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FCEC Newsletter

I would like to welcome everyone to our first edition of the Fish Contamination Education Collaborative (FCEC) eNewsletter. We hope that the eNewsletter will be a useful resource to keep interested parties informed and connected with FCEC’s status and EPA’s activities related to the Palos Verdes Shelf superfund site.

This 2008 marks the eighth year that FCEC has been working to protect the health of at-risk communities affected by the Palos Verdes Shelf DDT and PCB contamination. During this time, FCEC has accomplished a great deal, but there is still much more that needs to be accomplished to protect public health.

Looking back, some of the things FCEC has accomplished include the following:

In this past year, working with S. Groner Associates, Inc. (SGA), we’ve been able to build on a solid foundation of awareness and assess behavior change in communities we’ve reached. We looked at behavior change in the angler outreach program and with the Vietnamese outreach program, and saw that we were able to influence community members to change their fishing and fish consumption behaviors to protect their health.

Moving forward, we will continue to raise awareness among key populations and we will also evaluate behavior change as a tool to numerically measure program effectiveness. We will continue to do so in the angler and Vietnamese outreach programs. Similarly, when FCEC expands our outreach program to the Chinese community, our goal will be two-fold: to raise awareness and compel behavior change.

This last year we also implemented another opportunity to obtain community input into the community outreach program through the Community Resource Council (CRC). As we plan for the future, our CRC members will play an important part in providing insight, lending their areas of expertise and serving FCEC in an advisory capacity.

In the recent years, jointly with local and state enforcement agencies, EPA has completed and/or is close to completing detailed enforcement work planning activities with county environmental health departments and the California Department of Fish and Game.  I am happy to report the kick off of this full scale enforcement program.  This is a culmination of many folks’ persistent efforts, some of which dated back to more than a decade ago.

In this past year, we also worked with all the agencies and community groups to develop a strategy on which to focus efforts over the next five years through the Institutional Controls Road Map. Moving forward, we will move the prioritized tactics identified in the Road Map into the Palos Verdes Shelf Institutional Controls Program Implementation Plan. As we carry out the programmatic efforts, we will use the Implementation Plan as a guide to direct our tactics and to evaluate programmatic success.

This coming year is going to be busy and exciting! Thank you for your continued participation, support and interest in this program! We hope you find this newsletter to be a resource that keeps you updated and informed on our activities. If you’d like to contribute to the newsletter or have ideas for stories, please send an email to info@pvsfish.org.

Sincerely,

Sharon Lin
EPA Region 9
Remedial Project Manager