Saving Seafood

COVID-19 closes a third Aleutian plant, stranding Bering Sea fishermen at the dock

January 25, 2021 — A third seafood processing plant has shut down in the Aleutian Islands amid a COVID-19 outbreak, threatening to further derail lucrative winter fisheries in the region.

In the Aleutian port town of Unalaska, at least five local boats are stuck at the dock with nowhere to deliver their cod after the shutdown of the Alyeska Seafoods processing plant, according to a crew member on one of them, Tacho Camacho Castillo.

Alyeska closed its plant Friday “based on a cluster of positive cases” identified through “surveillance testing,” the City of Unalaska said in a prepared statement.

“There’s two days and this fish starts to spoil,” Camacho Castillo, a crew member on the 58-foot Lucky Island, said in an interview Friday. “Am I going to be throwing out fish into the ocean? It’s going break my heart, for real, if I throw all this fish away.”

The plant closures are setting off a scramble among fishermen, industry leaders and political officials involved in the Bering Sea cod, crab and pollock fisheries, which are worth more than $1 billion and support thousands of jobs.

Read the full story at KTOO

COVID-19 outbreaks shutter two of Alaska’s biggest seafood processing plants during winter fishing season

January 21, 2021 — COVID-19 outbreaks at two of Alaska’s largest seafood processing plants, both in the Aleutian Islands, are shutting down operations just as lucrative crab and pollock seasons get underway.

The remote Trident Seafoods plant in the tiny community of Akutan, 35 miles east of Unalaska, is reporting four coronavirus cases — three processing workers and a galley employee — prompting concerns about additional infections that could be hard to contain.

A separate outbreak at the UniSea plant in Unalaska has the facility on lockdown after 55 workers tested positive for the virus since January, about two-thirds of them during travel quarantine, which is intended to catch positive cases. Forty-five workers were still considered infectious as of Tuesday.

The Trident outbreak is the first for the company’s closed-campus plant there, officials say.

Industry observers expected the start of this winter fishing season to bring a whole new set of coronavirus challenges compared to this time last year.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Alaska hit with second COVID-19 trawler outbreak

December 11, 2020 — Alaska’s winter groundfish fishery was hit with a second COVID-19 outbreak after nine of 28 people on board a trawler owned by the O’Hara Corporation tested positive for coronavirus this week.

According to the City of Unalaska, O’Hara’s F/T Enterprise arrived in Dutch Harbor on Saturday, 5 December, when two crew members were found to have COVID-19. A local clinic tested the rest of the crew and found another seven positive cases.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

24 of 25 crewmembers aboard US Seafoods trawler test positive for COVID-19

December 7, 2020 — United States Seafoods had navigated the coronavirus pandemic with no cases on their vessels until last Thursday, 3 December, its last day of the season. The Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.-based company’s Legacy trawler pulled into Unalaska to wrap up perch fishing for the season when two people on board tested positive. Further testing by a local clinic found that 24 of the 25 people on the vessel had COVID-19.

A news release from the City of Unalaska said that all the crew members remained on board the 132-foot factory trawler, with the one person who tested negative separated from the rest.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

7.5-magnitude “shaker” prompts tsunami warning from Aleutians to Kenai Peninsula

October 20, 2020 — Residents of coastal Alaska, from Sand Point to Kodiak, scrambled for higher ground and motored boats into deeper water Monday afternoon after a magnitude 7.5 earthquake hit near Sand Point and triggered a tsunami warning.

Large waves did not appear, but life in the communities was disrupted by the emergency.

Residents from Unalaska to the Kenai Peninsula reported to the USGS that they’d felt the earthquake. The National Weather Service downgraded the warning to an advisory toward the end of the afternoon.

Raynelle Gardner, who works at the Sand Point School, said residents felt the violent shaking of the first quake. She hadn’t felt any aftershocks because she had been driving, but as she spoke on the phone, she watched the Alaska Earthquake Center website as it ticked off one that rippled through the area.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: GCI applies to bring fiber optic to Aleutian communities

December 27, 2019 — GCI has applied to bring broadband communications to communities along the Aleutian chain.

The proposed project would bring fiber optic cable from Kodiak to Unalaska, spanning approximately 428 miles.

Dan Boyette, Vice President and General Manager of GCI, said getting the financing arranged and support from the business community for this project has proved to be a challenge.

