Troublesome catch
One spring morning, the crew of the Danish fishing boat Soraya was catching cod in the Baltic
Sea near the Polish territorial waters. As the men pulled their fish on board, the young fisherman,
Theis Branick, went under the net to make sure it was all right and to open it. When the fish spilled out
onto the deck, he found the net had also caught something else – a large, yellow-brown lump of
a strange substance. The Soraya fishermen suspected the additional catch might be a throwback from
the past. And they were right – what Branick found turned out to be a big piece of solidified mustard
gas from World War II.
“It was a huge lump, weighing about 15 kg, and with no traces of metal casing,” says Michael
Jepson, skipper of the Soraya. He realized how dangerous the catch was and immediately followed
the regulations and alerted the military authorities on Bornholm. Soon the navy officers boarded
the boat, inspected the poison and took it away. They were going to throw it back into the sea in
a designated dumping area. Two hours later Branick started to feel strange. “I was fine outside in
the cold, but when I came into the warm cabin it started to itch and burn like hell on my back. I took off
my clothes. The others said I had a red spot the size of a fist on my back.”
Fishing has long been regarded as one of the world’s most dangerous occupations. Many
fishermen around the world die each year in weather-related accidents. But in the Baltic Sea there is
another danger – about 35,000 tons of chemical munitions sunk by the Russians in the late 1940s near
Bornholm and the Swedish island of Gotland, west of Latvia. Even more dangerous loads, sealed in
German warships, were sunk by Britain and the U.S. in the deep waters of the Skagerrak, an arm of
the North Sea, and in the Norwegian Sea. Over time, some of the weapons in the Baltic, e.g.: blister
agents (such as sulfur mustard), and other chemical irritants, which were once the property of Nazi
Germany, have lost their metal casings. As a result, they become solidified and get directly into water
where they are caught in fishing nets. This is another danger fishermen face.
“In the Baltic,” says Commander K.M. Jorgensen of the Danish Navy, “the shells were dumped
over the rails of Russian ships. In the Skagerrak, they were sunk inside ships that are now lying in 500
to 700m of water.” The Helsinki Commission, which works to protect the Baltic marine environment,
has said the toxins should be left on the seabed. That is the general agreement. “It has been there for so
long that it poses the least hazard where it is,” says biologist Henning Karup of Denmark’s
Environmental Protection Agency. Only a few fishermen have been treated for gas-related injuries
since the 1960s, and the long-term environmental impact is unclear.
A Greenpeace Denmark spokesman, Jackob Hartmann, admits that trying to raise the chemicals
“might pose new and even worse problems”. But he also says: “It is not an easy issue, and referring to
a 1994 report by the Helsinki Commission isn’t good enough. We need updated information on
the state and location of the materials.” But there are no plans and funds for a new survey, and
neighboring countries accuse each other of not sharing information.
The Ecology and Foreign Affairs committees of Russia’s Parliament held hearings on weapons,
then recommended a program of evaluation, monitoring and forecasting. “We keep working on
the issue,” says Vladymir Mandrygin, chief of the Ecology Committee. “However, not all our Baltic
neighbors are supportive; they prefer not to talk about it. Russian scientists have been offering various
projects for handling the issue, but there is no financing.” Another Russian expert adds that old
munitions are not only a potential threat to ecology and harm to fishermen, “but most importantly,
they put at risk gas pipes and communication cables lying on the sea shelf.”
The young Danish fisherman was lucky. “I only got hit by the water that had been in contact
with the gas. If I had touched the gas itself, it could have been much, much worse.” Like their
governments, Baltic fishermen are learning to live with the danger.