Back in Time: The Acid Waters, Cholera Banks, ETC......

[DarkSkies]

This is an important part of our NJ/ NY fishing history.......

Was taking about this with Fin the other day.....he was relating how these were fantastic bluefish grounds.......this was back when environmental regs were more lax....and they dumped acid in the ocean a few miles off the coast, NY Bight area..........

These drums eventually rotted from the salt....and the acid rose to the surface.....creating an eerie, milky white area of dead water......

But it wasn't really dead....the baitfish, bunker, anchovies, etc, used to try to hide there....unfortunately with the water being so white, their profiles stood out more clearly....and they were easy pickings, for bluefish or any other predators.....

So here's one situation, where a curtain of dead water...became an interesting place to look for fish.....

[DarkSkies]

** Obviously, acid in the water isn't good for anyone....those dumping chemicals and substances did great damage to some of our rivers and streams....it took the Hudson a few decades to spring back from all the industrial dumping.....and it can be argued some parts of the Raritan River have still not come back, from all the dumping that was done there in the 60's and 70's...


I just thought some of our members might want to post experiences, and share some thoughts, of what it was like....even if you didn't fish it.....anything on the acid waters of that area would be a good topic for discussion here...feel free....

[finchaser]

The Acid Grounds was a dump site for acid and alkaline wastes, which was closed in 1988. The average depth is 90-100 feet. "the Acid Dump was, as far as I know, used exclusively by National Lead Co. of South Amboy, when that firm existed on the Raritan River on the west side of the Driscoll (Parkway) Bridge. From what I have ever heard the acid was quickly neutralized by the sea water in a chemical reaction and never posed an environmental hazard other than the temporary stain it left after being dumped. Any residue that settled to the sea floor could have had negative effects, but after all this time, storms and Mother Nature have likely cleaned the sea floor at the site."


Hudson was contaminated by PCB's from manufacturing plants up the Hudson for years it saved the Striped Bass do to high levels of PCB's found in bass. Now they say the river has acceptable levels and harvesting of bass goes on.

[hookedonbass]

Wow that must have been some crazy fishing back then! I found this on the net-
"when blue fishing became popular in the fifties, it was a matter of making a routine heading right over to Sea Bright, Cholera or the Acid Waters, get the chum going, load up, and then steam back home...."

[clamchucker]

Good points here. The environmental regulations were a lot more lax back then. There was also the mud dump where they dumped sewage. I think they said some of it was treated but there were no scientists taking bacteria samples back then. Whenever there was a severe storm or noreaster some of the sewage treatment plants had no choice but to dump out sewage before the end of the process. When you think of the things that used to be acceptable to dump in our waters, raw sewage, mercury, cadmium, lead, pcbs it is a wonder we still have any fish left.
Cholera banks, I recall they named it that because when the immigrant ships came into the country. They staged the ships out there and the Drs came to check the immigrants for cholera.

[seamonkey]

From 1987
The Atlantic Cesspool: Legacy Of Waste
By RAMONA SMITH, Daily News Staff Writer

Posted: November 30, 1987

The crisp voice from the tugboat Turecamo Girls crackled over the radio
console at the Coast Guard outpost at the top of the Jersey Shore.
"Tug Turecamo Girls to Coast Guard Sandy Hook . . . We are en route to the sludge dump - 12-mile dump."
The radioman recorded the time - 1707 hours on Sept. 29 - when the Kimberly Ann, a hulking barge powered by the tug, would release her freight of sewage sludge into the sea.

Each morning, a list of the ships dumping sludge or other wastes into the ocean is telegraphed by the Sandy Hook station to the Coast Guard's port control center in New York.
"We just take the information and write it down and say OK, there goes some more pollution," radioman Tim Rollins said.

The dump ships - barges and tugs, dredges and tankers - move in an intermittent procession out of New York's Lower Bay to deposit their cargoes in a tormented burial ground.
The ocean off New Jersey and reaching toward the south is the nation's first and worst graveyard for a variety of wastes that have been shipped out to sea.

This part of the ocean is the only region of U.S. coastal waters where ships have poured cargoes of sludge into the ocean.
It has served as a disposal ground for industrial chemicals - hydrochloric and sulfuric acids, oil emulsions, acid-iron sulfate waste.
It has been heaped - legally and illegally - with trash and garbage, which sometimes have washed up on the beach.
And it is the final resting place for barrels of radioactive waste, stockpiles of explosives and entire ships sunk two decades ago with deadly cargoes of chemical warfare agents.

