Kishon River and Haifa Bay

The pollution began in the 1930s with the refineries and petrochemical plants of Haifa Bay; in the 1960s and 1970s the discharges of the fertiliser industry and of the Haifa wastewater treatment plant were added. Hydrocarbons and heavy metals settled on the river bed. According to Wikipedia patches of the river caught fire on several occasions. In 2000 dozens of veterans of a navy commando unit who had trained as divers in the river sued industries and the state for damage to their health, including cancer.

The Kishon River Authority was set up in 1994. In the late 1990s the Ministry of Environmental Protection imposed discharge permits on seven major plants and on the treatment works: by January 2002 the pollution load had fallen by up to 90% and the acidity had gone; fish, birds and turtles came back. The sediments remained. The 2006 survey confirmed contamination of the last seven kilometres by total petroleum hydrocarbons and metals, especially cadmium and chromium: about 400,000 m³ to be removed, plus 150,000 m³ of sludge dredged in the 1990s and left in ponds on the bank.

In the bay, mercury from the ECI chlor-alkali plant and the Kishon industries had fallen almost to reference levels after discharges ended in 2000. Between 2006 and 2014, however, it rose in three commercial fish species: up to 251 µg/L and 2,200 ng/g of total mercury were measured in groundwater and sediments near the former plant.