Document pBBQk3jj1vXeMRJe0wOLrL38a

From the desk of HOWARD S. BERGEN 9/2/75 Please circulate and return: G2WD E^ J'I. PUI/rer"-* B2WK Jv-R-r*"SaVcRje B7urSibbctts -J v Lv W4=fcef___- H. S. Bergen /\ />, DSW 1953 STLCOPCB4052158 SEPTEMBER 1,1975 Volume 43. No. 9 Cover photograph by Neil Leiter 14 Poisoned Fish, Troubled Waters At last a swell ol protest is rising against PCBs, the toxic chemical com pounds that are being spewed into our lakes and rivers and dispersed into the atmosphere, contaminating a variety of animals--including humans. -Awake to the menace, officialdom must now do something about it. by Robert H. Boyle 18 Furniss Was All Stoked Up Determined to atone lor Cali, young Bruce got hot at the AAU championships . by Anita Verschoth 20 Wanted: Instant Status A second-year golf tournament seeks to be on a par with the Big Four by Barry McDermott 22 Wheeling and Dealing Skateboards are back. The kids are rolling, and so are manufacturers--in money by Sarah Piteggi, 26 He Ran into Doors Tony DeSpirito, a star at 16, dead at 39. In between, he had everything but luck by Frank Deford 32 Wiles of the Wigwag Man He tugs at his cap, shuffles, scratches, and sends the signals that win games by Herman Weiskopf 58 Coming on Strong Brian Oldfield, whirling dervish ol the shotput, has muscles to match his ego by Cuiiy Kirkpatrick 11 Scorecard 43 Baseball 48 Soccer 50 Pro Football Credits on page 73 52 Crew 56 Horse Racing 73 For the Record 74 19th Hole Next Week COLLEGE FOOTBALL kicks off another sea son with a bad case of short money. In our an nual special issue, John Underwood looks into the financial squeeze; the Ivy League is serenaded in pictures and words (by George Plimpton, Harvard *48); the Top 20 teams are fearlessly picked; and Ray Kennedy presents the sainted Archie Griffin, who's won one Heisman, is bucking for another and still hasn't proved he's the best player in his family. 4_______________________ '_________________________________________________________ SPORTS ILLUSTRATED *o*kiy except o*e <v>u<- at ye* end. fcy Tim? inc . 54 t N Fa.roanks Ct. Chicago til 60611 principal otf.ce Rockefeller Cu . N Y. N Y 10020 J R Snepley. President. C. J. Grgm. Tre-isuce*. C. B 6ca<. Secretary Seco*d-ciass postage pa-d at Chicago, ill and ai additional ma.tmq of fices Authon/cd as second-cUss mail py ihe Post Otf.cc Dept. Ottawa. Canada anew payT.ont ot postage m cash. Subscription price m the U S. $ > 4 00 a year. I f ? 5 TIME INC Au MGHTS reserved, reproduction in whole or in PART without PERMISSION is prohibited. DS\N 1953' Sports ESIustrated SEPTEMBER 1, 197# Anglers, commercial fishermen, fish l dealers, restaurateurs. Senator Ed ward Kennedy and just plain citizens were up in arms last week, all because of some colorless, viscous fluids known as PCBs. PCBs is the abbreviation for poly chlorinated biphenyls, a group of chem ical compounds that are used by indus tries throughout the world because of their resistance to heat. PCBs are toxic to a wide range of animals, including hu mans. These chemicals, when ingested in large doses, cause miscarriages and still births, and they are turning up in dan gerous amounts in the upper Mississippi River, the upper Ohio, the Hudson Riv er and several of the Great Lakes. Toxic chemical compounds called PCBs are being discharged into rivers and lakes, contaminating food fish, which are contaminating us by ROBERT H. BOYLE r> < - fy r -. , * V. % r. . .. .>. V':'-1 - J V t- i New Yorkers are warned not to eat bass from the Hudson, Into which G.E. plants pour PCBs. PHOTOGRAPHS BY IAKC STCWART 14 DSW 195302 ,'T'--T ? I J.Ui _y v- . .c:-: <V^iI ! : iB t. STLCOPCB4052160 Scientists in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have been aware of the PCB menace for several years, but the bureaucrats in charge of EPA have dithered and dallied rather than take ef fective action. For example, last Febru ary EPA officials in New York stayed abatement plans for two polluting Gen eral Electric Company plants at Fort Ed ward and Hudson Falls after the com pany objected and requested an adjudi catory hearing to challenge PCB limita tions. Conservationists maintain that EPA should have acted under Section 504 of the Federal Water Pollution Con trol Act, which gives the agency the right to sue to halt discharge of pollutants that present "an imminent and substantial endangerment to the health of persons or to the welfare of persons where such endangerment is to the livelihood of such persons... Since 1942, G.E., which uses PCBs in the manufacture of electrical equipment, has been dumping them into the Hud son, an average of 30 pounds a day since 1971, 