Let's Take It Outside: S1E5 Fish Farm Disaster

Transcript

911 Operator: 9-1-1, what is your emergency?

Jill Davenport: I'm not quite sure if this is a 9-1-1 emergency or not, but my husband and I are on our boat in Secret Harbor and the middle fish pen is breaking apart. We don't know who to call.

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Chris Hill: On August 19, 2017, a fish farm off the coast of Washington State experienced a catastrophic failure. Owned and operated by a Canadian corporation — Cook Aquaculture — the farm was home to hundreds of thousands of Atlantic salmon. Only a net separated them from the open waters of the Pacific.

911 Operator: What do you mean by the middle fish pen?

Jill Davenport: So in Secret Harbor on Cypress Island, there's three fish pens. There's a bunch of equipment and stuff like a forklift and generators and stuff that are potentially gonna go in the water. And we don't see any, like, humans around.

Chris Hill: Jill Davenport was out crabbing with her family when she spotted the fish farm, mangled and on the verge of implosion. She called 9-1-1.

Jill Davenport: It's huge and the whole thing is buckling. There's a forklift that looks like it's about ready to go in the water.

Chris Hill: Hours later, an estimated 262,000 non-native Atlantic salmon spilled into the open waters of Puget Sound and the greater Salish Sea, threatening the already vulnerable populations of native Pacific salmon.

911 Operator:  Okay. We are passing that information along and can I get your name?

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Chris Hill: I'm Chris Hill, Chief Conservation Officer at the Sierra Club. In today's episode, we're diving into public waterways to tell the story of one of Washington State's biggest ecological disasters and the Tribe who stepped in to clean it up. And we're questioning who gets to decide how public lands and waterways are used, if not the public.

Let's take it outside.

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Jay Julius: My name is Jay Julius. My traditional name is W'tot Lhem, and I'm from the Lummi Nation, and I live in Bellingham, Washington.

Chris Hill: Jay Julius is the former chairman of the Lummi Nation, whose ancestral lands and waters span the Puget Sound and much of northwestern Washington and British Columbia.

Jay Julius: I do remember the day the net pen collapse took place.

Chris Hill: Lummi call themselves people of the sea, and salmon are integral to their culture and way of life. And I do remember the moments that led up to, you know, Lummi finally, having to take action because there was no plan in place for, uh, invasive species spill in the Salish Sea.

Jay Julius: I think salmon, to Lummi, and what it means you have to go back to pre-treaty. You have to go back to pre-contact, which I think it's important to understand that it wasn't that long ago. It's not like East Coast-1492, what we're taught in school. It was actually only six to seven generations ago.

Chris Hill: It was 1855 when representatives from several Northwest Tribes, including the Lummi Nation, negotiated a treaty with the U.S. federal government. Tribal leaders were looking for peace. They agreed to the cession of vast areas of Tribal lands to the United States government, in exchange for designated reservation lands and reserved fishing rights on what were called “usual and accustomed fishing grounds.”

Jay Julius: So Salmon, pre-contact, was everything. It's our food source, it's our education. There's more meaning behind it than just an ability to catch a fish. It’s an ability to feed a community. It's a head-of-household. Just the fact that they live and then they sacrifice to ensure there's a future generation — so much meaning to that. The interconnection with killer whales, with everything that is, points back to salmon for us in our world at Lummi, Salish Sea, San Juan Islands. So, salmon is part of our existence. It's, it's just who we are

Chris Hill: But that existence is threatened. Native salmon stocks are being systematically encroached upon, and are in a constant fight for survival.

Jay Julius: I like to think back to 1855. The signatories of the treaty from our end wasn't just us. We put an X next to our names for the salmon, for the killer whales. And then fast forwarding to today, I think we see the struggles around salmon and the existence of me as a person and my family, and us as a people is directly connected to the existence of salmon and the near extinction that we're facing right now.

Chris Hill: Pacific salmon are a keystone species in the ecosystem of the Salish Sea. Their annual migration brings marine nutrients to freshwater ecosystems, fueling the growth of algae, plants, and invertebrates. And salmon are a vital food source for the southern resident killer whales, who also share a deep and spiritual bond with the Lummi people. But these fish are under threat. Habitat degradation, overfishing, invasive species and the dams and culverts that keep them from swimming up river to spawn have sent their numbers spiraling to near extinction. And every day that outside forces threaten salmon populations, those reserved fishing rights enshrined in the treaty are broken.

