When David’s die and Goliath’s rejoice

The hazards to which fishermen are exposed arise, apart from the erratic rages of the sea, from the fatiguing nature of catching and processing fish and often gruelling working and living conditions. People who are tired, insufficiently nourished, living in crowded accommodation and lacking proper sanitary support, do not need dramatic accidents to become ill. Quite recently the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted a long needed Work in Fishing Convention 2007 that addresses minimum requirements for living and working conditions on board fishing vessels and social security.

Other dangers

But there are also other dangers, less known and talked about. In Israel, epidemics of cancer among marine commandos, who exercised in the heavily polluted Kishon River estuary and corrosion damage to boats and mooring installations of Kishon fishing harbour, had awakened public attention to the extent and effects of pollution. Six years ago, a group of fishermen, fishermen's widows and orphans filled a multi-million dollar civil lawsuit accusing industrial and municipal polluters of causing a cancer epidemic among fishermen and other workers of Kishon Fishing Harbour.

The defenders are six major petro-chemical and chemical plants, among them the mammoth Haifa Refineries, a huge fertilizer maker Haifa Chemicals Ltd., and a municipal effluent purification plant, for knowingly polluting the Kishon River, making it biologically dead. Haifa Chemicals alone has been releasing to Kishon 14 million tonnes per day of dense acid liquid, rich in suspended heavy metals. The annual contribution of heavy metals by this plant alone has been:

• Chrome – 10mt

• Copper – 2.6mt

• Cadmium – 2.3mt

• Nickel 8.4mt

• Zinc – 54mt

• And smaller amounts of lead, arsenic, and mercury

The lawsuit also names some government agencies for neglecting enforcement of anti-pollution laws and regulations and neglecting to warn the fishermen and other workers in the Kishon Fishing Harbour of the risk of exposure to its waters and fumes. Since 2001 the number of the cancer affected fishermen has increased to 45 and half of them already dead. Among the plaintiffs are four dredge and barge operators, employed every couple of years to remove sludge from the harbour and its entrance, working under severe exposure to the heavily polluted sediment. They were never warned. Today, however, three of them have already died of cancer, while the last one is ill with it.

At the same time there's been hardly any cancer-associated mortality among fishermen in Israel's other harbours, Ashdod, Yaffo, and Acre, while almost every single Kishon fisherman who died during the last 25 years or so had died of cancer, although on the average only about a third of deaths among the general population are cancer-related.

While, this painful report from Israel carries a strictly local character, it should also serve as a warning elsewhere to fisherfolk and other people working in polluted harbours, rivers, and estuaries, worldwide. Better start looking at the incidence of cancer before it's too late.

The Kishon River

The Kishon River is still the most polluted stream in Israel and used to be one of the most polluted in the world, while the man-made Kishon Fishing Harbour is a trap for the pollutants. Some 30,000-75,000m3 of the industrial and municipal effluents, containing an array of highly concentrated carcinogenous heavy metals and organic compounds, some volatile, have been flowing daily into the lower Kishon during the two-and-a-half decades since the mid 1970s. The plaintiffs have, for many years, been exposed to the various carcinogens abounding in the harbour's extremely acidic waters, vapours and sediment, separately and their mixture, which most probably has created more than one noxious synergetic effect.

The fact that Kishon has been heavily polluted for decades was well known, first, to the polluters themselves, then to the laboratories who performed occasional studies, to the Water Commissioner's office whose legal duty was to deny water supply to polluting industries, to the Ministries of Health and of Environment, to municipal and inter-municipal bodies, as well as green organisations. None of the above, however, had warned the Kishon Harbour fishermen of the risks involved with their working place. They were concerned about the aquatic life; the loss of the river's aesthetic values; and the danger of having fish polluted and thus unfit for human consumption. Fishermen's health and safety problems have hardly received any public attention. “Sometimes I wish we were dolphins,” said one fisherman. “At least we would be getting plenty of publicity and sympathy”.

This is a David against Goliath type of struggle with an unpredictable outcome. The fishermen's two volunteering lawyers are facing some 40 lawyers from the biggest and most expensive law offices in the country, who excel in deliberately prolonging the court's proceedings. The court case has already dragged on for six years, and at the rate of its present progress, it may go on for another six. Other problems are the numerous experts that the defendants have hired to prove that there was no pollution, and if there was it was not concentrated enough, and if there was, it was not of the sort that would cause the types of cancer the fishermen were ill with, and if it did, there was no statistical significance, etc. The defence and the judge seem to have all the time in the world.

So far, the critical mass of the dozens of the feet dragging barristers and their many hired experts seems to affect the court's intermediate ruling, and only the future can tell the outcome. In the meantime, fishermen keep dying.

benyami@actcom.net.il