it's been described as an ecological catastrophe that wiped out marine life across much of the north east and north yorkshire coastline. we've seen crabs completely decimated. something catastrophic had gone

wrong with the ecosystem. it's dying. in fact it's not dying, we're murdering it. i itjust left you with a sinking feeling that there's going to be no future in thisjob. it's a really complicated difficult puzzle to try and fit together. everybody is treating the sea like it is a rubbish tip. it is mind blowing! there's a community that know the environment better- than anybody else, -

you know, listen to them. i used to go out to sea with me grandad. i think the first time i went out i was only seven. i used to sit on his chart table in the wheelhouse, drank his irn—bru and eat his crisps. we didn't believe it at first, within weeks it was happening to us. my god, what's going on here? it was frightening. something is not quite right. we used to see a lot younger crab to thrown back for the following year's fishery, but we aren't seeing that.

there is a decent enough catchment today. you are always thinking ahead to the future, you want to see plenty of stock, small stock, it is getting fed, you throw it back, you know you will catch it when it is right. it's taken maybe two thirds of our crab catches away over the last 8—9 months. it is a big hit, especially in this financial climate. there was tonnes and tonnes of stock washing up, that stock is our future

and it was being massacred. i'm a jill of all trades, i mix my time between being a carer, gardener, more than anything i do at least 40 hours a week a week of voluntary work. i spend hours a week investigating what's happened in the north sea. about the 6th of october, we had an absolutely massive wash—up of dead crab and lobster, and they stretched the whole way along here. my suspicions were something catastrophic had to have happened. i care so much because i can

see the absolutely destructive impact we have on the planet. those sea creatures out there don't have a voice, so that's why people when they say to me, "have you not got bored yet of ranting on?" i say, "actually, mate, no, i haven't." "and you're going to hear my voice more, because them lot out there don't have a voice and that's how i see it." these documents are probably a 1,000th of what i've actually got, and i'm not exaggerating. there's not much else in my head now. the start of the investigation with happened at that time which was out of the ordinary. the dredge stuck out like a sore thumb.

dredging is something which is necessary to maintain channels going in and out of ports. basically, if you've got a port and you don't dredge the sea, every tide will bring some sand and sediment back in the channel, and eventually it will block up so nobody would be able to get in and out. so near—daily dredging occurs where dredges will go along and gather up the sand and then will take it back out to spoil sites. what you have in a river like the tees is 120 years of toxic industry. so everything was dumped in there. whilst we have massively cleaned up the water column, what we still have, historically, is the residue of that.

my name'sjerry hopkinson, and i'm the chief operating officer and vice—chairmen of pd ports. pd ports is the fifth largest port in the uk, we handle about 30 million tonnes a year, here on the river tees. because of the nature of the tees, we have to pretty much dredge constantly and have been for the last a0 or 50 years. whilst we're not doing it 21w, we're doing it six days a week. i've sat with fishermen, listened to guys ask me if i got paid last month, "cos i didn't," so i understand why people are looking

for something to blame. if you look at the operation of this vessel, we're licensed to dredge about 2.9 million tonnes a year. this vessel took out 150,000 tonnes. ie 5% of our dredged volume. the facts are that the vessel is no bigger than the vessels we currently use. it was carefully controlled and monitored at all times by ourselves. in the immediate aftermath of its dredging, we went out and checked the depths that it had achieved via our survey craft, and it had dredged to the depth that we required it to go to.

and there was a subsequent testing of that area of the river and no issues found with regards to contamination. so essentially what we are taking out, we are taking out virgin are sound, that material was being removed from a path 2 kilometres long which is at right at the entrance into the river itself. in other words, we are not taking materials out from, if you like, the epicentre of industry on either side of the banks of the river tees. you know, what i've discovered is whilst it kinds of sounds like we're blaming pd ports for killing off the inshore waters, and, yes, i believe they possibly have, they haven't actually operated outside of their license. so, no, they haven't done anything wrong. the buck definitely stops with the government agencies.

