The Center for Public Integrity

As aggressive, unregulated fishing continues in the South Pacific, BBC World News will broadcast this weekend a documentary that features the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ recent probe into the plundering of jack mackerel, once one of the world’s most abundant fish.

Jack mackerel might not be familiar at the supermarket fish counter, but you have probably eaten it unaware in bites of farmed salmon. Much of jack mackerel is reduced to feed for pigs and aquaculture. It can take more than 5 kilos of jack mackerel to raise a single kilo of salmon.

The ICIJ investigation revealed that greed, mismanagement and lack of regulation have devastated the fishery — it went from 30 million metric tons to 3 million in just two decades.

The world’s largest trawlers, after depleting other fisheries, headed south to scoop up their catch before regulations were passed. But it’s been seven years since efforts started to create a regional fisheries management organization, and key fishing nations still have not ratified the convention, notably Peru, Chile and China.

Without binding limits, industrial fleets bound only by voluntary restraints compete in what amounts to a free-for-all in no man’s water.

The documentary “Looting the Pacific” was produced by London-based tve for BBC World News.

"Looting the Pacific" will broadcast at the following times:

Saturday, April 21, at 9:30 a.m. and 9:30 p.m.

Sunday, April 22, at 2:30 am, 3:30 p.m. (all times GMT)

I set off after the vanishing jack mackerel with trepidation. Who would care? It’s hard to love a bony fish with oddly shaped fins and oily flesh that swims in shoals far away in the southern Pacific. But as oceanographer Daniel Pauly told me, they are the last buffalo. Industrial fleets, moving southward, have hammered one fishery after another. When the jack mackerel are gone, Pauly said, everything will be gone because the expansion will be finished.

Ten months later, I wrapped up tve’s BBC documentary with this alarming but unavoidable conclusion:

“People keep saying we’ll find something else .. We’re at the point where there really is nothing else ... Once these fish stocks collapse, we won’t have them. The only solution is for us to get real, to understand the problem at whatever level and whatever way — to get it, to finally get it that this is not limitless. This is not limitless.”

This was the third and final part of “Looting the Seas,” by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Earlier award-winning installments looked at the Mediterranean bluefin tuna and depredation around the world by Spanish fleets.

Mar Cabra, a Spanish-based ICIJ reporter, dug deeply in Europe and plumbed arcane databases. We relied heavily on two hard-nosed investigative reporting groups, CIPER in Chile and IDL-Reporteros in Peru. I spent a month in South America and then went to New Zealand. In Hong Kong and Holland, I talked to main players: heads of giant fishing companies. On tiny islands at extremes of the earth — above the Arctic Circle and off New Zealand, eccentric ex-sailors showed me how they track fleets that catch jack mackerel.

Mitt Romney railed against the “Obama EPA” and “how the Obama government interferes with personal freedom” — using as his example an EPA action taken in 2007, under President George W. Bush.

Furthermore, it was a Republican-nominated federal judge who made the initial ruling — in EPA’s favor — that was overturned recently by the Supreme Court.

At issue was a longstanding Environmental Protection Agency precedent regarding a property owner’s right to challenge an EPA compliance order in court, a policy that had been upheld in at least four other court challenges over the last two decades.

Romney outlined the case during an address to the National Rifle Association on April 13.

Romney, April 13: "Mike and Chantell Sackett have seen firsthand how the Obama government interferes with personal freedom. They run a small business in Idaho. They saved enough money to buy a piece of property and build a home. But days after they broke ground, an EPA regulator told them to stop digging. The EPA said they were building on a wetland. But the Sackett’s property isn’t on the wetlands register. It sits in a residential area. Nevertheless, the EPA wouldn’t even let them appeal the decision. Fortunately, the Constitution confronted the Obama administration: The Supreme Court ruled unanimously for the Sacketts and against the Obama EPA."

Wading into a decade-old controversy, former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman has urged current EPA administrator Lisa Jackson to close loopholes in a 2006 chemical security law “before a tragedy of historic proportions occurs.”

Whitman, who led the EPA under George W. Bush, suggests the agency use its authority to seal gaps in Department of Homeland Security rules adopted in 2007, according to her April 3 letter to Jackson, obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

Those rules are “extremely limited,” Whitman wrote, barring DHS from requiring industry to take specific measures to prevent accidental or terrorism-related toxic releases. The rules, she wrote, exempt “thousands of chemical facilities, including all water treatment plants and hundreds of other potentially high-risk facilities, such as refineries located on navigable waters.”

The EPA has the power to regulate chemical security under 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, Whitman noted, writing that that the act’s “general duty” clause “obligates chemical facilities handling the most dangerous chemicals to prevent potentially catastrophic releases to surrounding communities.

“Facilities with the largest quantities … should assess their operations to identify safer cost-effective processes that will reduce or eliminate hazards in the event of a terrorist attack or accident,” Whitman wrote. “This has never been required and today hundreds of these facilities continue to put millions of Americans at risk.”

