The company that operated the sprawling but shuttered fish processing plant in King Cove must do annual seafloor surveys to check for impacts of waste deposits there and take other corrective actions to protect the marine environment, under civil settlement signed earlier in the year.
The requirement for corrective steps at King Cove is one of the terms of a $750,000 settlement for environmental violations that Peter Pan Seafood Co.’s successor, PSF Inc., paid earlier in the year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said.
The settlement was announced last week by the EPA’s Seattle-based regional office. Terms are detailed in a consent decree.
The case concerns the discharge of fish waste at both the Peter Pan King Cove plant and the company’s Valdez plant, which was acquired earlier this year by Silver Bay Seafoods.
At King Cove, the company was using a broken outfall pipe to send fish waste into receiving waters, the EPA said. The company also replaced that pipe, without getting clearance from state environmental regulators, and was discharging waste at an incorrect depth, among other violations, according to the EPA.
At Valdez, the plant had an outfall that was too shallow, and its fish-waste discharges covered an area much larger than the allowed one-acre “zone of deposit,” according to the complaint in the case, which was filed in May in U.S. District Court in Anchorage.
The practices violated the Clean Water Act and date back to 2017 at both plants, according to the complaint.
Corrective actions at King Cove are to be undertaken “every year within two months of the processing season’s end” until the termination of the consent decree, according to the document’s wording. The consent decree assigns that duty to Peter Pan, but in its Dec. 5 announcement, the EPA said the responsibility will fall to the company’s successor.
Whether the plant will be operating in any future processing seasons is unclear.
Peter Pan announced last January that it was closing the King Cove plant indefinitely. The plant had operated in the community for about a century, and it was key to both the local economy and the source of most of the local tax revenues. The closure has thrown King Cove, a community of about 800 people, into turmoil.
The company itself is no longer operating in Alaska and in April, it was put into receivership, a status similar to bankruptcy. Since then, disposition of its assets has stirred controversy among Alaska Peninsula fishers and residents.
Corrective actions are also required at the Valdez plant, under the consent decree’s terms. Silver Bay Seafoods, as the new owner, has pledged to carry out those actions, which include better controls of waste sources, monitoring of the seafood waste pile and other tasks.