Environmental officials say there is no chance the remains of the more hazardous cargoes would wash up on shore and pose a threat to people on the beach. Their concerns center instead on industrial pollutants - from sludge, sediment and other sources - that can build up on the ocean bottom and damage marine life.

Silent and slow in the distance as they pass off Sandy Hook, today's dump vessels sail to separate legal disposal areas for sludge, acid waste, dredged- up harbor sediments and construction debris.
Some days there are several dumpers, some days none. The motions of the ships are watched by the Coast Guard; the impact of the waste is studied by scientists.
"You don't want to ever see anything dumped in the ocean, whether it be sewage sludge or dredge spoils or acid waste," said Lt. Cmdr. Kevin Eldridge, port safety officer with the Coast Guard for the Port of New York. "But it's probably the least onerous of all alternatives . . .
"Here's your EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) . . . and they're permitting the process . . . so you know that there's overwhelming pressures or reasons to dump it in the environment."
*
"Coast Guard Sandy Hook, Coast Guard Sandy Hook. This is the Alexandra . . . Good afternoon. We are departing for the 106-mile dump site with barge Weeks 702. ETA for the dumpsite: 1400 (hours) tomorrow . . . "
"Alexandra, this is Coast Guard Group Sandy Hook. Roger, out."

Richard Weeks, who named the Alexandra after his granddaughter, sits in his office in suburban New Jersey and states the case:
"Nobody's trying to degrade the area unnecessarily, but I mean you have to do something with it (the waste)."
Weeks' company and two others operate the tugs and barges that will release 2.8 million tons of North Jersey sludge next year at a deepwater dump site 106 miles outside New York Bay.

And what Weeks says about sludge has been uttered by generations of landsmen who have found no workable alternatives to casting their most offensive wastes into the sea.
"People along the shore say, 'Take it out of the ocean,' " says Mario Del Vicario, chief of marine protection for the EPA region that includes the Jersey Shore. "(But) if you take it out of the ocean and you put it on the land, someone says, 'Don't put it next to me.' "

The waters off New Jersey have served as a garbage pail, a cesspool and a potter's field for a ragtag assortment of abandoned wastes.
New York City once dispatched bargeloads of trash, rotten vegetables and dead horses into the ocean outside New York's Lower Bay. That was half a century ago, but the city's garbage handlers still are the traditional suspects when unexplained trash washes up on the New Jersey beach.

In more recent decades, according to information supplied by government agencies and research studies:
* Industries have poured bargeloads of acid and chemical wastes into charted dump zones, with quantities peaking in the 1970s. Most of the wastes are quickly neutralized by sea water, but environmental advocates note that within minutes, fish larvae and other marine life die in the wake. Scientists say they have never learned the full inventory of what was dumped at some of the industrial-waste sites.

* The federal government sank more than 14,000 drums packed with low-level radioactive waste and concrete in the deep waters about 115 miles southeast of Cape May. Thousands more of the 55-gallon containers were discarded at another site farther south.
* The military jettisoned outdated stockpiles of explosives by the bargeload in rectangular dumpsites still marked on the standard navigational charts. Later, it scuttled entire ships freighted with explosives or chemical munitions - lethal nerve and blistering agents - in deep waters about 180 miles off New Jersey or to the south.
* The Navy abandoned the reactor containment vessel of the nuclear submarine Seawolf in a watery burial plot at the low-level radioactive waste site.
Yet it is the routine wastes - sludge and dredged harbor sediments - that concern environmental officials more than the dramatic discards of the past.
EPA scientists say the radioactivity evident at the deepwater dumpsites appears to be negligible and the chemical agents either remain entombed or have been made harmless by the sea.

But the sludge and sediments carry with them a freight of industrial pollutants - heavy metals, pesticides and persistent chemicals. These substances accumulate on the ocean bottom, where they can be picked up by shellfish and other organisms, damage fisheries, and be passed along to animals higher in the food chain.
"In the municipalities that we're dealing with, it's not just pure human sewage, it's industrial waste . . .," said Del Vicario of the EPA. "You end up with a sludge that contains those toxicants."

"Tanker Owls Head to Sandy Hook Coast Guard . . . This is the Owls Head out by the dump - sludge dumpin' area. We should be out there about 1800 (hours), and our reference number today is Oscar-1-9-0-3."
"Owls Head (from) Sandy Hook, roger."

