Fisheries

Thousands of miles of salmon habitat and more than 200 communities across Southeast Alaska and British Columbia could be affected if another mine disaster happens near the border. According to a report released this week by a B.C. First Nations group, 35 tailings ponds in the region are drawing more scrutiny after a mine dam collapsed last summer.

The report, titled “Uncertainty Upstream: Potential Threats from Tailings Facility Failures in Northern British Columbia,” quantifies what could be at stake.

The B.C. First Nations Energy and Mining Council lists watersheds, communities and salmon habitat that could be affected by tailings facilities that are upstream from Southeast Alaska.

The tailings dam system for mine waste management is facing a lot of criticism after a dam at the Mount Polley Mine in central B.C. collapsed last summer. It spilled millions of gallons of waste into Canadian waterways.

B.C. First Nations Energy and Mining Council CEO Dave Porter said this report is a follow-up to an expert panel’s findings about the cause of last summer’s dam breach.

“Given the state of the regulatory legal framework governing the mining industry here in B.C., the panel said we can expect two more such failures in the next decade. Well, from our perspective, that’s unacceptable,” Porter said. “So we believe that it is the responsibility of government, industry and our communities to prepare for such an eventuality.”

His organization compiled this report as a resource tool to help communities understand what the potential risks are to nearby watersheds and fish populations.

According to the report, there are 35 tailings ponds from the Mount Polley mine up to the Yukon border. More than 200 communities in mainland B.C. could be affected by a failure. The study does not list towns in Southeast Alaska, but it does include rivers that flow into Alaskan waters.

Three tailings dams are upriver from Wrangell and Petersburg. Two tailings dams are in the Unuk River watershed, which ends near Ketchikan. There is a tailings dam that could eventually affect the Juneau area and one that could impact Haines and Skagway.

Southeast Alaskans worry B.C. mines could destroy salmon and other wildlife that many people depend on for subsistence and income.

The study finds 80 percent of king and sockeye salmon freshwater habitat in the region is either downstream of a tailings facility or would require migrating through a potential contaminant flow path. The same is true for about half of coho, chum and pink salmon habitat.

The report calls for some changes in B.C.’s approach to mining. The energy and mining council asks for more involvement of indigenous communities in the mine planning process and for more long-term economic benefits to settlements affected by mining. It also asks for an emphasis on protecting entire watersheds and to create a pool of money to help with clean-up in the event of a tailings dam failure.

Karina Briño is CEO of the Mining Association of British Columbia. She said laws are already in place to deal with almost all of those requests.

“I think what this recommendation is doing and what this report is doing is it’s enhancing the opportunity that we have, as an industry, to have those conversations at a more local level,” Briño said.

As B.C.’s mining boom continues, more mines with tailings ponds are planned for the region.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council voted Sunday evening to lower caps on halibut bycatch in the Bering Sea by 21 percent.

Bering Sea halibut fishermen say the cut isn’t big enough to save their communities.

The vote came after impassioned public testimony stretching over three days. Halibut biomass has declined over the past decade, and fishermen in communities like St. Paul, in the Pribilof Islands, face the possibility of being shut down entirely. They hoped that reducing bycatch would make more halibut available to fish.

Councilmember Duncan Fields said the final vote didn’t go nearly far enough.

“I acknowledge on a personal basis my identity with the folks living in Western Alaska,” he said, choking up. “And their loss of economic opportunity, personal identity, and cultural legacy. I get it.”

Alaska Fish & Game Commissioner Sam Cotten originally proposed a larger cut, of about 29-percent. He called it “the bare minimum” to protect Bering Sea fishermen.

But the Council adopted a smaller cut proposed by Bill Tweit of Washington State. Tweit said anything larger would be too steep for industry to absorb.

The numbers are tricky: While the final vote reduces the cap by about 21-percent, the affected fleets have been well under their caps in recent years. So the new cap is actually slightly higher than the total amount of bycatch taken last year.

But the cut varies among different groups. Big flatfish trawlers, who are responsible for most of the bycatch, will take the biggest cut. They must reduce the amount of halibut they catch by about 15-percent from last year’s numbers.

Chris Woodley is director of the Groundfish Forum, which represents many of those trawlers. He said that’s a big hit.

“We’re extremely concerned about job loss in our fishery right now, about tying up vessels,” he said. “We need to sit down and assess the extent that this is going to damage our sector.”

