10-03-2007, 08:45 PM
Today Salt Lake Tribune ran an piece on Utah Lake's PCB problem and our very own TubeDude was their primary local expert. Great job TD, good info !!!!!!
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Tube Dude is a celeb !!!!
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10-03-2007, 10:22 PM
[cool][#0000ff]That's what I get for being a "cat-a-holic". Truth is that I have been tapped before to provide info on Utah Lake, and specifically catfish. Brett Prettyman, the fishing writer for the Outdoors section of the Tribune, had me set up a hook and cook session a couple of years ago. We had a bunch of BFTers launch tubes and toons in search of catfish, and then we did a filleting and frying demo. Photographers shot every step of the process and it generated two articles...one on catching and one on cooking.[/#0000ff]
[#0000ff][/#0000ff] [#0000ff]When Tom Wharton got the assignment to do the writeup on the PCBs and catfish, Brett suggested he contact me. So, he did.[/#0000ff] [#0000ff][/#0000ff] [#0000ff][url "http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_7069172"]LINK TO ARTICLE[/url][/#0000ff] [signature] 
10-03-2007, 11:01 PM
You wouldn't believe how much exposure TubeDude has had over the years. He has had several spots on TV news, Radio Shows and even front pages of Fishing and Hunting News or Western Outdoorsman.(one of those)
I was the recipient of some of his best exposure. He taught me how to fish as a wee lad. We do have several Celebrities on the boards here. Perhaps one day we can all share our individual exposures here.[cool] [signature]
10-03-2007, 11:53 PM
[cool][#0000ff]Be careful about the kind of exposure you are talking about. This is a family type forum. It is not "clothing optional".[/#0000ff]
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10-04-2007, 12:47 AM
[shocked] Oooooops! Sorry!. Hopefully one of the Mods can edit anything if I accidentaly get out of hand.[cool]
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10-04-2007, 04:20 AM
I was going to say, some of the exposure is not G rated. What ever the reason, he,you, friend, etc, deserve the "exposure" and we appreciate you !!!!
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10-04-2007, 07:17 PM
[cool][#0000ff]Thanks, Lloyd, but I didn't write it. I just deal with it.[/#0000ff]
[#0000ff][/#0000ff] ![[Image: 10042007.jpg]](http://extras.sltrib.com/bagley/content/10042007.jpg) [signature]
10-04-2007, 08:44 PM
TD... I read the article.. to me is a breath of fresh air for someone to simply speak honestly.. no political double talk.. :-).. and I have to admit.. this cartoon is funny... [sly]
MacFly [cool] [signature]
10-06-2007, 03:14 AM
I read the artical,
 to say but it is true, industry and towns and home owners alike in last couple hundred years up to today use our water ways, dranage ditches and retention ponds for toxic waist dumping... most of wich is eleagle dumpings today, it is imposible to cantch and put culprits out of busness permintly is im posible... Towns dont want local dumpers prosicuted... they loose a tax base on top of lost jobs... I can only emagine how bad china is, still using lead products in their paints and who knows what other types of toxic waists they could dump in to paint to get rid of it... as I type this the news is braudcasting another kids toy from china is recalled because of lead contamination... just a couple days ago on the rouge river in detroit some one dumped oil in to a ditch wich poured in to the river after the first rain... my lake isnt safe either, any lake with a stream is endangered from back up trucks posing as landscapers who say they are sucking up water when realy they are dumping toxic waist... to say there are companies in this world who possess no ethics.... I looked at the photo, didnt look like you, not unless you got a good tan going on.... ya gotta watch them reporters, they is always sneekin up on a man while is lookin for dinner... [signature]
10-06-2007, 11:48 AM
[cool][#0000ff]Hey Dave, your area is known for being one of the worst in the country for polluted waterways. Too many years of steel mills and other industrial polluters just dumping all of their stuff without regulation. As we are finding out today, some of that stuff will never go away, and it has forever affected our fisheries.[/#0000ff]
[#0000ff][/#0000ff] [#0000ff]Utah Lake is probably our worst problem here in Utah. It got all the dumping from Geneva Steel for several decades. Geneva Steel has long since gone out of business but they left us all a legacy in pollution.[/#0000ff] [#0000ff][/#0000ff] [#0000ff]I was thinking about China the other day myself. With their lack of standards and their disregard for air and water quality they have to have some of the worst problems in the world. Many parts of the country are still beautiful and clean, but in the industrialized cities the hazards are probably terrible.[/#0000ff] [#0000ff][/#0000ff] [#0000ff]Nope. That was not me in the photo. I do not do much bank fishing. But, Utah Lake does have many spots that are popular and productive for anglers without boats or other floatation fishing systems (tubes or toons). Some Utah families have fished Utah Lake and eaten the fish from it for generations. So far there have been no identifiable health problems from anybody eating the fish. So, hopefully it is not as bad as the numbers might make us think it is.[/#0000ff] [signature]
10-07-2007, 02:30 AM
your fore mentioned artical dose says any ailments that come from eating of the fish would have to come from a long time consumption, wich would make one beleive it to be an over endulgance of tainted fish.
