Saving Seafood

Pebble offers to pay annual dividend to residents of Bristol Bay, hotbed of opposition to Pebble’s mine

June 19, 2020 — The proposed Pebble Mine has always faced fierce opposition in Bristol Bay. Now, Pebble is offering to pay every adult resident of the area an annual dividend.

Pebble Chief Executive Tom Collier says he wants to share the benefits of the mine with the region, even before the mine delivers its first load of ore. Pebble says it will pay at least $3 million a year in dividends, divided among those who register to receive it.

“(If) 3,000 sign up, it’ll be $1,000 a year,” Collier said. “And as the project becomes profitable, it will be much more than that.”

Collier says he’s making good on a commitment he made to the region.

Read the full story at KTOO

ALASKA: Bristol Bay Native Corporation not impressed with Pebble’s latest offer

June 18, 2020 — On Tuesday, Pebble Limited Partnership introduced the Pebble Performance Dividend. The plan would distribute 3% of the net profits from the proposed Pebble Mine to registered Bristol Bay residents.

But the idea was quickly rejected by the Bristol Bay Native Corporation.

In a statement BBNC President and CEO Jason Metrokin called it “the latest attempt by PLP to try to win support from the people of Bristol Bay for the proposed Pebble mine.”

Pebble Mine said the project would take a few years to be profitable, so it would distribute a miniumum of $3 million a year or about $1,000 if there are 3,000 “registered participants.”

Read the full story at KTVA

Pebble mine developer launches plan to share profits with local residents

June 17, 2020 — The developer of the controversial proposed Pebble mine in Southwest Alaska launched a profit-sharing plan for residents from the Bristol Bay region on Tuesday, drawing condemnation from an Alaska Native corporation opposed to the project.

The Pebble Performance Dividend will share 3% of the net profits from the copper, gold and molybdenum mine, Pebble Limited Partnership said in a statement on Tuesday.

The mine won’t make a profit during its initial years of construction, but Pebble pledged to provide $3 million annually during that period to ensure a dividend. Under that plan, if 3,000 residents applied for the program, each would receive $1,000 once construction starts, the company said.

“Developing a mine at Pebble will provide jobs, economic activity, local tax revenue and infrastructure,” said Tom Collier, Pebble chief executive.

The program will provide one more way local residents can benefit, he said.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could permit the Pebble mine this summer. If permitted, the open-pit mine would be about 200 miles southwest of Anchorage, near salmon-producing headwaters of the valuable Bristol Bay fishery.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Alaskan Native Tribes Face Health and Government Challenges With Fishing Season

June 16, 2020 — Like many tribal members in Alaska, Melanie Brown lost a generation of her family to influenza in 1918. Now, with Covid-19 circulating among the tens of thousands of fishermen and cannery workers arriving in the remote villages of Bristol Bay, Brown fears history is repeating itself.

Growing up in Naknek, a small village in Bristol Bay, Brown heard stories about the 1918 pandemic from her great-grandparents. They told her the disease killed people they knew, often within just a couple days of falling ill.

“It was so fast-acting, it was like it would liquify your lungs,” Brown said.

Brown’s great-grandparents were among those orphaned by the pandemic. But they were teens — old enough to raise themselves, Brown said. An orphanage was founded in Dillingham for younger kids.

Today, the Kanakanak orphanage is Bristol Bay’s largest health clinic. And with 12 available beds and two ventilators, that facility is bracing for an influx of Covid-19 during a summer fishing season that triples the area’s population.

Read the full story at the Courthouse News Service

America’s Stay-at-Home Seafood Binge Now Faces Virus Threat

June 15, 2020 — Every summer, the vast watershed of winding streams and rivers that flow into the easternmost arm of the Bering Sea become a magnet for homing salmon. And for the scores of daring men and women — more than 10,000 in all — who pour into the remote region of Bristol Bay, Alaska, to take their shot at scoring big paydays as seasonal fishermen and industry workers.

This year’s rush, wedged in the middle of a pandemic, will be more dangerous than ever, though. The bunkhouses and boats that house the fishermen are tightly packed — just the sort of environment where the coronavirus thrives. The seasonal workers will face a mandatory 14-day quarantine when they enter the state, but locals fear that won’t be enough to keep the virus in check.

“It’s a migrant work camp, basically — the reality of that is what makes it so dangerous,” said Katherine Carscallen, a commercial fisherman and boat captain from Bristol Bay, which supplies half the world’s wild sockeye salmon. “It is hard to imagine how we are going to pull this off without having some major outbreaks among the fishermen alone and among the processing workers. It’s a huge risk.”

