Alert on tainted Sudbury

Mercury levels prompt outreach

Fishermen trying their luck on the Sudbury River in Wayland, where an EPA report last year cited mercury contamination. (Wendy Maeda / Globe Staff / File 2006)

Regional planners are launching an ambitious public education project to warn area residents, including low-income immigrant fishermen and their families, that the Sudbury River is contaminated with mercury.

The MetroWest Growth Management Committee has received a $148,000 grant from the MetroWest Community Health Care Foundation, a Framingham-based independent philanthropic agency, to conduct a wide-ranging assessment to determine who may be at risk of eating contaminated fish.

The committee operates under the authority of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, which covers 101 cities and towns across Eastern Massachusetts. Committee director Donna Jacobs said anecdotal reports suggest that most of the anglers along the river - which passes through Ashland, Framingham, Southborough, Sudbury, and Wayland - are not native English speakers and are fishing for food.

Some of the grant money will be used to hire an environmental consultant, who may turn to translators fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Russian to speak with fishermen about the best way to educate their ethnic groups about the dangers, said Jacobs.

"Our concern is: How do we reach these groups?" she said. "We also need to reach the medical community and let them know their patients - and their children - could be eating mercury-contaminated fish."

There are multilingual "no fishing" signs posted at certain spots along the river, but "people ignore signs when they're hungry," said Jacobs.

It's not clear how many people are regularly fishing in the Sudbury River. The study is designed to generate the first accurate numbers about how widespread the activity is, she said.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has determined that unsafe levels of mercury in the water come from the former Nyanza textile dye factory in Ashland, which became a federal Superfund site in 1983.

EPA studies estimate that various factories operating on the 32-acre property buried nearly 50,000 tons of chemical sludge, and released 100,000 pounds of mercury into the Sudbury River during the 50-plus years before the state closed the site in 1978.

The site was capped in the early 1990s and wetlands nearby were dredged, but over the years contamination was found to have seeped through ground-water supplies underneath a circle of about 40 buildings in the center of town.

Jacobs described the Nyanza pollution as "the biggest environmental issue faced by MetroWest."

"It's crucial we get our hands around it," she said.

For years, the contamination was thought to be limited to Ashland, but the EPA reported last year that Nyanza mercury contamination had reached at least as far at the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Wayland and Sudbury. The EPA has spent $45 million on cleanup efforts in Ashland, and just last year installed equipment in the basements of 43 homes to remove potentially poisonous vapors coming through the soil.

The new river-use grant will also be used to study risks to hikers and walkers who may tread on dry river beds, not realizing they could track mercury-laced sediment back to their homes, said Jacobs.

"Our concern is not only people eating the fish. There are other uses of the river that can pose a hazard to people," Jacobs said.

John Petrin, Ashland's town manager, will serve as chairman of a project steering committee, which will include officials from communities along the Sudbury and such area organizations as South Middlesex Opportunity Council and MetroWest Medical Center. The plan is to hold a series of public meetings to educate residents, Jacobs said.

"It's an important project," Petrin said. "Nyanza has been with us a long time and this study is the next logical step; we need to take steps to inform people in regard to the dangers."

The information gathered by the grant project will be incorporated into the EPA's updated cleanup strategy for the area, which is scheduled to be finalized late this year.

Erica Noonan can be reached at enoonan@globe.com.