Fish consumption rate is unclear

Published 5:17 pm Wednesday, July 24, 2013

I think Billy Frank’s column in My Turn (“Time to move forward on fish consumption rate”, Auburn Reporter, July 7) is inappropriate to be published in your paper. Not because it uses inappropriate language or anything like that, but because it presents information that the general public cannot understand.

Mr. Frank did not describe what the fish consumption rate is, and only a person who has been deeply involved in water pollution activities would know that. The rest of us would be clueless.

I spent over two hours going through the Washington Department of Ecology site and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality site, and now I think I know what the phrase “fish consumption rate” means. (I am not sure, because neither site ever directly defined it. I think it is the amount of seafood from local waters that a person can eat each day without getting a dangerous amount of pollution from the seafood. It is a measure of the amount of pollutants in the water. A higher number means that a person can eat more fish without danger, which means that the waters are less polluted. If this understanding is wrong, someone please correct me.

After looking over the above sites, I tend to agree with Mr. Frank that the Washington Department of Ecology has been kowtowing to industry (to let industrial polluters avoid cleaning up their discharges) far too long, and the information Ecology needs to set a new and higher fish consumption rate is readily available.

Get on with it, Ecology. You were hired to protect us.

– Pete Beaupain