Teesworks

Demolitions

 and the Tees

Bay die-off:

an Update

Scott Hunter

10 January 2024

On 6 December we published a report arguing the case that pyridine was discharged from the Teesworks site during the demolition of the Dorman Long Tower on 21 September 2021 (joining-the-dots-the-tees-freeport-and-the-mass-destruction-of-sea-life). At Teesmouth it was trapped by the sand bar where routine dredging began few days later. The churn caused by the dredging led to the dispersal of the pyridine initially in the immediate area of Bran Sands, with die-off of crustaceans first reported in early October 2021.

Shortly after publication we were contacted by Hartlepool fisherman, Stan Rennie, who pointed out that the timeline of events was actually much shorter than we had claimed and that the first report of die-off was sooner than we had reported. In essence, we had been unduly cautious in our reporting. But there is another piece of information that has recently come to light that we think helps to validate our hypothesis. 

New Evidence from the Environment Agency

A long-delayed response to a Freedom of Information request to the Environment Agency (EA) then provided another surprising twist. At the end of November 2021, responsibility for investigating the incident passed from the EA to Defra. The handover document (High level operational handover of incident response (26/11/21) – Crustacean Mortality event (04/10/21 ongoing), contains the following comment:

“The incident originally started just south of Teesport a major international shipping port.” [italics ours]

In all other documents, the first report of die-off is given as early October at Bran Sands, and therefore downstream of Teesport. This comment places the first evidence of the incident upstream of the port, and therefore much closer to the site of the demolitions on 21 September 2021.

Closer also to the watercourses we showed on the historic map in our December report. Also in this vicinity is the Lackenby Outfall, a culvert that continuously discharges contaminants into the Tees, and some of whose sources run close to the site of the demolitions.

We are now writing to the EA for the evidence on which this statement is based, but it could take some time. The information we received from them in December was requested in June. To be fair, the EA is always politely apologetic when delaying delivery of the information we request. We have since had an apology from for not yet sending us the details of the sampling of material from the Teesworks site that they undertook in the autumn of 2021. We are patient, however. We have to be; there’s a lot at stake here.

Stan Rennie’s Evidence

In our December article we gave the date of first detection of dying crustaceans on beaches as 6 October 2021. This, in fact, was the first date on which officers of the North East Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority (NEIFCA) visited an affected area. It was not, however, the first report. That, as Stan Rennie points out, was at Greatham Creek on 25 September (shore crab).  This was followed by reports on 26 September from Hartlepool (crab and lobster), and then South Gare on 30 September.

The maintenance dredge by UKD Orca began on 25 September. The first report of crustacean die-off was therefore within 24 hours of the start of the Orca dredge, the sediment churn that ensued, we believe, spreading the contamination first across the immediate area, before it was dragged southwards on the current (and from there out to sea. In reports we have obtained, affected crustaceans were later found up to five nautical miles form the shore).

We should point out that in an earlier report (poison-earth-how-teesworks-exports-its-toxic-legacy) we presented evidence that the incoming material that creates the sand bar at Teesmouth always becomes contaminated with discharge from the Tees. In September 2021, as soon as the Orca started its operation a much higher than normal amount of contaminated material became suspended in the water.

That the churn from the dredge should have such an immediate impact on various species in the vicinity, makes our case all the more plausible. And while the EA and Defra reports consistently claim that the incident affected only crustaceans, in fact, in its initial stages birds, especially razorbills, also fell victim.

We were accused, following our December report of relying on the coincidence of the demolition and the start of the die-off to make our case. We accept the criticism, but in our defence, we must point out that Defra, by closing down the live investigation in November 2021, has made a more analytical approach impossible. Our investigation is now historical, and the best we can do is to assemble as many coincidences as possible, to support the case we are making.

One of these arises from Defra’s claim that the die-off was caused by harmful algal bloom (HAB).

2022, the year of the algal bloom theory

At an earlier stage of our investigation we suggested that Defra took over the investigation from the EA because it wanted to call a halt to its investigation into pollution as a possible cause. The recent tranche of emails and reports we have obtained indicate that, in fact, senior officers at the EA were only too happy to be able to wash their hands of the investigation, given that they hadn’t come up with what they saw as a plausible explanation for the mortality incident (most significantly their belief that the pyridine levels they detected in the environment were too low to cause death, when in reality they did not know at what concentration pyridine became toxic to crustaceans).