a health report came out over the news a couple days ago, It stated that pregnant women should now eat 12 ounces of fish per week... Doctors are concerned that the lack of fish in the diet of child bearing women is leading to under developed brain patterns in iffants. I was looking at the inserpt of the ducks at the end of the artical, It would make one wonder if they are checking spring ducks that have recently consumed materials from down mexico way where their polution laws are far more laxed than ours is here in michigan... or are they testing ducks that retained toxins over their life span in the utah lake regeon, and are the ducks they are testing in the fall actualy resident ducks or are they migritory ducks from north of you... I was just wondering [crazy] seldom where I live to we get the opertunity to shoot a local duck or goose... our locals are gathered as gooslings and transplanted in to regeons where they want more ducks... they have found that the transplanted birds "ducks and geese" return to the area they were transplanted to. when I was a kid we had lots of ducks and geese to hunt, now we see a few hundred on the golf corses and that is about it.... ever since the 1960's our state of michigan has been paid off by other states, countries, and corporations to take and handle contaminated waist... wich is realy scarry in the grand scheem of things... our polititions here have created an ecological time bomb that is going to go off in some bodies life time... and the problem that exist is that we possess 1/4 of the worlds fresh water... I am still pissed off at our past governer millican from back in the 70's who was paid by dow chemical to look the other way when they put all that fire retardant in to cattle feed. I can still remember him on his platform swearing up and down there was nothing wrong with our beef, cows were being born dead, two heads, deformed in ungodly forms, farmers and families of farmers were the first to be affected, still births, defrominties of the same features the cattle was being born with... While at the same time Millican was swearing there was nothing wrong michigans cattle, the rest of the world was getting first hand news of the contamination.... I was fortunate enough to have a teacher who came over from across the big pond who brought a vidio tape of a news brodcast from his or her country.... their news people held back no punches, they showed the cows, the people, truly a groosom site... here they claim mercury is the problem with fish, I think it is just plain toxic waiste... Oh, here is the kicker,,,, the city of detroit went under fire here a couple years back for lack of polution controlls and mysterious loss of funding... You will never guess who the supreem courts put in charge of the detroit waist watter ways... "none other than our past Governer Millican"[pirate][mad] nothing like adding insult to injury.... [signature]
10-07-2007, 10:04 AM
[cool][#0000ff]First of all, the mercury that causes the problem in our environment is not just the mercury from broken thermometers. It is "methyl" mercury. A high percentage of it comes from the smoke of industrial operations that do not have proper "scrubbing". I understand that a lot of it in the US comes across the Pacific, thanks to the coal burning operations in China.[/#0000ff]
[#0000ff][/#0000ff] [#0000ff]It is also a byproduct of several kinds of mining...expecially gold mining, where mercury is used to recover fine gold from crushed ore. That is the source of much of the mercury in the tainted waters of the western states. We have a lot of pretty little mountain lakes you would never suspect of being polluted, but which have methyl mercury content in the fish so high that they cannot be kept or eaten.[/#0000ff] [#0000ff][/#0000ff] [#0000ff]As for the ducks, Utah has no year round populations either. Some ducks spend the summers here, but most are migratory and stop only briefly on their way north and south. The mercury advisories are by species, not by individual waters. Some species of ducks evidently spend a lot of time on waters where the mercury content is high and it builds up in their flesh. If there are enough of them sampled that have high mercury content, then they put the advisory on all ducks of that species.[/#0000ff] [#0000ff][/#0000ff] [#0000ff]The really bad news is that once the stuff is in a wild creature, it will never work its way out of their bodies. Instead, it is usually eaten by predators and scavengers, who further concentrate it into their bodies.[/#0000ff] [#0000ff][/#0000ff] [#0000ff]Sorry about your local pollution problem. Sounds like you had the best governor that money could buy. Too bad he is being put back into another position where he can do more harm than good. [/#0000ff] [signature]
10-07-2007, 04:00 PM
