The dead shellfish littering our beaches tell you a lot about safety and secrecy in Britain | Environmentalists fear a toxic disaster is occurring on the seabed, and government denials seem less and less plausible
The dead shellfish littering our beaches tell you a lot about safety and secrecy in Britain | Environmentalists fear a toxic disaster is occurring on the seabed, and government denials seem less and less plausible
16 comments
You can find a quiet beach that’s been absolutely spotless for years, and then some influencer nob goes and brags about it on TikTok or whatever as a “prime location” and it becomes a bomb site for rubbish and people.
Tl;dr: uk.gov lying and secrecy about mass marine deaths from pollution because Brexit flagship freeport construction likely to result in more of same.
> Last October, beaches around the Tees estuary and along the coast of North Yorkshire were [suddenly covered](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/29/apocalyptic-dead-crabs-litter-beaches-north-east-england) in dead and dying crabs and lobsters. The government launched what it called an “investigation”. In January, [hundreds of dogs](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/12/warning-as-hundreds-of-dogs-fall-sick-after-beach-walks-on-yorkshire-coast) reportedly fell ill after being walked on the same beaches . . .
> Last month, there was another mass stranding of crabs and lobsters on the same beaches. Divers reported that the seabed immediately south of the River Tees was a “dead zone”: even the seaweed was dying.
The government investigation has every appearance of being a sham – blaming, on the slenderest of pretexts, a toxic species of algae which “thrives in temperatures between 20 and 24C.”
> The average water temperature on this coast in October is 13C. There is no plausible mechanism by which a Karenia bloom could cause the mass death of lobsters and crabs without also killing large numbers of fish, sea urchins and many other species.
Stonewalled by government secrecy about its own investigation, locals hired an independent expert, Tim Deere-Jones, who suggested a more plausible cause.
> The freedom of information requests revealed something else: that the levels of a pollutant called pyridine in the north-eastern crabs the government tested were up to 74 times higher than those found in crabs caught in Cornwall.
Heavy industry in the area is likely to have resulted in the high concentrations of pyridine derivatives which were found in local sediments.
> A dredger started work in the mouth of the Tees at the end of September, deepening the channel. Deere-Jones’s hypothesis is that the dredger inadvertently exposed contaminated mud. This was then dumped at the legal disposal sites farther offshore. The currents flowing southwards, he believes, spread these sediments down the coast. As pyridine attaches itself to particles that fall to the seabed, and accumulates up the food chain, it is likely disproportionately to affect bottom-living scavengers such as lobsters and crabs.
Why would uk.gov be so coy about this? The pollution is from the industrial past after all.
> In July, work begins on the Teesside freeport, the biggest and most spectacular of the government’s fabled “Brexit opportunities”. The project is being overseen by the Conservatives’ favourite mayor, Ben Houchen.
> Constructing the Tees freeport will require a massive dredging operation.
Right.
Has all the hallmarks of a Government/company fuck up.
Should there have been checks on the potential environment impact on the site before the work could take place and was this completed properly?
Definitely something fishy going on.
Thank goodness we thought ahead and destroyed our fishing industry!
Another reminder that this is not a government to deal with climate change, just a government that shouts over any attempts to deal seriously with climate change.
Voted into power by people – of all ages – who want to act like there are no consequences for their lifestyle choices, and make sure to say the right things when pressed on it so there is no opportunity for reasonable discussion.
The liars fucking up the country and the planet aren’t only in Parliament; they’re voting with their ballot and their wallets to keep us on course for disaster, by making sure there is no discussion of the disaster they are failing to act on.
They are having an end of the world party while the sun is shining, rather than a fixing the roof.
Not something I’ve been keeping an especially close eye on but the answer seems fairly obvious, sewage being pumped into the water everyday. Didn’t the government allow water companies to not treat the sewage due to difficulty importing the required chemicals after brexit?
When trawler fishing was introduced in 1820, fishermen petitioned to have it banned within the first five years.
It caused a decline of nearly 62% in ONE year
And this was back when you could see fish when you stood on the beach.
The estimates are that nearly 850m tonnes of fish was lost in the first five years around the UK by trawler damage alone in the 1820s.
[TL;DR, stop eating sea food unless it’s line caught/sustainable](https://www.academia.edu/3796251/Origins_of_the_bottom_trawling_controversy_in_the_British_Isles_19th_century_witness_testimonies_reveal_evidence_of_early_fishery_declines)
If this current tory shower are denying it you can almost guarantee it’s true.
Just look to see who is donated to the Government. It will be that obvious.
Anecdotally I was down in the New Forest on holiday this week, and there were literally thousands of dead crabs all strewn along the beach.
That isn’t natural.
I overheard locals saying they’d never seen anything like it.
This Government has allowed companies to rape the UK with their deregulation, and it makes me sick.
I went down to the beach last week. It was brown and frothy
> government denials seem less and less plausible
In no single instance where this Government has issued a denial has it been found that they did not directly cause, or else permitted by inaction, whatever is being denied.
I live near the sea and weekly they’re putting raw sewage out to it. it’s nasty
I lived on Walney Island in 1982 and I remember great drifts of dead crabs on the beach, all the same species and size. Definitely saw it more than once in a year. The place is downcoast from Sellerfield though.
Are British lobsters, mussels and oysters safe to eat?