“You don’t need to be a scientist to know if you dredge up toxic sediment and dump it in the sea it will have an impact.”
“You don’t need to be a scientist to know if you dredge up toxic sediment and dump it in the sea it will have an impact.”
An interview with seal rescuer and coastal advocate Sally Bunce from the north-east of England
“You don’t need to be a scientist to know if you dredge up thousands of tonnes of toxic sediment and dump it in the sea it will have an impact… I rescue seals and I’m sick to death of what’s happened in the marine environment here.”
The apocalyptic mass crustacean die-offs in the north-east of England, which have seen tens of thousands of dead crabs, lobster, starfish, and shrimp wash up on local beaches over the last 16 months have shocked communities up and down the coastline.
Sally Bunce, a seal rescuer, and coastal advocate is one of their number. She co-founded the group Reclaim Our Sea and along with local fishermen from the North East Fishing Collective, has been campaigning tirelessly to raise awareness of the problem and fund research into its causes. This hasn’t been easy as scientists have linked the marine deaths to dredging in the area, which took place in preparation for the government’s high-profile Freeport development. Government reports dispute this but they’re also refusing to #pausethedredge to find out the actual cause. I hope you enjoy this chat.
Hey Sally, when did you first notice there was a problem in the sea?
I was blissfully unaware at first, as I didn’t have any friends who were fisherman back then. I rescue seals and from around January 2022 we started to pick up seal pups that were noticeably underweight. They didn’t have lung worm burdens or respiratory diseases, which might have explained it, but they were just skin and bone.
And they had this mouth condition where their soft tissue had rotted in their mouths which had got through to the bone and we were having to put them down. We’d never seen anything like it before.
When seals are weaned off, at just 16 days old, they’ll scavenge along the bottom because they’ve never been in the water with mum or chased a fish in their whole life, so they go for the easy option, but it was clear there was nothing for them to eat. The seal is an indicator species as it eats everything down the food chain, so it lets us know what’s going on in our marine environment.
I spoke to some fisherman and asked if they were catching anything, and they said they weren’t, so I went to my first fisherman’s meeting in February and have been involved since then [with Stan Rennie and Joe Redfern at the North East Fishing Collective].
When had the fishermen first noticed things weren’t right?
“The Orca” vessel started dredging on 26th September 2021. On the second day of dredging the fishermen who catch crabs in tyres in the River Tees, noticed the crabs in their tyres were all dead. By the fifth day, the lobster and crab fishermen were finding them dead in their pots and then two days after the dredge ended, there was a big swell which brought in tens of thousands of dead and dying crab and lobster.
These die-offs continued and slowly spread down as far as Bridlington [over 80 miles south] over a period of three weeks. Since then, we’ve had at least 10 major die-offs, ranging from flat fish to razor clams to barnacles. Towards the end of last year, we had washed-up shrimp stretching for about six miles, two weeks ago we had thousands of dead starfish wash up and all the kelp around Hartlepool died, it was just the stalks left which looked horrendous. Stan Rennie has lived on the harbour there all his life and he said he’d never seen anything like it before. No one has seen anything like this before.
The government agency Defra originally suggested it was a toxic algal bloom, but research funded by the fishermen linked the die-offs to dredging in the area…
Yes, it should be the investigating agencies who are doing this, but the fishermen are having to raise the funds to pay for this analysis for stuff that members of the public are collecting. It’s citizen science.
Based on historic data, [cited by the academic DrJacqui Reed], the Tees is the most toxic site in the UK. Dr Gary Caldwell [a Senior Lecturer in Applied Marine Biology at Newcastle University] has been amazing and going above and beyond what he needs to do. He’s adamant that the stuff [that is being dredged] must not go to sea and other scientists at Durham and York have been helping me set up citizen science projects, empowering local people to be able to help prove what is going on here.
Ben Houchen, the Tees Valley Mayor is trying to paint the academics as having an agenda but the whole thing is a government agenda, because of the Freeport they’re building on the banks of the River Tees. They have eight to roll out and this one simply can’t fail. But they’re all going to be built on industrialised toxic rivers including the Mersey, that’s why the Labour MP [Ian Bryne for Liverpool West Derby] was kicking off about whether the die-off inquiry would be independent because he’s looked at it and thought he’s not sure if he wants one if it’s going to involve toxins being dumped off our seas.
