A shipping container full of empty industrial-sized fish food bags fell off a barge heading from Baranof Island to the landfill in Petersburg. Dozens of the plastic bags have washed up near Juneau over the past week.
They came from the Hidden Falls Hatchery, owned by the Northern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association.
Adam Olson, the operations manager at the aquaculture association, says high winds likely caused a container to go overboard near the southern tip of Admiralty Island in May. In a press release, the aquaculture association said that the barge company it contracted to transport the trash, Lituya Freight Runners, did not contact them or make any efforts to recover the bags.
Instead, another vessel traveling through Chatham Strait notified hatchery staff about the incident on May 20. Olson says he did not report it to any authorities. A representative at the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation couldn’t specify an official process for reporting such an incident in Alaska.
Hatchery staff attempted to clean up the spill.
“We flew the area to see what was there, and we sent staff from the facility out in skiffs to collect refuse out of the water,” Olson said.
Olson says hatchery staff retrieved more than a thousand bags over six days, but there could be thousands left in the water.
The bags are white and the size of large dog food bags. Most of them are from an aquaculture brand called Bio-Oregon and others are from a brand called EWOS.
Juneau resident Wayne Carnes discovered the litter about 90 miles north of the spill site while he was on a boat trip from Gustavus to Juneau last week. He retrieved 54 bags that had washed up at Funter Bay and were floating in the water nearby.
“We don’t want our fish eating these things, because that’s what happens to it eventually it ends up as microplastics, and we’ve got enough of that in the water already,” Carnes said.
The aquaculture association encourages those who have seen the litter to tell the Southeast Alaska Commercial Fishermen Marine Debris Clean Up program at seakmarinedebris@gmail.com.
