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Mississippi Water-Quality Tests Return With Ambiguous Results

Posted on: Sunday, 30 October 2005, 15:00 CST

By Mike Keller, The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss.

Oct. 27--Early government tests show Gulf waters are clean enough for people to go swimming and eat some seafood, but submerged storm debris means people should still stay away, according to officials.

"We didn't have any identifiable releases of large amounts of industrial contamination," said Phil Bass, spokesman for the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality. "But I also want to remind everybody that we basically have not had any rainfall since Hurricane Katrina and that we will likely see some spikes of contamination when we begin to get some normal rainfall back here."

The first group of water-quality tests came back showing certain types of bacteria below government limits for recreation, but officials cautioned it is too soon to tell whether seafood had been dangerously contaminated.

"All 20 monitoring stations tested showed at this time that the water was appropriate for what is referred to as primary contact recreation," said Ben Grumbles, spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency. "While this is encouraging for recreational uses, this data should not be used to assess the safety of consuming raw or undercooked molluscan shellfish such as oysters."

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration completed its first round of chemical tests on seafood from Mobile Bay to Louisiana waters.

Steve Murawski, an NOAA spokesman, said that contaminants are "far below" government limits in the 23 shrimp samples they analyzed. He said that NOAA scientists would continue to check seafood until they are confident that no contaminants are creeping into coastal waters and seafood.

"We'll be monitoring because some of the contaminants may take a while to work their way out into the ocean environment," he said.

Government researchers monitoring the health of Gulf waters have been looking closely for chemicals called brominated fire retardants, which are indicators of chemicals washing off of urban areas.

In what seemed to be an attempt to quell potential fears of seafood consumers, Don Kraemer, a spokesman for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the agency responsible for monitoring the safety of commercial seafood, said there were two reasons not to be worried.

"One, because the waters which were impacted from the hurricane remain closed to the harvest of oysters and other molluscan shellfish," he said. "On the other side, of crab, shrimp and fin fish, none of the analytical results to date show contamination at or above levels of concern of any of the contaminants that have been tested."

MDEQ's Bass added: "We're happy to report that some of our oysters and even some of our shrimping is back in operation."

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Copyright (c) 2005, The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss.

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Source: The Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.)

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