When I was an undergraduate at UC Davis I took classes in ichthyology (fish biology) as I was contemplating a degree in marine biology. One of our classes took a snorkeling trip down the Yuba river (I think this was the river) in Northern California. Water temps were close to freezing so we had to wear really thick wetsuits, but that's besides the point. We floated down the river looking at migrating and spawning salmon and boy was that fun. In any event, our instructor was showing us how much mercury was in the river by grabbing gravel and shifting it around. You could see balls of mercury come out of the gravel and float in the water. This section of river was very close to a gold mining area and hence all of the mercury. Luckily for the salmon they were only exposed for a short time, and they died anyways. Unlucky for the other fishes, and us[
], that live in the river day in and day out. I tried to add a word document with a couple of pictures but the size is huge. Don't know how to down size a word document. Had to scan them as they are old pictures. I also saved it as a tif but that was almost just as large. Thought I would share. [signature]
10-07-2007, 04:39 PM
[cool][#0000ff]I converted the Word doc to a PDF file and attached it below your attachment. It is much smaller and easily opened by anyone with Adobe Reader.[/#0000ff]
[#0000ff][/#0000ff] [#0000ff]I lived in Sacramento and other parts of California for quite a few years. I did a lot of gold panning and sluicing along the Yuba, Feather, Cosumnes, American and other formerly heavily mined rivers in Northern California. It was a rare trip when we did not get quite a bit of mercury in with the gold we were lucky enough to find. And, we always saved it because when we "retorted" it (heated it to evaporation), there was some gold left behind.[/#0000ff] [#0000ff][/#0000ff] [#0000ff]The mercury was used mostly by the placer miners...those who used pans to either prospect for gold or to clean out the "concentrates" from a long tom, sluicebox or rocker. When the panner got down to the last bits of black sand and fine gold, they would add a bit of mercury to suck up the fine particles of gold. Mercury forms an instant amalgam with gold. After multiple uses, the mercury was "cooked" off to leave the remaining gold "sponge", which was sold at the assay office.[/#0000ff] [#0000ff][/#0000ff] [#0000ff]It was inevitable that some mercury get spilled into the river during the difficult and labor intensive panning operations. That mercury IS potentially hazardous, if ingested by fish or invertebrates, but does not contribute much to the dissolved "methyl" mercury that finds its way into fish tissues. That comes largely from atmospheric pollution...sometimes from mining refineries and other times just from dirty coal burning emissions that are sent back to the earth in rain and wash down into the waters.[/#0000ff] [#0000ff][/#0000ff] [#0000ff]As an addicted "goldaholic", I heard all of the rumors and partially true stories about fabulous gold finds. One of them involved an amateur gold dredger who rolled over a rock at the bottom of a deep hole and found a pocket full of gold laden mercury. When it was all sucked up and later evaporated off, it was supposed to have yielded a couple of pounds of gold sponge. Maybe true. maybe not.[/#0000ff] [#0000ff][/#0000ff] [#0000ff]I have snorkeled among the salmon and steelhead on the American River. Quite an experience. TubeN2, his brother Mike and myself used to go diving for big crawdads in the American River, not far from where we lived. It was not uncommon for big stripers to swoop in and munch a crawdad we had just uncovered by rolling over rocks. They seemed to learn that we were good meal tickets. Also saw lots of big smallmouths, catfish and even a couple of lost sturgeon in the American. Fun times.[/#0000ff] [signature]
10-09-2007, 02:03 AM
Great to know we know someone famous!
Good input to the article. z~ [signature]
10-09-2007, 08:41 AM
As far as I know, the less harmful liquid "quicksilver" mercury gets converted into methyl mercury by bacteria, so the mining mercury gets converted to methyl mercury in the bottom sediment. So it can enter the food chain too.
I never made the connection between mining in earlier times, and present day mercury poisoning in (apparently) pristine mountain lakes. Thanks for that information TD. The generally held view was that methyl mercury pollution was purely an aquatic problem, you needed water, predator fish, otters, pilot whales, ducks, to concentrate the toxin and give it to people living nearby via their food. But 2 years ago it was found to be very high in songbirds, (thrushes), and nobody seems to know how it got there. So another unresearched method on concentrating methyl mercury in the wild is in operation. [signature] |
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