90 pounds on some occasions, the largest nonaccidental release of these poi sons yet discovered in the U.S. and pos sibly the world. The threat of PCB poisoning became a national concern three weeks ago when Ogden R. Reid, former ambassador to Israel and the new commissioner of the New York State Department of Environ mental Conservation, got a copy of an EPA study that prompted him to warn the public against eating striped bass from the Hudson and coho salmon from Lake Ontario. Reid was further upset when he learned that his department, long deplored by conservationists as a sick joke, had known of PCB contam ination since 1972 and possibly as early as 1970. On Oct. 26,1970, Sports Illustrated published a lengthy article of mine on chemical contaminants in game fish from the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific coasts, re porting that the WARF Institute in Mad ison, Wis., which did the laboratory anal ' continued I II - ZJZ* STLCOPCB4052161 PCBs continued yses, detected high levels of PCBs in Hudson River stripers. On Feb. 17,1971 I wrote to Carl Parker, chief of New York's Bureau of Fisheries, telling him that Hudson stripers had 11.4 parts per million of PCBs in their eggs and 4.01 in their flesh. In my report I informed Par ker, "These are grim figures, and I cer tainly think the state should warn fish ermen not to eat striped bass eggs." I also noted that the levels in the flesh did not make "great reading," and I suggested he read the SI article. Parker's reply was derisive. Tests ordered by Reid or previously performed by EPA scientists and New York State disclosed that numerous spe cies of Hudson fish in addition to striped bass were contaminated. These included rock bass, largemouth and smallmouth bass, shiners, white perch, northern pike and sturgeon. Apparently fish can ingest PCBs by taking in bottom sediments, eat ing lesser organisms or simply by swim ming through water that contains PCBs. The striped bass pose a particularly vex ing problem, which was Senator Kenne dy's immediate concern. After spawning, bass from the Hudson migrate as far north as Massachusetts and as far south as New Jersey, and they are indistin guishable to fishermen from stripers em anating from rivers in the Chesapeake Bay where no serious PCB concentration has yet been discovered in the flesh of adult fish. The U.S. Food and Drug Administra tion has placed a tolerance limit of five parts per million of PCBs in fish; accord ing to the EPA National Water Quality Laboratory in Duluth, all Lake Michigan trout and salmon longer than 12 inches exceed that limit. Last May 30, the FDA seized 124,812 cans of Lake Michigan coho salmon because the PCB levels in the canned coho ranged from 7.6 to 10.9 ppm. The FDA also seized 6,480 pounds of frozen Lake Michigan coho and chi nook salmon from the Point Adams Packing Company; the PCB levels ranged from 8.2 to 9.2 ppm. Wis consin Lieutenant Governor Martin J. Schreibcr wrote with some foresight last Nov..S to A. Gene Gazlay, director of the Michigan Department of Natural Re sources: "There exists now a problem with contaminants in Lake Michigan that has the potential of destroying both sport and commercial fishing in all the Great Lakes. This situation could turn any efforts to develop the lake as a fu- ture protein source into a futile and frus trating endeavor." Since 1971 Michigan health authorities have advised fishermen not to eat salmon or trout from Lake Michigan more than once a week. Large lake trout from Lake Superior are generally contaminated, and coho and Chinook salmon in Lake Ontario have excessive levels. PCBs appear to be a threat to fish-eating birds in the Great Lakes region. "Severe reproductive fail ure has been identified in herring gull colonies around Lake Ontario," wrote Karl E. Bremer of the EPA Chicago of fice on July 24 to the Lake Michigan Toxic Substances Committee. "There is a positive correlation between early em bryonic mortality and PCB contamina tion. The major effect on young birds is to produce symptoms ofchick edema dis ease. ... Officials have observed unnat urally high mortalities of gulls in recent years from Saginaw Bay and Grand Tra verse Bay. Analysis of the liver and brain of a dead herring gull from Grand Tra verse Bay in 1973 showed the presence of 2,600 ppm of Aroclor 1254 [a PCB]." PCB pollution is not restricted to New York and the Great Lakes. Earlier this year the FDA seized and eventually bur ied 20,000 pounds of carp taken from Lake Pepin, a reach of the Mississippi 70 miles downriver from the Twin Cit ies. EPA scientists have also discovered excessive levels of PCBs in channel cat fish and