Fishing about and about fishing
POLLUTION KILLS. BEWARE OF CANCER !
A WARNING FROM ISRAEL
By: Menakhem Ben-Yami
First published in the August 2001 edition of "SAMUDRA".
What follows is a short and a rather painful report from Israel. Although it carries a strictly local character, it should serve as a warning to fisherfolk and other people who are working in polluted harbours, rivers, and estuaries also elsewhere. All the more that fisherfolk's health and safety problems receive relatively little public attention. Fishery casualties find themselves in a good company of those of road accidents. Like weather, nobody's doing anything about them. Unlike the weather, hardly anybody is talking about them. There may be many heavily polluted fishing harbours throughout the world. Better start looking at the incidence of cancer before it's too late.
In Israel, industrial and municipal polluters are now accused of causing a cancer epidemic among fishermen and other workers of Kishon Fishing Harbour, Israel. On June 14, 2001, thirty-one fishermen, and fishermen's widows and orphans submitted a multi-million dollar civil lawsuit to a Haifa Court. They accuse 6 major petro-chemical and chemical plants, including the Haifa Refinery, a fertilizers maker Haifa Chemicals Ltd., and a municipal effluent purification plant for knowingly polluting during at least two-and-a-half decades the Kishon River, for many years biologically dead. The lawsuit names also some government agencies for neglecting enforcement of existing anti-pollution laws and regulations and neglecting to warn the fishermen and other workers in the Kishon Fishing Harbour of the risk of exposure to its waters and fumes. Since 2001 the number of the affected fishermen has increased to 45 in 2004, when the court hearings are about to start.
The lawyer acting on behalf of the fishermen prepared, with the help of a multi-disciplinary team of experts, a two-volume lawsuit that describes the man-made fishing harbour at the Kishon River estuary as a hydrological trap for the pollutants, and the Kishon River itself, or what's left of it, as a most polluted stream in Israel and one of the most polluted in the world. The lawsuit cites the plants' effluents as containing an array of highly concentrated cancerogenous heavy metals and organic compounds, some volatile. Some 30,000-75,000 cu.m of the industrial and municipal effluents have been flowing daily into the lower Kishon during the two-and-a-half decades since the mid 1970s.
According to the epidemiological opinion included in the lawsuit, there's a statistically significant connection between the high cancer incidence among the Kishon based fishermene, which several times higher than among the population at large) and the conditions of work and of exposure to carcinogens of the fishermen and other workers in the Kishon Fishing Harbour and this influx of pollutants. Another medical opinion, of an environmental medicine specialist, is placing at a very high probability level the association between the various types of cancer diagnosed and the pollutants present in the harbour's waters and sediment. The synergetic effect of the various mixtures and chemical compounds that might have been created by the separate pollutants coming together in the extremely acidic environment is very hard to assess in view of the lack of focused research.
Mr. E.Fichman, the fishermen's lawyer, told a press conference that, while he was giving the last touches to the lawsuit, 4 more fishermen were diagnosed to have cancer and will later be added to the list of plaintiffs. "Each one here is walking with a time-bomb - said one fisherman - We just don't know how soon they're going to kill us". "Sometimes I wish we were dolphins - said another - at least we would be getting plenty of publicity and public sympathy".
Among the plaintiffs are 4 members of the crew of a dredge, employed every couple of years, for a fortnight or so each time, to deepen the harbour and to clear its entrance to the Kishon estuary from silt. This work required considerable contact with the heavily polluted sediment. Nobody ever warned them of any risk to their health. Today, however, 3 of them already are dead of cancer, while the last one is ill with it.
The Kishon fishermen woke up, after a military commission of inquiry, headed by a former president of Israel's Supreme Court, had started investigating the alarmingly high rate of cancer among former naval commandos. The one common reason for this epidemic was that they all exercised in the Kishon estuary, swimming and diving in its polluted waters. Capt. Moshe Raba, a retired fishing skipper, who until recently served as the president of Kishon fishermen's union, found out that there's been hardly any cancer-associated mortality among the fishermen in other Israel's harbours, Ashdod, Yaffo, and Acre, while almost every single Kishon fisherman who died during the last 20 years oe so had died of cancer. Than he found the others ill with cancer, and others who felt ill, but shunned medical attention, and had to be persuaded to seek medical assistance and undergo tests, only to by found ill with cancer.
The fact that Kishon is heavily polluted with cancerogenous substances was well known, first, to the polluters themselves, then to the laboratories who performed occasional studies, to the Water Commissioner's office whose legal duty was to deny water supply to polluting industries, to the Ministries of Health and of Environment, to the inter-municipal association for environment, as well as to several other institutions and green organizations. None of the above had done anything during all those years to warn the fishermen and other workers in the Kishon Harbour of the risk involved with their working environment in general, and with physical contact with Kishon's polluted air, water, and sediment in particular. All worries expressed had to do with aquatic life, loss of Kishon River's aesthetic values, and the danger of having fish in the Haifa Bay polluted and thus unfit for human consumption.
Israel has developed very fast since its establishment over 50 years ago. Until the public opinion and government's agencies became aware of the dangers of environmental pollution and habitat destruction, plenty of damage had occurred. The translation of this awareness into what can be done and what cannot be done is by no means complete. The plaintiff fishermen and their legal team hope that the court case would not result just in the compensations they may win, but also that it'll contribute to the struggle developing in Israel and many other countries against industrial and other development that ignores people's health.
[For more info: mailto:benyami@actcom.net.il.]
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