how are they so sure it is safe to be allowed to dump at sea? they have to test once every 3 years. i couldn't believe that these were the highest european standards which defra were refusing to rule out dredging as being a threat to the marine environment. a surface scraping once every 3 years, that is not environmental analysis in any way, shape or form. what we are doing is taking a sample of this material down to a depth of about i foot. i think that is perfectly appropriate to the necessity to ensure that the material that we are taking out is in good order and condition.

if there is to be a step change in terms of the, if you like, to thresholds against which materials can be disposed of offshore, and that is for the government and the environmental organisations and the scientists to evaluate. so, i studied marine biology coastal ecology at university of plymouth, and then i wanted to come back to yorkshire and see if could get a job. so we're potting for lobsters, working about 250 pots off whitby. the idea is to try and protect

the lobster populations out in the wild, cos they're heavily fished and they're really commercially, ecologically important species. to do that, we'll take lobsters with eggs on from the wild, and the eggs will naturally release in a hatchery. we'll then protect the larvae. over their most vulnerable part of their life period, which is the first, sort of, five to six weeks. and once they're over that stage, we'll then release them into the wild. i've got core values at the hatchery, just to try and promote the, i guess, more positive sides of fishing and try to promote more positive signs of the marine environment and try to push for more of a balance between it, trying to protect it and nurture it, instead of take, take, take all the time.

so, like, sort of pre—mass mortality event. it was kind of booming. i suppose. in the last in the past 15 years, we've seen a 400% increase in the amount of lobsters landed into whitby. but what we want to make sure is that spike where it's going up and that boom doesn't come crashing down on the other side. so we're trying to kind of like solve a problem for tomorrow. we want to make sure juveniles, they will go to a safe environment. all the fishing communities, banded together and formed the north east fishing collective to really unify a voice and to show unity between us all. so i reached out

to tim deere—jones. he's a marine pollution consultant and we tasked him to do some research himself, to do some freedom of information requests and try to construct a report. from that, there was one thing he picked up which was really evident and had the potential to be the suspect behind the mass mortality event. he actually identified this pyridine in some of the samples from the environmental agency. pyridine, a toxic chemical, was present in high volumes in crabs washed up along the north—east coast. it's a toxic chemical which has potentially laid dormant in the dredged material. he actually links the resuspension to the dredging activity and theorises that is has a strong chance of being a causative factor. it was, kind of, like a sort of game—changing moment. really, that was. that was the first sign that we might have some

evidence or some backing for this dredging theory. there is a large—scale development to come specifically for the southbank quay, which will dwarf the amount of dredging that was done back in october. there is a certain area of that dredging which is which is

being classified that it has to be taken to landfill, because it's full of toxins and it's harmful if they take it to sea. if you've found harmful toxins, just take it all to landfill and process it. jump on board!

the villa revolution! the situation unfolding in front of us is dire. and we felt very very frustrated that there was no help from the authorities. they were disbelieving of us as if we didn't know our own environment. we also very helpless. we all felt helpless. what we are trying to get out of today is to reopen the case and what went on the back end of last year on the coast, stop the million tonnes or so of spoil that will come out of the river tees for the new development, and we need help because there

are people that are absolutely on their knees because the stock is not there. really want reimbursing for what we have lost out on. we want them to put something back, if it is proven, we want them to help the stocks to regain. make as much noise as possible and let them have it! it has been absolutely heartbreaking at times, you want to sit down and cry over what has gone on. but the coastal communities, you have the people in the street saying to you, "keep going, keep fighting it. you have to get to the truth of it all." it spurs you on to

fight the good fight. i'm gary caldwell and i'm a marine biologist here at newcastle university. my background is trying to understand how the sea and animals relate and any toxins that take place there. pyridine is a very useful industrial chemical, something we call a solvent, which is very good at dissolving other chemicals.