No sooner had Defra taken control of the investigation than they closed it down, and then started inventing reasons why mortality might have occurred. The most notorious of these was Harmful Algal Bloom, with which Defra persisted throughout 2022, until a notionally ‘independent’ expert panel that they set up themselves to examine competing explanations for the die-off said that it was patent nonsense.

Being nonsense does not mean, however, that it was inconsequential. Its consequences were that attention was directed away from Teesworks’ role in the event, the fishers affected were denied any compensation, and Defra denied that continuing die-off events were in any way connected.

But the panel’s dismissal of the HAB theory provides us with another coincidence. The expert panel stated that HAB would have been a wide spectrum killer had it been present and would not have targeted crustaceans only. They then hammered home the point by explaining that there was no evidence of there having been any HAB (K. Mikimotoi) in the area at the time anyway:

“[while] … elevated K. mikimotoi … occurred on the east coast of the UK a month prior to the mortality event there is no phytoplankton cell count data immediately before or during the first week in October. Phytoplankton monitoring did not extend into October in the region, but phytoplankton cell densities typically decrease through October reaching low background values in November and the winter months.”

This was embarrassing for Defra as, not only had they falsely claimed that K.Mikimotoi was present in Tees Bay at the time of the incident, they had, in a report published in May 2022, produced a map to prove it. The ‘Independent Panel’ used a similar one in their report:

It’s the density of chlorophyll that demonstrates that there is something unusual in the water, and the intense yellow area towards the bottom of the map is Teesmouth. The panel then referred to the conclusions of the Plymouth Laboratory responsible for producing the satellite images which were that this was not K. mikimotoi, but could have been either another (non-toxic) algal bloom or alternatively suspended sediment.



Now, while it is possible that there was some kind of algal bloom at that time, the one thing that is indisputable is that there was suspended sediment, as this was precisely the week that the Orca dredge started.

And the Orca dredged an area that is regularly cleared with no (extreme) ill effects on sea life. Until September 2021. This is what led to our conclusion that the level of contamination in the sediment at that time was not only much higher than it had ever been before, but, also that, unusually, it contained significant levels of pyridine.

Pyridine is water soluble, so would rapidly dilute. It could persist in the marine environment only through adsorption to sediment, sediment that in this event was stirred up by the Orca during dredging. (We now know, however, that only water from the affected area was analysed at the time. No sediment analysis was undertaken).

What we now see is that the effect of this was immediate and the die off began within hours of the start of the dredging operation.

Crustacean stocks have shown very poor recovery since 2021, as reported to the Crustacean Deaths Collaborative Working Group (an initiative by local councils from the Tees Valley and North Yorkshire to examine the ongoing issues of marine mortality in the region). Whether or not pyridine contamination continues to play a role in this is unknown.

One reason for this is Defra’s unhelpfulness. It has persistently refused to undertake sampling and analysis of sediments to test for residual pyridine and has refused licences to researchers to test for themselves (as reported by Dr Caldwell of Newcastle University to the Working Group). We have since discovered that Defra may have been even more unhelpful than Dr Caldwell realises however.

In minutes of an EA-hosted meeting of the Tees Coastal Crustacean Incident Partners’ Meeting on 19 November 2021, one of the documents obtained by us through FOI, we find that, actually sediment sampling was undertaken:

“Sediment grab samples have been collected, but in storage and awaiting decision for analysis.”

A week later, responsibility for the investigation passed to Defra. So, where are those samples now?  And why won't Defra surrender them to investigators?

Since this original mortality event, there has been a massive dump of contaminated material in coastal waters from the capital dredging of the Tees as part of the South Bank Quay project. This material contains high levels of various hydrocarbons and may account for much of the subsequent devastation in North East coastal waters.

The fact that this project is also part of the work undertaken by the South Tees Development Corporation/Teesworks adds to the urgent need for the work of those organisations to be properly investigated, and for those responsible for what appears to be a complete indifference to the environmental consequences of their enterprise to be held properly to account.

At the time of writing, we await an inquiry report into allegations of financial mismanagement at Teesworks. That inquiry has been widely criticised for its lack of independence from certain interested parties in government. But the corruption allegations form only one part of the case against Teesworks and the South Tees Development Corporation. Time they were also held to account for their role in the destruction of the region’s fishing industry and the ongoing contamination of our coastal waters.