July 2, 2017 — If you took a drive through Port Union in the 1980s, you would have had to slow down driving past the fish plant.
In those days, over 1000 people worked at the plant — then owned by Fishery Products International (FPI) — and vehicles filled the plant parking lot and lined both sides of the road.
With three shifts, working day and night, the plant was operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, processing cod fish landed by the FPI offshore trawlers.
Back then the plant was operating almost 52 weeks of the year, with a 10-day shutdown during Christmas when the trawlers came in for the holidays.
An estimated 1,400 workers in that area alone were directly affected by the closure of the cod fishery in 1992.
Darryl Johnson was one of them.
Today he’s the town manager of Trinity Bay North, but 25 years ago he was one of many facing a very uncertain future with the announcement of the moratorium on northern cod.
He started working at the FPI plant in 1979.
“When I graduated school, I went to the plant for a couple of months before I went to trades college in St. John’s,” Johnson told The Packet in a recent interview.
“But when I got there, I got hooked. You got in with good money coming there, I liked the job … and before it was time to go to school, I got myself a car and said, ‘I’m comfortable here.’”