Jay Julius: So the frustration and anger, I think, comes from my grandfather, my great-grandfather, in the fights that they've fought, and an attempt to understand that this marriage is a forced marriage that we've tried to honor. But it hasn't always been honored, and these little things add up. Culverts add up. Allowing Atlantic salmon to be bred, invasive species to be bred in our waters. We did not cede the water in the treaty. We did not give up the water. We reserved and, we never ever ceded the water. So it's been a challenge for the last 168 years and it still is today.

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Chris Hill: Most people's relationship to salmon is restricted to the grocery store, where pink fillets line ice boxes and deli counters. Seventy to 80 percent of this salmon is farmed, raised in aquatic feedlots alongside thousands of other fish. It would be easy to believe that this is a good thing, that farming salmon takes pressure off of endangered wild fish populations. But much of that farming is done in public waterways at high densities, which comes with a lot of unexpected risks. There’s the pollution that flows

Chris Hill: Most people's relationship to salmon is restricted to the grocery store, where pink filets line ice boxes and deli counters. 70 to 80 percent of this salmon is farmed, raised in aquatic feedlots alongside thousands of other fish. It would be easy to believe that this is a good thing, that farming salmon takes pressure off of endangered wild fish populations. But much of that farming is done in public waterways at high densities, which comes with a lot of unexpected risks. There's the pollution that flows freely into the surrounding waterways made up of fish waste, fish feed, and pharmaceuticals. There's the threat of viruses that can spread so rapidly among farm fish and then shed into the environment, putting wild fish at risk. And of course, there's the risk of escape. Either a few fish here and there, or something goes really wrong and there's a major escape event.

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Chris Hill: On August 19, 2017, the currents off of Cypress Island, where the Cooke farm was located, were moving at three meters per second – Fast, but not unusual for the turbulent waters of Puget Sound. The fish farm consisted of three net pens: sites one, two, and three, each larger than a football field housing hundreds of thousands of Atlantic salmon. When operating as intended, a fish farm benefits from strong currents and tides. The water is supposed to flow freely through nets secured to the sea floor. This keeps fresh water flowing and expels pollutants quickly. But the Cooke farm was weak, held together by corroded mooring components and weighed down by seaweed, kelp, and mussels accumulated on the nets. The current began to drag the clogged nets, putting strain on the mooring lines and twisting the steel structure. In a video taken by Jill Davenport – the 9-1-1 caller – the vast farm looks like a toy, crunched and mangled by the speedy current.

Field Tape of Jill Davenport: That forklift is not long for this world. Let’s get topside. The crow’s sitting on it.

Chris Hill: Site 2 began to buckle just as Cooke Aquaculture staff took notice and urgently worked to stabilize the structure. They hired tugboats and divers to work through the night, hoping to hold the pen in place and replace mooring lines. But, it was too late. 

Newsreel audio: There were more than 300,000 of the Atlantic salmon in the pens at Cypress Island when the nets broke Saturday.

Chris Hill: Response from state agencies was slow. There was no set plan for what to do. So the Lummi Nation took matters into their own hands.

Jay Julius: Our chairman at the time, Tim Ballew, made a quick decision to declare a state of emergency and call all fishermen who were actually out trying to make a living – you had a pink run going, you had king salmon running – so our fishermen were actively fishing, but the chairman swiftly called upon the Lummi fishermen and asked to go help out and clean up, clean up this mess.

Chris Hill: Lummi fishermen quickly changed their operations to launch a 24-hour fishery of the escaped Atlantic salmon.

Jay Julius: At the time in 2017, I was actually an elected, I was a councilman and fisherman, so I was on the water, and at the same time going to meetings with the chairman, with state officials and, with Cooke Aquaculture, when called upon. I didn't know what kind of impacts these would have if they made it to the river, went up river. What are they gonna feed on? Are they gonna adapt? So a lot going through my mind at the time and it was a last minute thing and,you know, hungry a lot of the time. I remember, I think we all were, because we were just on the water cleaning it up for, I want to say seven or eight days straight.

Chris Hill: In the end, the combined efforts of the Lummi and Samish nations caught 55,000 of the escaped salmon. That's an estimated 90 percent of the total fish recovered.

Jay Julius: Grief comes out when you have no control. Add an agency, a state who doesn't have a plan, and they did something without our consent, but they don't do anything about it. Elected officials not out there sweating, not eating, starving, not cleaning up a mess that had nothing to do with ourselves. But it's not something new. This is just one of many things that I think Tribes, Tribal leaders, and Tribal members have to deal with every single year, every moment of time for our entire life since this relationship started.

