On the Trail of the Alaskan Oil Spill : Part 2

by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

(Page 2 of 2)

Flying the Sea Route

Unlike Duzenack, who spent nearly all his time in Valdez, Seattle-based investigator Debra DeVlieger traveled from one Alaskan fishing village to another in 1989 to conduct normal one- and two-day inspections at one processing plant after another. She spends at least two weeks in Alaska every summer, but last year was there for eight.

In addition to Valdez, DeVlieger's 1989 itinerary included stops at Cordova, Dillingham, Clark's Slough, Kenai, Ekuk, Ninilchuk, and a host of other places, some more than once. Some of the towns are not even on standard road maps. Indeed, most have no permanent roads and the only way to get there is by air.

I go in anything that flies, DeVlieger claims. Sometimes that means regularly scheduled flights aboard four- and six-seater airplanes, but more often she has to charter her own. Moreover, some villages DeVlieger visits have no runways. Float planes are great, she says, adding: There's a lot more water than land where I go in Alaska.

Occasionally, flying in Alaska can get scary. Flights are often delayed or cancelled due to bad weather or low ceilings, making travel schedules meaningless. Once when flying into Clark's Slough on Alaska's west coast, DeVlieger's plane landed short of the dirt runway, shearing off its landing gear. The plane continued down the dirt strip on its belly and hit an embankment, tearing apart a wing tip and rupturing both fuel tanks. DeVlieger escaped unhurt, conducted her inspection, and left at 10 o'clock the next evening by fishing boat.

She arrived at Dillingham across Bristol Bay, her next stop, at 1 o'clock in the morning. Luckily, the town's only hotel had a vacancy. DeVlieger often has to scramble at the last minute for sleeping accommodations. Sometimes she winds up in bunkhouses maintained by seafood processors for their work crews, a pretty rough and rowdy crowd. You learn to travel light and make arrangements as you can, DeVlieger says of her life on the road in Alaska. Beyond inspecting fish tenders and their load, FDA compliance officers and investigators like Duzenack and DeVlieger also look carefully at processing plants and their equipment. They scrutinize how the plant personnel handle and process fish, and observe employee cleanliness and other work practices.

Sniffing for Oil

Such inspections, the normal fare of seafood investigators in Alaska and elsewhere in the United States, call for observational skills and knowledge of FDA regulations. But spotting signs of oil contamination, the major focus of the 1989 inspections in Alaska, requires using one's senses of sight, smell, touch and sometimes taste, says Richard Throm, FDA's leading trainer in organoleptic techniques.

Organoleptic methods are a subjective analysis, Throm says. You have to learn to eliminate the biases most people associate with fishery products. Good fish don't smell bad. A well-trained nose can correctly detect low levels of oil contamination more than 90 percent of the time.

Throm's job in Alaska in 1989 was to train the many federal, state and industry inspectors assigned to fishing and seafood processing operations. Nearly all were already experienced investigators, but many usually investigated meat and poultry plants or restaurants, not seafood. Others who sometimes examined seafood were rusty and needed their organoleptic skills refreshed. And most had little or no experience with oil spills.

Throm, who usually goes to Alaska once or twice a summer, went there eight times in 1989. He and his staff gave 12 full-day training sessions in Alaska, plus one in Seattle. At each, Throm had his pupils examine various fish, fishing equipment, and crude oils to show how each changed over time and place following a spill. He also contaminated live fish with varying amounts of crude oil so trainees could see, feel and smell contaminated fish.

The 13 sessions drew from 15 to 40 people each, 330 in all, Throm says. Some were held in Anchorage, but most were in Valdez and other small fishing villages. The latter were designed for individual fishermen, tender operators, and seafood processors rather than federal and state inspectors.

We wanted to give people we trained a greater confidence in their ability to detect oil-contaminated fish, Throm explains. They didn't know what to expect at first, but some became quite good at detecting low levels of contamination. We felt we were helping Alaska prevent contaminated fish from reaching consumers.

That was also the goal of much FDA work outside Alaska in 1989. The agency's Seattle laboratory, for example, added $45,000 worth of new scientific equipment to test fish and shellfish sent from ADEC's Palmer lab. We needed to be able to confirm organoleptic and chemical analyses done in Alaska, says John Wiskerchen, director of FDA's Seattle lab.

Using methods developed by the nearby National Marine Fisheries Service laboratory in Seattle, FDA and other scientists found few fish with any more than minute traces of oil-derived hydrocarbon chemicals in their tissues in 1989. All contaminated fish that were found had been caught by subsistence, rather than commercial, fishermen, ADEC's Donegan says.

In addition to obviously contaminated waters being closed to commercial fishing, the main reason so few fish were found to be contaminated was that most fish quickly break down any ingested oil in their gallbladders and excrete the resulting chemicals from their bodies, says Usha Varanasi, director of NMFS's Seattle lab.

Nevertheless, FDA, NMFS, and other scientists are concerned that lingering oil in Prince William Sound will pose a future threat to fish and, eventually, consumers. We are developing the baseline data we will need to test for bioaccumulation of oil-derived hydrocarbons in fish tissues in 1990 and subsequent years, FDA's Wiskerchen says.

Shellfish Contamination

Of greater immediate concern is oil contamination levels in crabs, shrimp, mussels, clams, and other shellfish. Unlike fish, most shellfish are sedentary, rarely moving far or fast. Thus, they are more susceptible to contamination. More importantly, they do not break down or excrete any oil they ingest the way fish do, Varanasi says.

NMFS does not yet have complete data on shellfish contamination because the main commercial season began only in December, but preliminary findings show marked elevation in oil levels in mussels and clams taken from highly contaminated waters in Prince William Sound. Of particular concern are the effects on Alaska's subsistence fishermen and their families, many of whom get 80 percent of their diet from seafood.

Based on the preliminary data, an expert panel, created by Alaska's Department of Health and Social Services in 1989 to assess the oil spill's effects on Alaskan natives, advised the state that shellfish taken from obviously contaminated waters should be considered unfit for consumption, says P. Michael Bolger, a toxicologist in FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. Bolger serves as one of two agency representatives on the panel.

Meanwhile, FDA laboratories are testing different screening methods for examining fish and shellfish for oil contamination, says Gregory Diachenko, chief of the food formulation branch in the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. We want to be able to confirm organoleptic, chemical and other analytical results, Diachenko says.

For now, though, the FDA scientists and investigators who helped Alaska respond to the 1989 oil spill have good feelings about their role in its clean up. It was a pretty incredible summer, DeVlieger says. Duzenack agrees, adding: It was a great experience and I was glad to be a part of an important event.

As for the future, most sense a need for continuing FDA vigilance. I expect 1990 to be more of a normal year for us, Seattle district director Lowell says. But we will be watching to make sure there is nothing we don't know about.

That spirit is also voiced by DeVlieger. Speaking for herself and other FDA inspectors, she says: The oil spill is not over for us by any means.

About the Author

www.fda.gov
FDA is A United States government body that oversees medical devices, including contact lenses, intraocular lenses, excimer lasers and eyedrops. In the US, these products must be approved by the FDA before they can be marketed.