Letter to the Editor originally published in the Ellsworth American
Dear Editor:
Last summer, some 116,000 salmon died mysteriously in the Canadian firm Cooke Aquaculture’s fish pens at Black Island, near Mount Desert Island. The same things that kill salmon kill other marine life, but state regulators don’t really know what killed all those fish. So the people of Maine will never know what collateral damage was done.
Here’s what we learned from this disaster:
• Maine’s fish factories are only minimally regulated. Imagine that 116,000 chickens dropped dead at a Maine poultry farm, or that slurry from a chemical plant left 116,000 fish rotting in a nearby river. Hearings would be called, violators would be charged and fines would be levied. But Maine lacks commonsense public health and safety rules for fish factories — they aren’t even required to report die-offs!
Several days after the carcasses were hauled away and after the pens had been disinfected, Cooke told Augusta that low oxygen levels accounted for the carnage, not parasites or chemicals. Their explanation was accepted; there was no serious state investigation. Nothing to see here, folks — move along, please!
• Our watchdogs are really lapdogs. Maine grants renewable 20-year leases of our waters to fish factories. Just a few weeks after the die-off, DMR held the required public hearing for a renewal of Cooke’s Black Island lease.
The only meeting announcement was a posting on an obscure page of the DMR website, and members of the public who wished to speak were required to register two weeks in advance. Most concerned citizens were unaware that the meeting had been scheduled.
So, despite widespread outrage about the die-off, interested citizens had missed the registration deadline and were not allowed to speak, nor were local fishermen who asked to be heard.
• We need leadership. Our inability to police our ocean resources is attracting foreign conglomerates with terrible environmental records. A Norwegian group is proposing to build another fish factory in Frenchman Bay. It would be many times the size of the Black Island operation. This proposal has been condemned by more than 22 communities, economic interests and conservation groups, but the very same agencies that let Cooke off the hook are moving the application forward.
Dozens of other new aquaculture leases are pending at the Department of Marine Resources. They threaten thousands of jobs in lobstering, tourism and fishing. State agencies are understaffed, underbudgeted and overwhelmed. We could soon have industrial-scale fish factories spewing effluent along the whole coast of Maine. Someone needs to prevent this from happening.
Governor Mills, will you help? Otherwise, Mainers could be just another bunch of back country rubes, taken advantage of by opportunists from away.
Mike Hyde
Trenton