According to DHS testimony this year, there are 4,458 high-risk facilities nationwide.

Three separate Center for Public Integrity investigations examining toxic air, green energy contracts and hazards in oil refineries have won 1^st place honors in the Society of Professional Journalists’ prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Awards.

The prizes, among the national winners in a contest attracting more than 1,700 entries, were awarded for:

• Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities: Produced in partnership with National Public Radio and the Investigative News Network — won top honors for Public Service in Online Journalism. The series explored how, more than two decades after enhancements to the Clean Air Act, many communities still suffer poisoned air and regulatory neglect. The Center’s main stories were written by Jim Morris, Chris Hamby, Ronnie Greene, Elizabeth Lucas and Emma Schwartz.
• Green Energy: Contracts, Connections and the Collapse of Solyndra: Written by Ronnie Greene in partnership with ABC News, won the top honor for Online Investigative reporting. The series of reports documented breakdowns in the process by which the Department of Energy awarded lucrative green energy grants and loans.
• Fueling Fears: Written by Jim Morris and Chris Hamby, won top honors in Online Non-deadline reporting. The reports examined worker and environmental hazards at America’s aging oil refineries.

The national prizes were announced this week, and will be presented at a July 20 ceremony at the National Press Club.

Environmental groups sued the Environmental Protection Agency in federal court Thursday over the EPA’s failure to regulate disposal of toxic coal ash.

“Politics and pressure from corporate lobbyists are delaying much needed health protections from coal ash,” Lisa Evans, a lawyer with Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm, said in a statement. “As we clean up the smokestacks of power plants, we can’t just shift the pollution from air to water and think the problem is solved. The EPA must set strong, federally enforceable safeguards against this toxic menace.”

Coal ash is the collective term for the solid remnants left over from the burning of coal at more than 500 power plants nationwide. It contains compounds such as arsenic, chromium, lead and mercury, which have been linked to cancer, birth defects, gastrointestinal illnesses and reproductive problems.

A 2009 investigation by the Center for Public Integrity revealed the havoc that coal ash has wreaked near ponds, landfills, and pits where it is dumped. Even the EPA has identified 63 “proven or potential damage cases” in 23 states where coal ash has tainted groundwater or otherwise harmed the environment. But critics say no meaningful federal regulations have been put in place.

The issue gained renewed attention after a dam holding billions of gallons of coal ash collapsed in eastern Tennessee in December 2008, destroying houses and water supplies and dirtying a river. Following the spill, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson pledged to set federal standards.

In one of the deadliest nightclub fires in American history, 100 people died at a rock concert in Rhode Island nearly a decade ago. But the biggest killer wasn't the flames; it was lethal gases released from burning sound-insulation foam and other plastics.

In a fatal bit of irony, attempts to snuff fires like this catastrophic one could be making some fires even more deadly.

New research suggests that chemicals – brominated and chlorinated flame retardants – that are added to upholstered furniture and other household items to stop the spread of flames increase emissions of two poisonous gases.

"We found that flame retardants have the undesirable effect of increasing the amounts of carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide released during combustion," study co-author Anna Stec, a fire specialist at the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.

These two gases are by far the biggest killer in fires. They are responsible for 60 to 80 percent of fire deaths, according to the National Fire Protection Assn. During the Rhode Island fire, the levels of hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide were high enough to kill in less than 90 seconds.

When a U.S. Coast Guard inspector boarded the M/T Chem Faros, a 21,145-gross-ton cargo ship that pulled into port in Morehead City, N.C., an oiler with the engine crew quietly handed him a note.

"GOOD MORNING SIR, I WOULD LIKE TO LET YOU KNOW THIS SHIP DISCHARGING BILGE ILEGALLY USING BY MAGIC PIPE,” the note said. “IF YOU WANT TO KNOW ILLEGAL PIPE THERE IN WORKSHOP FIVE METERS LONG WITH RUBBER.”

The crewman’s hand-scrawled note, passed that March day two years ago, triggered an inquiry that unmasked a wave of high-seas pollution and phony recordkeeping as the ship ferried cargo in Asia and the U.S. The crew had used the so-called magic pipe to divert oily waste overboard at least 10 times in six months. Eleven days before the inspection, the chief engineer ordered 13,200 gallons of oil-contaminated waste dumped into the ocean.

The ship’s owner, Cooperative Success Maritime S.A., was fined $850,000 and sentenced to five years’ probation after its guilty plea. And the chief engineer — after cooperating with authorities — was sentenced to one year of probation. “The oceans must be protected from being used as dump sites for waste oil or other hazardous substances,” said Maureen O’Mara, special agent-in-charge of the Environmental Protection Agency’s criminal enforcement program in Atlanta, in June 2010. A company attorney declined comment.

That Department of Justice prosecution is one piece of a larger federal crackdown targeting dumping on the high seas, a form of pollution that taints global waterways and is drawing increased scrutiny.