Six miles below Sandy Hook, in the small oceanfront town of Sea Bright, the waves curl up blue-green in the morning sun.
A solitary man sits in a beach chair in his street clothes as a scattering of fishing boats bob in the autumn sea.
Twelve miles out, where the man in the beach chair cannot see them, the sludge ships have been making their final trips this fall to an old dumpsite that opened in 1924.

By New Year's Eve, the six New Jersey sewer authorities that ship their sludge to the 12-mile site have been ordered to complete their move to the deepwater site. New York City and two suburban New York counties already have made the change.
The new dumpsite - scheduled to remain open until at least 1991 - is not only much farther out than the old one, it is much deeper.
The bottom of the new dump lies 6,000 to 9,000 feet beneath the surface, off the Continental Shelf 100 miles east of Atlantic City.
At that depth, the EPA says less of the waste will pile up on the bottom than near the 80-foot-deep dumpsite off Sea Bright. The liquid sludge is expected to be greatly dispersed and diluted as it sinks in the deep.

The 12-mile dump is one of several legal dumpsites in the degraded "apex" of the New York Bight - the part of the Atlantic where the Hudson and other rivers sweep additional contaminants into the sea.

Parts of the area, closed to shell-fishing since the early 1970s, have been plagued by elevated levels of bacteria and sediments laced with toxic metals, pesticides and other pollutants, according to environmental impact statements prepared by the EPA.
Unlike dredged material, which usually sinks at its "Mud Dump" site and stays there, the liquid sludge travels through the water to contaminate sediments in a nearby ocean basin.

The EPA has denied that material from the 12-mile sludge site finds its way ashore, but it has linked the sludge to contaminents that have reached to within five miles of the Long Island coast.

When the sludge dumping stops, the EPA expects to find improvement in the ocean near the site. But the waters will remain troubled, scientists said, as pollutants continue to spew from the Hudson River, and from ocean outfalls that pipe partly treated sewage into the sea.

"Tug Kate to Sandy Hook . . . Good evening, Sandy Hook. We have the sludge barge Morris J Berman, the Morris J Berman . . . ETA for the 106-mile dump: 12 noon tomorrow . . . "
". . . Roger, sir, you folks have a safe trip."
At the Coast Guard headquarters on Governors Island in New York City, a lieutenant summons up a map on a computer screen.
The map tracks the voyage of a barge out of the Lower Bay, beyond Ambrose Light and down the coast of New Jersey, on a two-day mission to the 106-mile dump.

From a "black box" on the barge, the Coast Guard can check how high the vessel rides in the ocean to monitor the speed and location when she dumps her load.
The electronic tracking system, now on three barges and expected to expand to about 16 more next year, is only part of the scrutiny that will ride with the dumpers to the more distant site.

Both Congress and the EPA are currently looking at tighter regulation of ocean dumping. So far, there has been little motion in Congress toward an outright ban.
The EPA says it will be as strict with the dumpers as the law allows. When the environmental agency began operating in the early 1970s, it set out to end ocean dumping.

The agency's Philadelphia office did succeed in closing all dumps in its region - south of Cape May and off the coast of Delaware - by 1980.
But the EPA's New York office, which is responsible for the Jersey Shore, ran into trouble when it ordered all the sewer authorities out of the 12-mile sludge site by the end of 1981.

A federal judge ruled the EPA could not deny applications for ocean dumping permits without considering whether there were any reasonable alternatives for sludge disposal.
T
hat meant not only showing the sludge was "harmful" to the ocean - not a simple task in waters heavy with pollutants from many other sources - but also weighing the costs and environmental problems of getting rid of the waste on land.
The EPA currently is beginning an intensive review of the dumpers' permits.

And although the 106-mile sludge and industrial waste dumps themselves will remain open until 1991, it is "very conceivable" that some of the dumpers may not win renewed permits, said EPA marine scientist Frank Csulak.
The environmental agency also is revising its ocean dumping regulations and is expected next year to propose user fees of $10,000 to $100,000 for dumpers.
"We'll be as strict as we can be without a ban," said Bill Muir, an EPA oceanographer based in Philadelphia who has worked on the national task force drawing up the new rules.
"We won't see a ban specifically because Congress didn't put a ban in . . .," said Muir. "We can only do what Congress allows us to do."
But that is not enough for New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, or for environmental activists who want to end the area's long tradition of waste burial at sea.
"Time after time," Kean said recently, "Congress has decried ocean dumping but allowed loopholes in the law through which a lawyer can drive a sludge barge. In 1991 it has to be different."

