Check this out!!!!!!!!

http://www.kirotv.com/index.html

Cigar

That article forces you to immeadiatley speculate about the source of the fire retardant? Could it be from various ships at sea performing fire drills? Is it runoff from fires within cities where the fire department uses this stuff, ...and the sewage treatment cannot remove it?

Any firemen care to comment on the common uses, frequency of use of retardants?

The report on TV actually said it was from a chemical that is put into household products to prevent them from burning. Like curtains, rugs, and clothing. Guess its OK to where but when it breaks down, it gets into fish. I wonder if the farmed salmon industry had anything to do with this, funny they only mention WILD Chinook, which spend as much time in PS as most other salmonids.

NEN

now how am I suposed to smoke my fish?

I wonder if its because they are higher up on the food chain than the plankton eating salmon.

That article forces you to immeadiatley speculate about the source of the fire retardant? Could it be from various ships at sea performing fire drills? Is it runoff from fires within cities where the fire department uses this stuff, ...and the sewage treatment cannot remove it?

Any firemen care to comment on the common uses, frequency of use of retardants?


Sky Guy

When we were out to sea and did our fire drills we never used any items everything was simulated so it wasnt the navy that helped in these fire proof kings..... I can say one thing though you can throw them on the grill and dont have to worry about them burning. If we had to use any of our firefighting agents onboard a vessel we had to dump the material 50 to 75 miles from the coast line. I hope that answers your question about about navy vessels

PBDE's are bioaccumlative meaning that they tend to increase in concentration as you move up the food chain. This is common for many of the nasty pollutants that have been reported in the media. PBDE's are organic compounds and behave similarly to other organic compounds like PCB's, Dioxons and many pesticides and herbicides that have made there way into the environment. What is very concerning to scientists is the fact that these bioaccumlative compounds are at extremely low levels in the environment, far below what can be detected in the lab. But because once these compounds enter the food chain they are greatly concentrated as they work there way up. These compounds have an affinity for the fatty tissues and once they are consumed by an organism they remain with it for its lifetime. This is why generally older organism's will have greater concentrations of these compounds than younger organism's because the older one's have had a chance to eat more.

Currently the only sewage treatment technology that will remove these compounds is reverse osmosis (RO). RO treatment systems are unpratically expensive when used for the volumes of sewage generated by municipalities. The sewage treatment technology used by King county and all other treatment plants in the area do not use RO systems, so the PBDE's in the sewage waste streams will not be removed.

I hope I am not boring people to sleep by being too technical. The bottom line is the way these compounds behave by moving up the food chain is very concerning. This is an unfortunate trend that will continue to rear its ugly head with a number of nasty compounds.

Steve

There is a good side to this. I've eaten so much fish that every time my wife tries to light a fire under my a$$ to get something done, it just goes out

Fishhead5

I wonder how much we have in our systems since we are top of the food chain and, I for one, have a few fatty deposits?

By the way, what chemicals are dumped on brush fires (forest fires to the timber industry)?

From what I understand the major source is believed to be from forest fire fighting, they dump tons of the stuff on fires and the first rains come along and it all hits the streams.

Actually the news said it was not the same stuff they drop on forest fires.

This chemical is typically added to common plastics like the housing of the computer you are reading this on. This is done to meet a UL requirement for non-flamability. As the article points out the chemical is in the process of being banned and mfgs are beginning to use alternatives. Finding it in wild chinook is just solid evidence that the ban should be supported even though the alternatives are more expensive.