Another 20 year infestation provided by your Provincial Government. Even after there was a committee formed by them that recommended no new farms. So thats the support were getting for the wild fish, replace them with farms. Go ahead and make little points about sport fishing and the damage it causes. Or stay focused on the real problems that affect the fish. These pens have wiped out the wild fish in every place they've been.
B.C. fish farm salmon escape
Canadian Press
September 6, 2007 at 4:00 PM EDT
Ashousat, B.C. — Native fishing boats are dropping seine nets around a Clayoquot Sound salmon farm following a harvesting accident that tore a one-metre hole in a net pen Tuesday.
Alistair Haughton, deputy managing director of Mainstream Canada, said trawlers from Ahousat, B.C., are working a one-kilometre radius around the company's Saranac farm in an effort to catch any Atlantic salmon that may have escaped.
“We're rounding up as many as we can get our hands on,” said Mr. Haughton. “I'd like to have five to six boats anyway.”
Mr. Haughton said the company won't know how many Atlantic salmon may have escaped from the farm until at least Friday morning.
Mainstream Canada is a subsidiary of Cermaq, a Norwegian-based salmon-farming company.
Located in the traditional territory of the Ahousaht First Nation, the Saranac farm holds 10, 30-by-30-metre pens, each about 15 metres deep, and protected by an inner net, known as a containment or grower net, and an outer net, known as a predator net.
The company grows Atlantic salmon.
Mr. Haughton said accident occurred during a routine harvest after workers accidentally tore a hole in one pen's containment nets with a shackle.
A worker saw Atlantic salmon swimming between the containment and predator net.
Mr. Haughton said workers immediately implemented the company's escape-response plan, informed the provincial government and dropped secondary nets inside the containment pen to plug the hole.
The company called in divers who repaired the hole, which he estimated was about one metre in diameter, he said.
Mr. Haughton said the net pen held about 20,000 Atlantic salmon, and the company will know how many escaped after it counts how many fish remain inside the containment and predator nets.
He said the company is currently dropping gillnets inside the pens.
“There's quite a few thousands still in the pen.
“It's really an unfortunate incident because we have such an excellent record.”
Environmentalists, however, criticized the company and the provincial government for not following through on recommendations made by a provincial government committee to move towards closed containment farms.
“It's another example of the inherent risks of farming salmon in open nets in the ocean,” said Maryjka Mychajlowycz, a campaigner with the Friends of Clayoquot Sound.
“It's companies playing Russian roulette with wild salmon for corporate profit and this is unacceptable.”
“This should be another wake-up call to the B.C. government.”
This past April, the Clayoquot Sound Central Region Board approved a 20-year lease for the Saranac site and eight other Mainstream farms in Clayoquot Sound.