METALS - Marine Pollution: What Everyone Needs to Know - page 84

marsh plants than in bare sediments, perhaps due to higher
microbial activity in sediments around roots. Common reeds
can release a volatile form of inorganic mercury into the air,
thereby removing some from contaminated sites but sending
it elsewhere.
What are some highly mercury-contaminated sites?
In the late 1950s and 1960s, thousands of people in Minamata,
Japan suffered from mercury poisoning. This community had
a factory that discharged mercury into Minamata Bay, from
which the people ate fish that had accumulated the poison in
their tissues. Local residents developed severe neurological
and developmental defects, a condition now called Minamata
disease, sending a wake-up call to the rest of the world that
exposure to mercury can have life-long neurological effects.
Thousands suffered from poisoning, which in extreme cases
led to insanity, deformation, and death. Many children whose
mothers had eaten contaminated fish were born with severe
disabilities, even when their mothers had no overt symptoms.
Berry's Creek Marsh, a contaminated Superfund site in the
Hackensack Meadowlands of New Jersey, also has extremely
high concentrations of mercury in its sediments as a result
of industrial pollution. The Hackensack and Passaic Rivers
and Newark Bay formed a major center of the Industrial
Revolution. Paper, paint, chemical factories, and plants that
manufactured gas were some of the early manufacturing
facilities in the area, and the factories used the rivers and estu-
ary for wastewater disposal, which at the time was quite legal.
As a result, the entire system—not only Berry's Creek—is
highly contaminated with PCBs, dioxins, PAHs, and mercury.
Fortunately, the mercury has largely not become methylated
and has not accumulated to Minamata-type levels in local fish,
because of other factors. In this area, there is so much sulfide
in the sediments as a result of years of accumulating wastes
from sewage treatment plants that the mercury is chemically