, in part because of state budget cuts but also because the contamination had diminished. Still, no one knew where the contamination levels stood today.
By the numbers
For this new survey, VIMS worked with the Virginia Marine Resources Commission and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to gather fish samples.
VMRC provided 38 striped bass and DEQ 47 white perch, all collected last spring in areas of the James that once showed high Kepone concentrations — around the mouth of the Chickahominy and Hopewell. Some also were collected upriver around Richmond.
VIMS also tested cod fillets purchased from a local market as a control group. Cod isn’t a local species and so shouldn’t — and didn’t — show residual Kepone in its tissue.
The analysis was done in the same manner as earlier surveys for consistency’s sake, using parts of the fish that anglers would eat.
And it showed that all samples were well below the action level of 0.3 parts per million set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Of the 38 striped bass, 11 samples were even below the detection limit of 0.01 parts per million. Of the 47 white perch, 19 samples were below.
The rest of the striped bass samples showed concentrations between 0.02 and 0.03 parts per million. The white perch, between 0.015 and 0.02 parts per million.
“The fish haven’t been above action level for years,” said Unger. “So the human risk and concern really is diminished over what it was in the early ’80s, for instance. … I would have no concern over occasionally eating fish from the James River in terms of Kepone exposure.”
‘A very, very long time’
Like the infamous pesticide DDT, Kepone is a chlorinated hydrocarbon. This means they’re notoriously persistent in the ecosystem — especially in sediment — and one reason they were phased out in the ’70s.
“There’s some research that’s been coming out recently that shows there are some mechanisms for it to degrade, but it degrades very slowly,” said Unger. “So it’s probably going to be in those sediments for a very, very long time. I’m thinking more along the lines of hundreds of years.”
The risk of a recontaminating the James by limited dredging or limited excavation projects such as the overhead power lines that Dominion Energy proposes across the river from Surry to James City County are basically nonexistent, he said.
Kepone is not only buried in the sediment but unevenly distributed. Core samples taken before excavation would first show if it was present, and in what amount.
“So dredging and doing things like putting in pilings or stanchions or something like that, it’s not going to contaminate the surface sediments in the river like it was back in the ’70s or ’80s,” said Unger. “That’s not going to happen. There may be some localized release of Kepone, localized to the dredging that’s occurring. But it’s not going to recontaminate the entire food chain in the James River.”
While Kepone is exiting the food chain, Unger cautions against complacency.
“Long-term monitoring’s important, not just for Kepone, but for other things as well,” said Unger. “Probably about five years down the road, it would be worthwhile to go back and monitor again to see if levels are still declining as predicted.”
The problem? Funding for monitoring has gotten worse and monitoring technology has gotten, in a weird way, too good.
After the Kepone contamination was discovered, said Unger, VIMS developed a Toxics Monitoring Program with some innovative methods to analyze fish samples for unknowns, without targeting any specific contaminant.
“And that actually led to the discovery of high concentrations of certain chemical compounds,” said Unger. “Things like PCBs, brominade fire retardants and some other things.”
PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, were widely used as coolant and insulating fluids before they were deemed carcinogenic and an environmental hazard. The Virginia Department of Health now considers PCBs a greater public health risk from fish consumption than Kepone.
But, while new or unknown compounds, chemicals and drugs are still being dumped into waterways in Virginia and elsewhere, Unger says there’s even less effort underway to find them.
“The analytical methods have evolved over time to be much more sensitive and much more specific to particular compounds,” Unger said. “We tend not to look for unknowns. We tend to look for specific things. That’s part of the evolution of the analytical chemistry, as well.
“We also don’t have the funding and the programs anymore as budgets have been reduced for environmental monitoring to fund the expensive instrumentation and doing this exploratory kind of work anymore.”
Learn from history
From 2007 to 2016, state funding to monitor waterways and fish tissue has dropped by nearly half.
DEQ figures show the state spent more than $2.8 million in 2007 on waterway and fish monitoring, and last year more than $1.5 million. That doesn’t include staff salaries, equipment or travel expenses. DEQ is one of the primary monitoring agencies in Virginia.
“State budgets have been reduced over the last several years, and DEQ’s feeling it just like we are at VIMS,” said Unger.
Sandra Mueller, water quality monitoring and assessment program manager at DEQ, says the agency could always use more resources, but with the money it has it’s focusing on the most pressing needs to improve water quality.
It manages an extensive monitoring network across the state for physical, chemical and biological contaminants, she said. It collects fish at 25 to 50 sites each year across the state to analyze for metals and organics. Since 2012, a big focus has been on PCBs.
The agency also relies on surveys of benthic macroinvertebrates — basically, the bugs that live in stream beds and serve as biological red flags for potential contaminants.
“Because they’re really pretty sensitive,” Mueller said. “So if there’s a problem, then we can pick it up pretty easily with a benthic community or a bug community that’s really unhealthy.
“Benthics really give us a good first indicator, in the absence of an extensive monitoring network for every parameter, which is just simply not something that we have the resources for.”
How much would it cost to build another program to monitor for unknowns?
“It wouldn’t be an astronomical amount of money,” said Unger. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars could easily do it.”
That money would go to upgrade some instruments at VIMS and buy some next-generation ones, to fund salaries and collect samples, he said. VIMS, located in Gloucester Point, is affiliated with the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg.
“I think the things we know are bad need to be a priority,” Unger said. “But I think some effort needs to be put forward in the future to look at these new and emerging problems.
“We need to learn from our history. New things keep popping up over time. … Some chemicals get banned and taken off the market. The concentrations come down over time, but new things come along to replace them. If we aren’t staying ahead and looking for these things, then it’s difficult to be proactive.”
Dietrich can be reached by phone at 757-247-7892.