Read the full story at Bloomberg

ALASKA: Questions surround Pebble Mine’s environmental review

June 12, 2020 — Just months away from deciding whether to permit construction of the proposed Pebble Mine, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is wrapping up its environmental review. In early April, USACE received the last round of feedback from a selection of federal, state, local, and tribal groups. Some of that feedback — recently acquired and released by the Bristol Bay Native Corporation (BBNC) using the Freedom of Information Act — is quite pointed.

Reviewing the released critiques, Dennis McLerran, who from 2010 to 2017 ran the Environmental Protection Agency office in the region that includes Alaska, says that stakeholder agencies think USACE is taking too narrow of a view of the Pebble Mine’s potential environmental impacts, and isn’t addressing fundamental issues with the project even at this late stage.

The Pebble Limited Partnership (PLP) plans to build an open-pit mine in a largely undeveloped stretch of southwest Alaska to extract a fraction of what may be the world’s biggest unexploited deposit of copper and gold. The proposed site for the mine lies under two rivers that drain into Bristol Bay, home to one of the world’s most productive wild salmon fisheries. That geography has contributed to a long and heated battle over the proposed mine, which has gained new momentum under the Trump administration.

Read the full story at the High Country News

Alaska’s Rural Fishing Communities Are The Next Front Line Of COVID-19

June 8, 2020 — In a normal season, the village of Naknek in southwestern Alaska would be bustling by the end of May, with people arriving from all over the world to work Bristol Bay’s renowned salmon run.

The village’s population of around 500 swells as over 13,000 workers come to Bristol Bay to spend about six weeks fishing, canning and cleaning the products of the world’s primary source of wild-caught sockeye salmon.

This year, with the season opening just days away, “it still feels like a ghost town,” said Nels Ure, a second-generation Bristol Bay fisherman. Because of the pandemic, “it’s not business as usual.”

Seafood industry workers are under 14-day quarantine orders once they arrive in Alaska from elsewhere. Cannery workers are being quarantined either in hotels in Anchorage before they arrive at the bay, or with a group of other newly arrived employees at their facility, so they can start work while in quarantine together. Fishermen are expected to quarantine on their vessels, either in the boatyard or on the water ― or they can stay in their seasonal cabins or homes around the bay, as long as they are self-isolated.

Read the full story at the Huffington Post

ALASKA: Bristol Bay Bracing for a Season Like None Other

June 4, 2020 — For millions of wild sockeye salmon returning to Bristol Bay in 2020 it will be the traditional journey, but for thousands of people coming to harvest and process the world’s largest run of red salmon it will be a fishing season like none other.

Veteran harvesters like Robert Heyano of Dillingham, said he plans to fish the Nushagak area of Bristol Bay, just as he has since he was a boy on board his dad’s drift gillnetter. “I’m not looking forward to it this year, not with this virus,” he said. “I’d like to see the fishery conducted in a safe manner.”

Heyano said he had not heard fishermen say outright that they would not fish this year because of COVID-19. “It all depends how safe they feel,” he said. “If we could focus our energy on the safest practices that would go a long way,” he said.

Read the full story at Fishermen’s News

EPA opts not to delay controversial Alaska mine for now

June 1, 2020 — A top official at the Environmental Protection Agency informed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska late Thursday that the EPA would not formally object at this point to the proposed Pebble Mine, a massive gold and copper deposit where mining could damage the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery.

Christopher Hladick, the EPA’s regional administrator for Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, wrote to the Alaska district engineer, Col. David Hibner, that the agency still has serious concerns about the plan, including that dredging for the open-pit mine “may well contribute to the permanent loss of 2,292 acres of wetlands and … 105.4 miles of streams.”

But Hladick said the EPA would not elevate the matter to the leadership of the two agencies, which could delay necessary approvals for the project to advance. The EPA “appreciates the Corps’ recent commitment to continue this coordination into the future,” he wrote.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Alaska’s Controversial Pebble Mine Was Dead. Not Anymore.

May 28, 2020 — The Bristol Bay region in southwest Alaska is home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon run, a resource that brings in $1.5 billion annually and provides a vital food source for thousands of Alaska Native residents who live there.

It’s also home to a vast copper and gold deposit worth an estimated $500 billion, known as the Pebble Deposit. A plan to extract that wealth by building a massive open pit mine at the heart of the environmentally sensitive Bristol Bay watershed has become the environmental fight of the century for Alaska.

FRONTLINE told that story in Alaska Gold, broadcast in 2012, when the mine’s opponents seemed to have won the day.

But the Pebble mine got a new lease on life under the Trump administration, and in late 2017, the Pebble Partnership, the company behind the mine, filed for a permit with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Read the full story at Frontline