carp taken from the Ohio River. On Sept. 29, 1972 Dr. Donald J. Lisk and Carl Bache of the pesticide research lab at Cornell University contributed a paper to Science on PCBs in lake trout in Cayuga Lake, N.Y. As a general rule, trout exceeding 24 inches in length had excessive levels, the highest reading of 30 ppm being found in a 9-year-old fish. Queried by SI, Dr. Lisk said no one in government had ever bothered to ask about the findings or the possible sourc es of the PCBs. Dr. Ward Stone, a New York State wildlife pathologist, warned conserva tion department superiors for several years of the PCB crisis. He found his warnings "futile." Dr. Stone says, "No one really cared. In one memo I wrote, T hope the department begins to take some of these toxic problems seriously . . . because it is doubtful these prob lems can be put ofT. In fact, they have al ready been put off far too long.' " In au topsies Dr. Stone discerned excessive PCB levels in breast muscles of a num- Commissioner Ogden Reid got semi-tough. ber of greater scaup shot on Lake On tario and Long Island Sound. He also ; found excessive PCB levels in white winged scoter dying on Lake Ontario. Moreover, he found 30.16 ppm of PCBs in the liver of a great blue heron from Albany County; 11.05 ppm in the liver and 21.49 ppm in the muscles of a dead herring gull from Oneida Lake; 20.3 ppm in the liver of a porpoise washed ashore ! at Westhampton Beach, N.Y.; and 49.39 ppm in the brain of an otter from Twitchell Lake in Herkimer County. But not just mammals, birds and fish are affected. The water is, too. In a re- * view of PCBs in the Hudson, Dr. Gil man D. Veith of the Duluth lab report ed that "the river for many miles downstream from the G.E. discharge has not been adequately tested. It could be contaminated with PCBs at levels 100 times over the 10-parts-per-trillion guide line set forth by EPA in 1972 and 1,000 times higher than the newly recommend ed water quality criteria [of one part per trillion]." Poughkeepsie and other river towns draw their drinking water from the Hudson. Water supplies for cities on the Great Lakes may also be endangered. Chicago and Milwaukee draw their wa ter from Lake Michigan, and EPA re ports indicate that PCB levels in certain 16 DSW 195304 i STLCOPCB4052162 .r areas of the lake range from four to 10 parts per trillion, well above the recom mended one part per trillion. PCBs have been manufactured in the US. since 1929 by one firm, Monsanto Industrial Chemicals Company. It is es timated that Monsanto has turned out about 400,000 tons of PCBs between 1948 and 1973. The company's output is about half the world production. PCBs have also been made in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Czecho slovakia, the Soviet Union and Japan. PCBs are a family of partially or whol ly chlorinated isomers of biphenyls. Monsanto has marketed them under the trademark names of Aroclor 1016,1221, 1232, 1242, 1248, 1254, 1260, 1262 and 1268. The last two digits indicate the chlorine percentage in the different for mulations. Like DDT, PCBs are chlori nated hydrocarbons, but compared to DDT, which may persist up to 15 years, PCBs resemble the Rock of Gibraltar. After the use of DDT was restricted by the Great Lakes states in 1970, DDT res idues in Lake Michigan fish dropped 87%. However, the more highly chlori nated of the PCBs are essentially unal terable by microbial or physical chemical action in the environment. Their molec ular structure inhibits enzymes from .shearing the bonding between the chlo rine atom and the biphenyl structure. So far as is known, the only way in which PCBs can be destroyed is in a special in cinerator at a temperature of 2,700 Fahrenheit. The apparent indestructibility of PCBs horrifies ecologists and gladdens indus trialists. Just a partial listing of products made with PCBs at one time or another includes hydraulic fluids, plasticizers, ad hesives (brake linings and clutch faces), paints, sealants (asphalt and concrete) and printing products (carbonless car bon paper and paper coating). PCBs are still used as filling agents or impregnants in electrical transformers and capacitors. Imported or recycled PCBs are used in such products as heat-transfer fluids. Traces of PCBs have been found in toi let soaps, hard and soft wood pulps, col oring compounds, fish oil and Xerox ton ers. Ironically, waste-paper claimed for recycling is one of the sources ofthe PCBs that flow into Wisconsin streams emp tying into Lake Michigan. These PCBs come from the inks and papers. In 1971, five years after scientists rec ognized PCBs as contaminants, Monsan to announced it would voluntarily re