Eighteen Mile Creek in Niagara County is so polluted that the state Department of Health doesn’t want people to eat the fish caught there. It’s one of only six waterbodies in the state with such a warning.
This hasn’t stopped another arm of the state, the Department of Environmental Conservation, from stocking the contaminated creek each year with an average of 160,000 of what are considered among the most desirable of fish: salmon and trout.
As a result, a section along Eighteen Mile Creek in the Town of Newfane has become a fishing hotspot, part of the Lake Ontario watershed’s $113 million dollar recreational fishing industry.