FEATURE

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Sunshine Coast resident Mac Rich-
ardson with Wood Bay fish farm

(right).

ish farms have been touted as

an economic salvation for

British Columbia, a means of
supplementing the province's declining
wild salmon stocks, and a job-creator.
But as more and more of the floating
pens sprout in bays and coves around
the southern Pacific coast, residents,
environmentalists and fishermen are
crying foul.

Fish farms have increased in number
to close to 200 in the past three years,
thanks to the provincial government’s
practice of fast-tracking licence
applications.

The result is a dangerously
unregulated industry that poses an
environmental hazard through the use
of chemicals and the danger of waste
accumulation, upsets Canada’s.tradi-
tion of public access to the seashore,
introduces uncontrolled foreign owner-
ship of a resource and an industry, and
threatens the commercial fishery in
BG

On the Sunshine Coast, where the
bulk of the fish farms have been
established since the provincial

government began handing out licences
some five years ago, residents have
banded together to protest the
encroachment on public bays and inlets
and the degradation of views by the
industry.

Positions by critics on fish farms
range from calling for an outright ban
to moratoriums at least until a set of
regulations governing the industry is
established. But all agree that the
distribution of licences has been
virtually uncontrolled.

Particularly outspoken is Sunshine
Coast foreshore resident Mac
Richardson, whose home north of
Sechelt literally became neighbour to
the Wood Bay Salmon Farm
overnight.

“On Sunday morning (July 14, 1985)
I woke up to see a tug towing the first
of the pens into place,” Richardson
said.

Since then the farm has grown from
four to 16 pens and juts out further
into the bay. For Richardson, the
presence of the farm in an area initially
zoned residential was inexcusable,
resulting in the devaluation of land that

By Dan Keeton

contained an unhindered view of the
Strait of Georgia.

“They initially got into the area by
applying for a temporary permit. Now
the Wood Bay operation has a permit
to operate for 10 years,” he notes.

Richardson’s initial anger about the
farm being located in his area led him
to investigate the phenomenon itself.
He has amassed an impressive body of
documents that point to several
dangers — including that of severe
pollution problems down the road.

He puts it bluntly: “In my opinion,
these things are nothing but cesspools
of disease.”

Richardson says investigations have
shown that feces from the fish,
crowded into net-like pens and num-
bering up to one million in the larger
farms, combine with excess fish food to
form deposits of rotting organic matter
up to four inches deep on the ocean
floor.

(Last year, newspapers carried
accounts of a “brown scum” floating
on the surface of the water near some
B.C. fish farms.)

That problem can be especially acute
in areas around the Sunshine
Coast — most notably Porpoise Bay in
the north, an inlet that does not benefit
from frequent flushing by the tide, and
which has become choked with fish
farms. But even strong tidal activity
won’t solve the problem, says Arnie
Thomlinson.
Thomlinson, a Capilano College
teacher who is also environmental co-
ordinator for the United Fishermen
and Allied Workers Union, says the |
rotting matter produces ammonia, a
byproduct “highly toxic to all forms of
marine life.” |
“All that the tide will do is spread |
the waste over more of the sea bottom,
where it will accumulate, given enough

~time. It’s like building a longer pipe at

the Iona sewage outfall, when what is
needed is a second treatment plant. The
waste still gets dumped into the ocean.”

Also of concern are the antibiotics
and growth hormones fed to farm .
salmon. Richardson points toa manual
for salmon farmers, entitled The
Salmon Handbook, which warns of the
hazards to people eating salmon
containing antibiotic residues —for
which there is no testing.

Two of the antibiotics used in B.C.
are sulfamerazine and oxytetracycline.
Some 147 pounds of tetracycline per
acre per year are used by Washington
state salmon farmers, the Sierra Club
notes in a report that warns: “These
antibiotics may, in addition to their
ingestion by bottom organisms, create
strains of bacteria resistant to the
compounds used.

“Since some bacteria which may be
associated with fish pens are also
pathogenic in humans...the presence of
strains resistant to antibiotic therapy is
of obvious health significance,” the
report warns. |

The report, released last February,
goes on to warn about the health
hazards of tributyl tin — known
commonly as “TBT” — an anti-
foulant applied to the nets which form
the pens and also used to coat boat
hulls.

TBT traces were found in farmed
fish in provincial tests last year,
prompting a ban on the chemical by

-both the provincial and federal

governments. The ban had been sought
by the UFAWU, but its
implementation now, while welcome,
may be a bit like “closing the barn
door after the horse has left,”” Thomlin-
son says.

“Once someone finds out how easy
it is to use, it can be difficult to stop
using it. And no doubt there are some
fish farmers greedy enough to circum-
vent the ban,” he notes.

Thomlinson says that attempts by the
union to have fish carcasses analyzed
by local laboratories failed because the
labs lack the refined means to test for
the deadly toxin, which can be harmful
even in doses as low as a few parts per
billion.

Worker safety may also be in doubt
with the use of sex hormones and ;
steroids —Methyltestosterone and
Estradiol — on an experimental basis
on 18 B.C. fish farms, Gordon Wilson
warns.

Wilson, a member of the Sunshine
Coast regional district board, says the

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6 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, JANUARY 27, 1988