The cut passed 6 to 3. Two Alaska members were forced to recuse themselves, in a controversial ruling by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

If you’ve ever encountered halibut, it was probably as a tasty — and pricey — entree. But in Alaska, it’s the subject of a fierce fish battle. On one side are small family-owned fishing boats. On the other, an industrial fleet delivering seafood to the world. This weekend, federal managers are trying to decide how both sides can survive.

In the middle of the Bering Sea, a fishing vessel is hauling in a 50-foot net. It looks like a stocking packed with fish, their mouths wide open and gasping for breath. John Nelson has been the captain of the Rebecca Irene for 20 years. His 35-man boat is part of a Seattle-based fleet that fishes these waters around the clock, January through December.

“We’re talking about a tremendous amount of jobs. We’re talking about a tremendous amount of a low-cost protein source that is utilized worldwide,” Nelson says.

The Rebecca Irene is a trawler — it tows a net along the ocean bottom, scooping up everything in its path. Most of the fish then goes to China for processing — and from there, around the globe. Some makes it back to the U.S., landing in the frozen food aisle.

But here is the controversy. Mixed in with the cheap yellowfin sole and arrowtooth flounder is expensive halibut, one of the iconic species of the North Pacific. At the store, it can go for $24 per pound.

The Rebecca Irene can’t keep that halibut: Trawlers aren’t supposed to catch it, and the law requires any halibut that are caught be thrown overboard.

“We have no control over that,” Nelson says. “We’re forced to discard halibut. It’s a prohibited species for us. We can’t even eat it.”

That accidentally caught halibut is called bycatch. Last year, almost 9 million pounds of bycatch was dumped, dead, in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska. And this is a point of contention with those who actually do fish for halibut.

Simeon Swetzof Jr. has been a halibut fisherman for more than 30 years. He’s also the mayor of St. Paul, a town of about 500 people, mostly Alaska Native Aleuts, in the remote Pribilof Islands.

“You meet people on the street, talking to people anywhere, Seattle, other places in the country here, [and they say,] ‘Oh, halibut! I love halibut.’ Well, guess what? It comes from where we live, out in the Bering Sea, and down here in the Gulf of Alaska,” Swetzof says.

There isn’t much of an economy in St. Paul. Most families rely on halibut for a big chunk of their income. They’re part of Alaska’s thousand-strong commercial halibut fleet, small boats that fish with longlines and hooks. The vast majority of those boats are family-owned.

But in recent years, because of concerns about halibut numbers, the amount that fishermen are allowed to catch has dropped. Meanwhile, the amount of bycatch the big boats can take — and discard — has stayed essentially the same.

In the Bering Sea, halibut fishermen have seen their share cut so low that last year, there was more halibut thrown overboard by the big boats than was caught by the small boats. If the trend doesn’t change, fishermen in St. Paul face the potential of a complete shutdown.

With his community’s future on the line, Swetsov choked up as he testified this week before the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which regulates bycatch in federal waters off of Alaska. “I’m extremely angry that we’re here today,” he says.

Swetzof and others asked the council to cut the amount of bycatch allowed in the Bering Sea by 50, calling the status quo unacceptable.

“We live right out in the richest ocean in the world, practically, and we’re going to see this happen to us, in our own backyard? No! We’ll fight it!” Swetzof says.

But the industrial fleet says they’ve already done a lot to reduce bycatch, and anything more would be devastating, putting their boats — and crews — out of work for most of the year.

The council is expected to vote on the issue this weekend.

Copyright 2015 KCAW-FM. To see more, visit http://www.kcaw.org/.

With a partial government shutdown looming, state agencies are making plans for what services might be reduced without a budget deal by July 1. But salmon don’t care about budgets and money. The fish are coming to Alaska waters whether or not the Alaska Department of Fish & Game has its usual resources to manage them.

Commercial fishermen Haines are readying their gillnet boats for the upcoming salmon season. They have about three weeks before their first opener in the Lynn Canal. That’s about the same amount of time legislators have to approve a state operating budget before thousands of state employees face layoffs and many state departments face a partial shutdown.

That includes Fish & Game. They count the fish and tell fishermen when and where they can operate.

Haines fisherman Cindy Adams captains the LadyHawk. She says the budget uncertainty is not coming at an ideal time for the commercial fishing season.

“That’s a problem,” Adams says. “Because we have a finite time to make our money and if that gets compromised in any way then our season is compromised.”

“Fishermen are ready. Everybody is just ready to go so we’ll do our best to make sure they have that opportunity,” says Jeff Regnart, Director of the Division of Commercial Fisheries for ADF&G.