With Kean urging a total ban on dumping at the start of that year, the barges still continue their slow procession down his coast.
The irony, to activist Cindy Zipf of the group Clean Ocean Action, is they perform their burials with the blessing of the government.
"The government," she said, "is giving individuals the permit to pollute . . . They sanction the ocean dumping. They allow it to continue."

www.philly.com

[bobstefa]

Growing up in the NY/NJ area I couldn't wait for the bluefish to show up in the summer. I lived on the Long Island Sound, and in those days (mid 50's to early 60's), we went out of either Sheepshead Bay or Atlantic Highlands to the acid waters for Blues. We fished in the sound for snappers, (baby bluefish) which were a lot of fun. One day, while fishing for Blues I watched how voracious they were eating each other and wondered if we saved the snappers we had caught previously, and used them for bait the next time we went for blues, if it would work. Sure enough we used the snappers and the blues attacked their own kind as readily as the bunkers we were using. As luck would have it, in the late 60's I moved to the west coast and shortly thereafter the blues invaded Long Island Sound. Up until this year, in my opinion, the fishing out here does not come close to the east coast, although, we did go to La Paz Mexico a few years ago, and had a ball catching dorado. This year within the last month or so, the fishing exploded, with fish coming up from the south that aren't normally this close; Yellowfin and Bluefin tuna, Dorado, Wahoo, Skipjack, Big Eye. Wow--- If only it wasn't so expensive. Anyway it sure was fun to go Bluefishing back then.

[Monty]

Growing up in the NY/NJ area I couldn't wait for the bluefish to show up in the summer. I lived on the Long Island Sound, and in those days (mid 50's to early 60's), we went out of either Sheepshead Bay or Atlantic Highlands to the acid waters for Blues. We fished in the sound for snappers, (baby bluefish) which were a lot of fun. One day, while fishing for Blues I watched how voracious they were eating each other and wondered if we saved the snappers we had caught previously, and used them for bait the next time we went for blues, if it would work. Sure enough we used the snappers and the blues attacked their own kind as readily as the bunkers we were using. As luck would have it, in the late 60's I moved to the west coast and shortly thereafter the blues invaded Long Island Sound. Up until this year, in my opinion, the fishing out here does not come close to the east coast, although, we did go to La Paz Mexico a few years ago, and had a ball catching dorado. This year within the last month or so, the fishing exploded, with fish coming up from the south that aren't normally this close; Yellowfin and Bluefin tuna, Dorado, Wahoo, Skipjack, Big Eye. Wow--- If only it wasn't so expensive. Anyway it sure was fun to go Bluefishing back then.

Welcome aboard
Great post.
I have this thing for Blues over 30 inches, I really enjoy catching them, extra shot of adrenalin.

[ledhead36]

Growing up in the NY/NJ area I couldn't wait for the bluefish to show up in the summer. I lived on the Long Island Sound, and in those days (mid 50's to early 60's), we went out of either Sheepshead Bay or Atlantic Highlands to the acid waters for Blues. We fished in the sound for snappers, (baby bluefish) which were a lot of fun. One day, while fishing for Blues I watched how voracious they were eating each other and wondered if we saved the snappers we had caught previously, and used them for bait the next time we went for blues, if it would work. Sure enough we used the snappers and the blues attacked their own kind as readily as the bunkers we were using.

Great memories Bob thanks for sharing and welcome to stripers and anglers. I remember fishing the acid waters with my Dad when I was a kid. We would take his rickety 19 footer over there on calm days. It took me a while to understand why the water looked like that. Sure did have a lot of fish over there though, Lots of good laughs and good fishing with my Dad.
Do you fish out of San Francisco much? I went there one time to visit my aunt and uncle. My uncle took me on a day party boat. We used live sardines and caught a lot of different fish called rockfish. Nothing like the stripers here more like sea bass. Pretty cool trip. Have you ever fished for them?

[cowherder]

Bob welcome to the site!

[J Barbosa]

Bob welcome to the site!

Welcome aboard Bob!

[plugcrazy]

There are a great bunch of guys here Bob. Welcome and thanks for sharing.

[DarkSkies]

That was really nice of you to share those memories with us, Bob. Welcome aboard and look forward to your future contributions.

[captnemo]

"The EPA has denied that material from the 12-mile sludge site finds its way ashore, but it has linked the sludge to contaminants that have reached to within five miles of the Long Island coast."


I used to fish the area a long time ago with my uncle.
It is amazing to think that EPA and wetlands regulation existed everywhere on terra firms. Fines can be crippling if you were to violate them. The site contains toxic poisons and they rubber stamped it. Hypocrisy.