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Food

EPA Summoned to Remind People Not to Eat Fish From Notoriously Nasty Brooklyn Canal

Probably not the best idea to eat anything that's been hanging out in the sludgy 'black mayonnaise' on the bottom of the Gowanus Canal.
EPA Summoned to Remind People Not to Eat Fish From Notoriously Nasty Brooklyn Canal
Photo via Flickr user listenmissy

A couple of years ago, Williamsburg-based retailer Brooklyn Industries had a T-shirt with a mutant one-eyed mermaid, posing seductively in a puddle of slime. “EAST RIVER,” it said in wonky-looking letters, right above a fish skeleton. No one should ever rely on graphic tees for scientific accuracy, but come on—if any disgusting Brooklyn body of water could produce irregular sealife, it’s the Gowanus Canal. The historically polluted EPA Superfund site is so contaminated that residents have asked for warning signs, reminding people not to eat anything they pull out of its nasty-ass depths.

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Despite the pollutants, microbes, and regular presence of raw sewage, the Canal is a regular spot for fishermen. Blue crabs, white perch, striped bass, and bluefish can be caught there, but the Gowanus Community Advisory Group (CAG) wants the EPA to again warn everyone not to put ANY OF THOSE THINGS into their mouths. According to the Brooklyn Paper, federal and state agencies collaborated to design the warning signs, and they will be approved by the CAG before being submitted to the EPA.

“We ask that such warnings be placed in reasonably likely fishing locations and at each public-access location where people can easily make physical contact with the canal,” a spokesperson for the CAG said. The signs will be written in both English and Spanish and will list more than a dozen fish and shellfish that theoretically could come out of the Canal, but will also have a very clear warning that those organisms might be tainted by a long list of chemicals and contaminants.

In its most recent Public Health Assessment, the New York State Department of Health listed eight kinds of marine life that anglers might find, along with guidelines for human consumption. “DO NOT EAT,” the agency wrote about American eels, gizzard shad, and white perch. Women under 50 and children under 15 were advised not to eat anything that might’ve been swimming above the sludgy “black mayonnaise” on the bottom of the canal. Woman above 50 and men over the age of 15 are currently instructed not to eat these not-at-all awful fish more than four times per month.

“Don’t eat the soft ‘green stuff’ found in the body section of crabs and lobsters because cadmium, PCBs and other contaminants concentrate there,” the Department of Health warns. “As contaminants are transferred to cooking liquid, you should also discard crab or lobster cooking liquid.” (Paragraphs like that make us question why you’d even touch any of these creatures with a long stick, let alone your tongue).

The cleanup and dredging of the canal is already behind schedule, which means that those DO NOT EAT warnings might be on the banks until way beyond the project’s projected completion date. On the bright side, that gives us a couple more years to find those mutant mermaids.