There’s a BBC archive news article from 1969 where two mums are talking about how their children had buried themselves in the sand at South Gare, Redcar and within hours they were covered in chemical burns and that same stuff is what we’re about to unleash into the sea. We cleaned up that river and nature has sealed in those toxins, so we should leave them there.
I know quite a few surfers who’ve been ill. Not the usual swimming in sewage stomach upsets but these guys have been talking about kidney pain and feeling like their eyes are on fire and like they can’t breathe in their lungs. Surfers are obviously addicted to surfing and they will take risks to go in, but I know people who’ve stopped surfing at South Gare as it's so close to the river and because they felt so ill.
I also talked to some divers recently who pick up the rubbish (like old fishing gear) from the bottom by the mouth of the Tees. They said they had to come out as they’ve never seen it that bad ever. It was like a thick broth of rotted down leaves and their suits were getting covered in it, but they couldn’t wash it off.
Last year, you organised a series of local gatherings through Reclaim Our Sea a local action group you co-founded to raise awareness about the die-off. How did they go?
They were amazing. We’ve had hundreds of people come down from local communities including lots of surfers. At one of them, I was standing on a bin talking to everyone and a surfer stuck a plaque on it that said: “This is the bin where Sally Bunce inspired us all to save the sea,” which I thought was funny and sweet. We created a crab with mobile phone lights and then filled it with marine-themed lanterns.
It was just to show what we’d achieved so far, because when we started it felt like David and Goliath but talking to a government agency officer recently, he said you’ve got them seriously on the back foot. We’ve been heard in parliament and forced the government to appoint an independent committee to look at all of the data and that’s massive.
You don’t need to be a scientist to know if you dredge up thousands of tonnes of toxic sediment and dump it in the sea it will have an impact. I rescue seals and I’m sick to death of what’s happened in the marine environment here, I can’t not give it a go.
How do you feel about the latest report, which said the die-offs were unlikely to be an algal bloom or due to toxic pollutants from dredging such as pyridine, instead suggesting it could be a new pathogen?
It was clear pretty quickly that the report isn’t worth anything and the more we look into it the more we realise it’s flawed on every level. It’s frustrating that we don’t seem to be able to get anybody to actually do this properly. It’s almost debilitating.
We’re in contact with another government agency and they’ve said they don’t know where they’ve got this from as we ruled out all pathogens six months into this investigation. and there had been no new work done. All pathogens leave a trace of their existence, but there was no trace.
Defra themselves found pyridine in extortionate levels in crabs and a route of transport from the sediment into the crab meat meat, so to then hedge your bets on a pathogen with no evidence of its existence is like wow. It’s a stalling tactic to be able to continue this dredge as there is so much riding on it for the Freeport.
It looks like the panel weren’t given a lot of evidence from the universities, so they were only allowed to consider what was on the table in front of them. If there was a mystery disease in the sea that was killing everything, there would be millions thrown into finding out what it is as it could potentially spread round the whole UK and kill all of the fishing industry.
What are your next steps?
We’ve got more sediment samples that we are testing so we’ll see what comes back. We haven’t had any die-offs from this latest round of dredging, but it would take a while as they’re dumping it six miles out. Plus, we haven’t got a great deal left alive on the bottom to die off, and there are far less seals this winter.
But we just want to keep this story out there. All the public are behind us, we were filming with BBC Countryfile this week and people kept coming up and saying to them: “You’ve got to help with this, it’s so wrong.” Every job that is going to be created at these Freeports you’ll potentially lose more from existing industries like fishing and tourism.
To find out more about Reclaim Our Sea head here.
And you can read the piece I did for Huck on the mass crustacean die-offs here, featuring Sally and the North East Fishing Collective, who have a crowdfunder going to fund independent research and their legal fees which you can donate to here.
Other news:
Lots of people have been asking where they can see The Big Sea, the film about the problem with neoprene & surfing’s toxic supply chain, directed by Lewis Arnold, who I interviewed here. There is a preview screening later this month with
& Finisterre but it looks like that is sold out but if you keep an eye on The Big Sea website you can find out about future screenings and their forthcoming crowdfunding campaign. Lewis and Chris Nelson, the film’s producer also did an insightful Q & A with here.Jamie Brisick’s podcasts for The Surfer’s Journal are always immense but his interview with Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard might be my favourite episode yet.
Please fwd this newsletter to anyone who you think might be interested & if you have any story tips on any of these themes pls get in touch.