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Chris Hill: In the aftermath of the Cypress Island collapse, Cooke did not take immediate responsibility. They blamed the collapse on a solar eclipse and stronger than normal tidal currents. And their initial estimation was that only 4,000 Atlantic salmon escaped. But an investigation by the state Department of Natural Resources proved them wrong on both counts. Remember, the currents were moving at three meters per second. A speed which is normal, and had been clocked in the area several times earlier that summer. And it quickly became clear that hundreds of thousands of fish had escaped.

Cooke immediately lost their lease on the Cypress Island Farm. And soon after, investigations into their other locations lead to the closure of another farm in Puget Sound. Public scrutiny soon reached a fever pitch. Local conservation groups sued Cooke, arguing that every escaped fish was a violation of the Clean Water Act. Cooke settled for $2.7 million dollars, much of which went to restoration efforts of native salmon stocks.

In 2018, the state legislature passed a bill to effectively phase out non-native fish farming in Puget Sound. Cooke turned around and applied for new permits to raise native steelhead in their farms. A pivot that did not satisfy local conservation groups or many tribes, who argue that even raising native fish can have disastrous consequences on wild fish stocks.

Finally, in 2022, Washington State Public Lands Commissioner Hillary Franz issued an executive order, banning all commercial fish farming in Puget Sound.

Field Tape of Commissioner Franz: We’re here today becauseof a stark truth, one that all of us know well: Salmon are in danger of going extinct. The way of life that supports numerous Salish Tribes and our entire Pacific Northwest culture hangs truly in the balance. That is why as commissioner of public lands, I’m committed to using every single tool at my disposal to ensure that our salmon, the native orcas they feed, and all native marine species thrive in Washington’s waters. Today, I’m announcing an order prohibiting commercial fish net pen aquaculture in our public waters and on our public state aquatic lands.      

Chris Hill: The last of Cooke's farms were dragged out of the sound that November. In the years since, much of the long-term ramifications of the spill are still unknown. Atlantic salmon have been found miles up key salmon-bearing streams, threatening to outcompete native salmon, or even disrupt the native gene pool. In an independent study published in Virology journal, it was found that an estimated 95 percent of the escaped fish were infected with Piscine orthoreovirus  which causes heart and skeletal inflammation in farmed salmon. Whether the virus is a threat to wild salmon is still being debated between state agencies and local conservation groups.

But more than the ecological impact, the Cooke spill lays bare a broken system. So often, public and sacred lands and waters are handed over to corporations for extraction with little to no regard for public health or benefit. Often under the guise of “resource management,” the same agencies tasked with protecting public lands are the ones turning a blind eye to environmental degradation. Jay calls this “being managed to extinction.”

Jay Julius: That's my best effort to put truth and reality into the English words, where you might be able to have empathy and understanding, being managed to extinction is what is happening to the killer whales. And there's no denying that being managed to extinction is what is happening to the salmon. What is being done to the rivers isn't because of natural disaster or nature. It's us. Others don't see it that way. But when you look at the timeline and what's taken place in the last 16 and a half decades, it took a lot longer to drive something to extinction in Europe – took hundreds of years. And then on the East coast, it took less time. But now as we get here, you take those timeframes and it's much shorter. If we don't come together, if we don't understand one another, if we don't have empathy for everything that is, then there's – the future's dim, and we can't settle for that.

Chris Hill: Jay often invokes the past to paint a picture of an ecosystem that works well and is worth fighting for.

Jay Julius: No matter where, what your religion, what your belief, whether it's nature, Catholicism, Christianity, no matter what, in every creation story you were last, right? And everything else was first. If we just think about it from that perspective for a moment and think about the fact that we were here last and all of this, everything else that belongs to this garden, this perfect garden before we got here. It was alive. It was perfect. It was functioning well.

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Chris Hill: This episode was produced by Tina Mullen, edited by Isaac Kestenbaum of Future Projects, and hosted by me, Chris Hill. Recording assistance provided by Mia Sullivan. Ian Brickey is our executive producer. Mixing and sound design by Nic Neves. The 9-1-1 call at the top of the episode was provided by Seattle public radio station KUOW. Special thanks to Kurt Russo, Robin Everett, Bill Arthur, and Alex Craven.

To learn more about the fight to protect wild fish in the Pacific Northwest, visit the link in our show notes.