strict sales to "closed cycle" systems in transformers and capacitors. However, PCBs were already omnipresent. Dr. George Harvey of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution says PCBs en ter the environment from sewage out falls, industrial and municipal wastes, leaching from dumps and the burning of refuse. PCBs occur in rain and snow. For example, measured snowmelt in Keno sha, Wis. contained .22 parts per billion of PCBs. "The atmosphere is the major pathway of global transport," Harvey has written. "PCBs have been found in all organisms analyzed from the North and South Atlantic oceans, even in an imals living under 11,000 feet of water. __ Based on available data it seems safe to conclude that PCBs are present in varying concentrations in every species of wildlife on the earth." The concentrations do vary. Dr. Rob ert Risebrough of the University of Cal ifornia at Berkeley has found levels of from 300 to 1,000 ppm in cormorants and ospreys, and he suspects that deformities in terns bom on Great Gull Island in Long Island Sound are caused by PCBs. Researchers in both the U.S. and Can ada have discovered that ranch-raised, mink suffer adverse reproductive effects when fed PCB-contaminated foods. At Michigan State University,1 R. K. Ring er, R. J. Aulerich and M. Zabik "con firmed the mink industry's observation that Lake Michigan coho salmon, when fed to breeder mink, resulted in either to tal cessation of mink reproduction (em bryo toxicity) or kit mortality, the de gree of complication being dependent upon the percentage of coho salmon fed and the duration of feeding." Dr. Renate Kimbrough of the Center for Disease Control of the U.S. Public Health Service in Atlanta and a team of researchers have "concluded that the polychlorinated biphenyl Aroclor 1260 had a hcpatocarcinogenic [liver cancer] effect in female Sherman Strain rats when fed in the diet." The Kimbrough study will be published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. In 1968, more than 1,000 Japanese de veloped Yusho disease when they used rice oil containing an estimated 2,000 ppm of PCBs. The PCBs leaked from pin holes in a factory pipe during processing. Disease symptoms included eye discharg es, severe acne, ulcers of the uterus and darkening of the skin. Pregnant women suffered miscarriages and stillbirths, and surviving infants suffered from abnormal pigmentation as the result of transplacen tal transmission of PCBs. Recent research by Dr. James R. Al len and Deborah Barsotti of the Uni versity of Wisconsin Medical School has demonstrated that even very low PCB levels are dangerous to primates. The sci entists started with six rhesus monkeys that ate food containing 25 ppm of Ar oclor 1248 for two months. They devel oped facial swelling, loss of hair--includ ing eyelashes--and acne lesions within a month, and one monkey died from PCB intoxication two months after going off the experimental diet. In another exper iment, Barsotti and Allen fed two.groups of rhesus monkeys food containing five ppm and 2.5 ppm of Aroclor 1248. With in two months, both groups had lost hair from the face and neck, and their skin was of "a sandpaperlike texture." Both groups developed acne, although the "2.5-ppm group deyeloped the lesions later in time as the PCBs accumulated." In six months both groups reached a steady state concentration of PCBs in ad ipose tissue. They were then bred to con trol monkeys that had not been fed PCBs. Six of the eight five-ppm females became pregnant (in contrast to the 12 females in the control group, which was not fed PCBs), four of the six aborted or re sorbed the fetus, one gave birth to a stillborn and one to a very undersized in fant. All eight in the group of 2.5-ppm females conceived, and of these, three re sorbed the fetus and five gave birth to undersized infants. In the light of these findings, it appears relevant that EPA's present calculation is that 50% of the hu man population of the U.S. now contains one to three ppm of PCBs in its fatty tissues. What is to be done? Conservation groups are discussing lawsuits, and one organization, the Hudson River Sloop Restoration Inc., has asked Russell Train, the administrator of EPA, to use emergency powers to halt the G.E. dis charges. Demand for a nationwide ban on PCBs may be forthcoming, but how PCBs will be removed from ecosystems is not yet known. On his own authority, Ogden Reid is expected to issue an im mediate order requiring G.E. to reduce its PCB discharges into the Hudson to zero by Dec. 31,1976.lt is a move in the right direction. By this week would have been better. end DSW 195305 i i i: i! i STLCOPCB4052163