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Crater Lake, other national parks contaminated, study finds
Posted by Scott Learn and Michael Milstein,
Terry Richard/The Oregonian

Crater Lake’s Wizard Island.The snow-covered trees around Crater Lake National Park may be miles from civilization, but they still contain industrial PCBs, the banned pesticide DDT and at least two currently used pesticides.

The fish in Golden Lake at Mount Rainier National Park carry relatively high levels of toxic flame retardants.

And the DDT measured in fish at Montana’s Glacier National Park is higher than levels found in fish studies from Africa, even though the United States phased out DDT production in 1972 and Africa still uses it for mosquito control.

Those findings come from a six-year study of airborne contamination in 20 Western national parks and monuments released this week. Yosemite and Kings Canyon, in California; and Rocky Mountain, in Colorado, are also cited as having surprising levels of pollution.

With the exception of mercury in some fish, the study — conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Oregon State University — didn’t find contaminants at levels likely to harm campers, anglers and hikers.

But it illustrates the surprisingly broad reach of industrial and agricultural chemicals, both banned and current. And, contrary to the scientists’ expectations, it found that most of the pollution was coming from cities and farms relatively near the parks, not floating on the jet stream from power plants and manufacturing sites in China or elsewhere overseas.

“The message here is that the world’s a really small place,” said Carl Schreck, a professor at Oregon State University who collected and examined fish for the study. “If you mess up your bed you have to sleep in it, that’s the bottom line.”

He and other researchers “wore out a lot of soles on a lot of boots” catching fish from remote lakes in national parks in Washington, Alaska, California and the Rocky Mountains to examine them for evidence of contamination.

Some of the fish — mainly those from the Rockies and one from Mount Rainier — had signs of being both male and female, a condition that has been associated with pesticides, organophosphates and other chemicals known to disrupt the endocrine system.

A few fish had levels of contaminants high enough to make Schreck wonder about the health of other animals that might eat them, but in general he sees little danger to people. The levels of pollutants were generally low, he said.

“What we don’t want to do is be alarmist,” he said.

Researchers were not shocked that the parks were affected by many of the same pollutants affecting the rest of the world. But “even in these remote areas, we had some levels of contamination, that’s the interesting thing,” said Michael Kent, an Oregon State professor who also worked on the fish research.

In addition to Rainier and Glacier, the researchers gathered extra data on Olympic National Park in Washington and five parks in California, Colorado and the Arctic. They collected plants and fish and looked for the presence of herbicides, insecticides, industrial chemicals such as PCBs, mercury — mainly from power plants — and other toxics from the burning of forests and fossil fuels such as gasoline.

The study, released this week, was not the first to emerge from the Western Airborne Contamination Project, completed last year.

In May 2006, chemists announced that winter snow falling on Mount Rainier and other high-elevation parks in the Western states is contaminated with minute amounts of agricultural pesticides. Researchers found a correlation between regional farm practices and contaminated snow at Mount Rainier and three national parks in California and Montana.

In the more recent study, scientists found higher concentrations of pollutants and mercury in vegetation at Mount Rainier than in other parks. Scientists also discovered high levels of flame retardants in one of two lakes sampled there. The concentrations of mercury found in two of the park’s lakes were higher than scientists believe is healthy for birds, such as kingfishers. Also, mercury levels found in some fish were too high for people to safely eat them.

University of Washington atmospheric researcher Daniel Jaffe said scientists previously thought banning pesticides such as DDT and dieldrin would reduce the presence of chemicals in the environment.

“We replaced them with pesticides with much shorter lifetimes in the environment,” Jaffe said. “But in places like the Central Valley of California, we are applying many, many tons of these every year… We now know they can move substantial distances.”

A parks advocacy group called the federal report “a wake-up call” that should mobilize Congress to take a tougher stance on air pollution.

“We can take steps to reduce mercury emissions from power plants, steps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming,” said Will Hammerquist with the National Parks Conservation Association.

EPA officials said the $6 million study is the most comprehensive to date on the distribution and concentration of contaminants outside developed areas.
– Scott Learn; scottlearn@news.oregonian.com
– Michael Milstein; michaelmilstein@news.oregonian.com

The Associated Press contributed to this story.