Settlement reached in lawsuit tied to LI Sound lobster deaths

FARMINGDALE, N.Y. --A group of Long Island Sound lobstermen announced Tuesday they have settled a lawsuit that claimed a pesticide used in 1999 to prevent an outbreak of West Nile virus may have contributed to a devastating die-off of the popular crustaceans in the waters that separate Long Island and Connecticut.

The die-off rattled the industry, sending 75 percent of full-time lobstermen in Long Island Sound out of the trade. Lobster catches in the Sound have dropped to less than 1 million pounds a year, compared with 6 million pounds in the late 1990s.

"This settlement is a victory for the hundreds of lobster fishermen in New York and Connecticut who lost their vocation and way of life with the destruction of the 200-year-old Long Island Sound lobster fishery," Gladstone Jones, a New Orleans-based attorney who represented the lobstermen, said in a statement issued late Tuesday.

Lawsuits filed in 2000 in U.S. District Court in Central Islip targeted the manufacturers of chemicals that were sprayed in and around the New York metropolitan area to combat the perceived threat of the West Nile virus outbreak.

Suits against two of the companies were settled in 2004; Tuesday's announcement ends the final pending case.

In the suit settled Tuesday, the chemical company Cheminova agreed to pay $12.5 million to the lobstermen, subject to a fairness hearing in federal court, Jones said. The settlement is in addition to the $3.75 million that was paid in the 2004 agreements with Clarke Mosquito Control Products Inc. and Agrevo Environmental Health Inc., Jones said.

He said he believed the settlement would be approved by the court. The money would be divided among several hundred commercial lobstermen.

Jones also said $100,000 of the settlement will be donated to the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine to research the Long Island Sound lobster fishery.

The lobstermen claimed Cheminova allowed Fyfanon, a brand name for malathion, to be used with an outdated label on its 55-gallon drums. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in 1994 the label needed a warning that the spray should not be used "around bodies of water where fish or shellfish are grown and/or harvested commercially," according to the lawsuit.

But the EPA delayed final approval of the label change a number of times between 1994 and 1999. The labels that included the warning did not appear until a few weeks after lobsters began to die, the suit contended.

Cheminova, located in Wayne, N.J., argued the EPA never gave it a "specific, immediate starting date for use of the new label," according to papers filed by the company's Manhattan attorney. In the settlement, the company admitted no wrongdoing. Neither attorney Christopher Kelly nor a spokesman for the company in New Jersey immediately returned telephone calls seeking comment Tuesday.

A debate has raged in the years since the die-off over the role the pesticide spraying played. Researchers in 2004 reported that pesticides were not a major factor and instead said the deaths were caused by several factors, including warmer-than-usual water, low oxygen levels, unhealthy levels of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide and infectious diseases.

Some scientists also concluded that pesticides did not reach the Sound at concentrations lethal to lobsters. They conceded that pesticide levels in the water may have been enough to cause some nonlethal sickness.

Researchers said lobsters can become more vulnerable to parasites and bacteria if average water temperature increases just 1 degree and oxygen levels drop. Phosphates and nitrogen, from run-off in populated areas, can reduce oxygen.

Other events, such as the effects of hurricanes Floyd and Dennis, also could have contributed to the die-off.

West Nile virus, which is spread by mosquitoes, was virtually unknown in the United States until New York City was stricken in a summer outbreak in 1999, when 62 people were infected and seven died. Most people who get it see mild flulike symptoms or no symptoms, but it can cause encephalitis, a potentially fatal swelling of the brain.