He says if a budget isn’t passed by July 1, ADF&G will have to operate with about 70 percent less money than usual. He says the department won’t stop commercial fishing, but the management of those fisheries could be more conservative. For example, the fleet could get less time to fish in a certain area. That’s because survey and research programs might suffer and biologists won’t have as much data to make management decisions.

“When we have less data we get more conservative because we’re going to err on the side of the fish. So that’s likely to happen if we continue to operate under this fiscal umbrella,” Regnart said. “We’ll do our best to make sure it doesn’t impact things substantially. That’s really the key for us is that we can continue to maintain escapement, maintain priority uses, healthy fisheries, that’s our hope.”

By July 1, several fisheries will be underway across the state. In Southeast, those include salmon purse seine, gillnet and troll fisheries.

But, Regnart says, ADF&G has its priorities. First is the conservation of fish stocks. Second to that is managing for subsistence use.

“Commercial fishing follows that subsistence use as a priority so we’ll do our best to makes sure those fisheries have an opportunity to harvest salmon. We hope they can harvest close to what they would have harvested if it had been a normal year.”

Unlike a normal year, Regnart says most forecasts predict near records levels of salmon returns across the state.

The threat of a government shutdown is not stopping the fleet in Haines from getting ready for business as usual. Across the harbor from Adams is fisherman Bill Thomas.

“You know, we fished 12-hour openings in the past to conserve fish. Conservation isn’t a bad thing,” Thomas says.

Thomas has firsthand experience with the legislature. He’s a former state representative, and he says a month is still plenty of time to forge a budget deal.

“I think they’ll have a budget by then. You have nothing to fear but fear itself. We don’t have to panic yet.”

Instead of worrying about what could happen to state government, Thomas will instead spend the next three weeks gearing up for salmon season.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is forecasting strong sockeye salmon returns to Bristol Bay this summer. Copper River Seafoods is getting ready to open a processing plant in Naknek and buy fish from the Naknek-Kvichak District, where 18 million sockeye are expected to be available for harvest.

Fish and Game is forecasting a return of 28.8 million sockeye to the district, with 18 million available for harvest. Copper River Seafoods will be on hand to help purchase and process those fish.

Copper River bought the old extreme seafoods plant in Naknek. Vojta Novak, the company’s Bristol Bay manager, says they have been getting ready to open for the past two months.

Although the plant is new to Naknek, Novak said the company is familiar with the region from its operations in Togiak. He said that entering Naknek is challenging, because it’s competitive, and one of the biggest sockeye salmon fisheries in Alaska. But in some ways, it’s easier to operate there than in Togiak.

“You have everything pretty much here, if you need any help, if you need any welders, if you need any materials, you can buy here. When I was in Togiak, I cannot buy anything,” he said.

Novak said about 15-20 people are working at the plant now to get it ready, mostly construction guys. When the plant is operational, it’ll have about 70 employees, he said.

Novak said the company is shooting for a June 15 opening this summer. All of the fish purchased and processed in Naknek will be sold under the Copper River Seafoods brand.

A bill to reauthorize the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the nation’s primary fishing law, passed the U.S. House onday, largely on party lines. The sponsor, Rep. Don Young, says the bill makes practical revisions to continue a law that has restored the health of America’s fisheries.

“The opposition is coming from, you know, not the fishing community. It’s coming from, very frankly, from the environmental community, and why they’re opposing it I don’t really know. Other than the fact that they think I’m weakening NEPA. I’m not. The Endangered Species (Act), I am not,” Young said. “This bill is originally and it always should be a sustainable yield fisheries bill for the fish and for the communities.”

Much of the debate on the House floor did concern NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act. Democrats, like Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan, say Young’s bill would gut the public process required under NEPA.

“Stakeholders, including businesses and individuals, would get less consideration in the council process and would not have a way of voicing their concerns and influencing the directions of plans or projects that threaten the environment or the livelihoods of these people,” she said.

Young says the same environmental review required by NEPA would still take place, but it would be part of the Council process, to avoid duplication.

Young’s bill also introduces a controversial element of flexibility in fisheries management. It would eliminate the mandatory 10-year planning period for rebuilding depleted stocks. Opponents say that allows for commercial interests to pressure managers to set harvest levels too high. Young, though, says the rebuilding time frame should vary, depending on the needs of the species.

The White House has already threatened to veto the bill. Young says the veto threat is premature, since the bill will be revised once the Senate passes its version and the two bills are renegotiated in a conference committee.