lots of industries use it, it is what we call a legacy pollutant, something that this historical and been used a long time back through industries like that stop. historically, there has been very poor control of effluent discharge, pollution basically being poured into the river. it was treated like an open sewer. we're trying to see how the crabs respond to pyridine, different amounts of pyridine, that's really important to understand, in their environment over three days. so it's trying to understand what the crabs do — do they die, don't they die, do we see signs of stress? hello, gentlemen.

welcome to my building. this is where we will be doing the experiment. don't go berserk thinking you can catch it! we have the animals exposed to the chemicals, we gave him plenty of oxygen, we keep them happy, so in theory the only thing that might cause them any distress is the chemical that we are exposing them to. when we were seeing crabs that were dowdy, so if you get a crab in that state, you will get a tell them, won't you? we can look at their behaviour as well, we do regular observations in what they are doing. there may not be a single factor responsible, but to be fair, you have a system that is under stress, and it may only take one more stress to knock at system over. it is peer again, that extra stress? i'm just waiting for

that eureka moment. we expect to get our ist real meaningful data in a weak�*s time. there is every possibility that we find it is not toxic at all. and that is just as important that it is toxic. should we find that pyridine is poisonous, and seeing deaths at the lower range we are exposing, that would put pyridine front and centre as a candidate. hi, gary! lovely to see you again. we were effectively asking a very simple question,

is pyridine toxic to crustaceans? and if yes, how toxic is it? the take home message is both good news and bad news, depending on your perspective. so pyridine is very toxic to crustaceans. there are no two ways about it. it was actually quite disturbing to find that we were finding a lot of the crabs were dead injust 6 hours. i was not quite expecting it to be quite so rapid, quite so striking. we never have expected it to be saying it so matter—of—factly as that. we found that pyridine was very toxic to the crabs. even at quite low levels. it was really quite striking. we were getting big behavioural changes, very agitated crabs, would even describe it as convulsions. and to the extent that we were

almost doing somersaults. it will take a bit of sinking in. the symptoms you are talking about in the crabs, the rolling forward, acting drunk, that was exactly what our fishermen have been saying. a single drop of pyradine in a litre of sea water, that is enough to kill half the population in three days. it is very poisonous. we still have some data to analyse, but the take—home message is pyridine is very toxic to crabs. given the amount of pyridine that was recorded in the crabs that had died, i think we are starting to see that smoking gun. we found out that pyridine can do that to the crabs, but now we have to find out whether it was there, whether it was in the water. so it is ongoing. it is just the first steps

really to finding the answers. i believe that the government agency should reopen the investigation and they should give the pyridine aspect of it the attention it deserves, we have enough information out to justify that.

hoping and praying that they will take on board this data and reinvestigate what happened, because it is not about proving who is right or wrong any more, it is genuinely about trying to improve things for the future. we will probably be out of business before we get a conclusion. i would like to think that we could keep the boats for another year, but if i feel like we are going to be going backwards too quickly during winter again, then i will have to sell it. and that is my dad as a little lad with my great grandad. mending herring nets. we keep on fighting and we will keep on fighting because we have got support

from our own people. hello there. certainly a mild start to thursday morning, but there will be outbreaks of rain around and also a lot of low cloud. a misty, murky start across england and wales. sunshine across aberdeenshire. unfortunately, that won't last, as the showery outbreaks of rain drift their way steadily northwards. some improvement across england and wales, despite a few showers moving through east anglia, but mild for all — top temperatures between 11! and 20 degrees. we might see one or two

places at 21 or 22. and then as we move through thursday evening, into the early hours of friday morning, more wet and increasingly windy weather will start to push in from the west. so here, it will be a wet start to friday. there will be some drier, brighter weather, but it's not expected to last. outbreaks of rain gradually drifting their way north, the heaviest of which will be always out to the north and west. once that rain clears, the sunshine comes through. once again, temperatures respond. a mild story for all. pyridine front and centre as a candidate.