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waste dumping leads to fish deformities |
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| His
name is Gerald Nicks and he lives in Goodland. He's a Sarasota
native and has been a commercial fisherman on Florida's Gulf Coast all
of his life and he thinks he has the answer to something that's been
bothering me for about 15 years. His experience spans 62 years, so I
figured I'd listen to what he had to say. In the mid-1980s, we discovered, by checking out a spot a Loggerghead turtle was over, a chunk of structure on the bottom, about 12 miles out west of Marco in about 42 feet of water. It wasn't large, but boy did it produce fish. Especially big mangrove snapper and gag grouper. It was sure fire fishing in the fall and winter months, so we fished it sparingly and didn't share our find with anyone. This went on for years until the winter of 1992 or 1993 when the mangrove snapper we were catching had large indented lesions on them and were very empty-feeling, not at all firm and fat. This went on for weeks and we told our clients not to keep or eat them as we didn't know what was wrong. No agency we contacted seemed interested or was any help and soon afterward that structure was gone. Vanished. So the problem was gone as well and I haven't seen anything like it since. Now Gerald Nicks thinks he knows what that was. He says it's similar to what happened to him and his brother in 1947 off the coast of Clearwater in 60 feet of water while hand-lining for grouper. They snagged a drum with their grapple hook and when they got it to the surface, a very smelly greenish liquid came pouring out of the ruptured drum that Gerald says smelled like the chemical gas he smelled while he was in the army in WWII. The side of the drum was marked U.S. government. He went to the local nabobs to report what he saw but, typically, no one cared or did squat. He went to McDill Air Force Base in Tampa and talked to a guy named Johnson who knew about chemical dumping but said he didn't think, but wasn't sure, that the government dumped any chemical waste that close to shore. After that drum that Gerald ruptured fell back into the Gulf, in the weeks that followed he observed dead fish around the area for a while until the current carried the destroyed drum away. Gerald supplied me with documented proof of mass dumping of chemical weapons waste by the U.S. government off our shores. The Intrafish Daily Press states that the army admits it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea along with 400,000 chemical bombs and 500 tons of radioactive waste. This stuff was dumped off the coast of at least 11 states, six on the east coast, two on the Gulf coast, and off California, Hawaii and Alaska. What brought this all to a head was an incident that happened off the New Jersey coast in 2004. A clam dredging operation brought up an old World War I artillery shell that was filled with a black, tar-like substance when the bomb disposal unit from Dover Air Force Base was dispatched to neutralize it. Three bomb disposal techs were hospitalized with large pus-filled blisters on their hands and arms from handling it. The stuff was mustard gas in solid form. There is much, much more to this story than we have space for here, but log on to: www.intrafish.no (subject: U.S. Chemical Weapons Foul Seas) for more on this topic published March 11, 2005. See ya! Retired fishing Capt. Fred Lifton has been fishing Marco Island waters for more than 32 years. He welcomes your fishing questions, comments and suggestions at 394-7445, or by fax at 394-8353. |