“We’ve been working on the business case to bring fiber optic services to Unalaska along with all the communities on the southern side of the Alaska Peninsula and the Eastern Aleutians for a couple years,” Boyette said. “So that cable would originate in Kodiak and terminate in Unalaska and make stops in a total of 11 communities.”

The fiber optic cable would be loaded onto a ship that’s specifically constructed to do undersea fiber optic installations, and would be laid over 428 discontiguous miles on state-owned, Department of Mining, Land, and Water-managed tide and submerged lands, according to Boyette.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: Pollock ‘A’ season starts amid federal shutdown

January 23, 2019 –Pollock “A” season began Sunday at noon.

This year the total allowable catch is 1.397 million metric tons up from last year’s 1.364 million metric tons.

The partial federal government shutdown has caused some hiccups for the fishery, but it still started as scheduled Sunday.

Unalaska Mayor Frank Kelty said Juneau has two regular fish managers on the job, but local National Marine Fisheries Services (NMFS) offices like Unalaska’s are closed.

Read the full story at Alaska Pubic Media

Unalaska Considers Joining DOC Program That Employs Inmates At Fish Plants

October 1, 2018 — This winter, Unalaska’s seafood plants could host a handful of prison inmates — if the community joins a work release program run by the state Department of Corrections.

DOC Commissioner Dean Williams proposed the idea to the City Council this week, citing interest from at least one local processor that he declined to name.

Williams said he’d like to start with four or five inmates, who would go through a thorough vetting and selection process. They’d work at plants and live at bunkhouses under strict rules and electronic surveillance.

“We’re going to pick people whose behavior behind the walls has been exemplary,” he said. “People who we’ve provided training to — carpentry, HVAC, refrigeration, and welding. Companies would love to have these guys.”

In return, Williams said the inmates would find purpose, develop skills, and transition back into society. His goal is to chip away at Alaska’s high rate of recidivism.

“My department releases 12,000 sentenced people every year,” said Williams. “The problem is that 4,000 end up back in prison within the first six months, because they don’t have a job and they don’t have a place to live. You just can’t cut the cord.”

Williams said the program is already succeeding in Kenai and Cordova, where more than 20 inmates have worked at Pacific Star Seafoods and Trident Seafoods. A few were returned to prison for drug offenses, but he said most have become reliable workers.

In Unalaska, the proposal met with a mixture of open-mindedness and reservations.

City officials and residents raised concerns about how local police would be affected, whether the island has sufficient addiction and behavioral health services, and whether sex offenders would be allowed to participate.

Read the full story at KUCB

ALASKA: Organizations in Unalaska seek $250,000 for salmon surveys

June 4, 2018 — Local organizations are seeking $250,000 to count salmon runs and harvests in Unalaska Bay, including drone surveys for the sport and subsistence fisheries.

“If we get that, we’re going to be in the chips,” said Mayor Frank Kelty at Sunday’s meeting of the Unalaska Native Fisherman’s Association. In addition to two years of aerial counts in 2019 and 2020 at Unalaska Lake, Iliuliuk River drainage and McLees Lake, the survey has been expanded to include Summer Bay Lake and Morris Cove, he said.

The proposed project goes beyond counting fish in the water. A household survey in the next two years would estimate salmon harvests and use in Unalaska.

UNFA and the Unalaska City Council are seeking the money from the state’s Sustainable Salmon Fund for the proposed project, “Estimation of sockeye salmon escapement and subsistence salmon harvest surveys for Unalaska.”

According to the city council’s letter of support, “Data gaps of of escapement values for various road-system accessed streams inhibit best practice management for salmon stock assessment. Furthermore, understanding the subsistence harvest by residents will improve subsistence management of those fisheries.”

Read the full story at The Bristol Bay Times

To get good credit, Alaska’s fishing towns may have to factor in climate change

February 15, 2018 — Late last year one of the world’s largest credit rating agencies announced that climate change would have an economic impact on the U.S.

Moody’s suggested that climate risks could become credit risks for some U.S. states.

Even though Alaska is warming nearly twice as fast as the rest of the U.S., its credit rating doesn’t seem to be in danger. But take a closer look at some of the state’s coastal communities and the story changes, especially when Alaska’s fishing towns consider adding climate risks to their balance sheets.

Frank Kelty is the mayor of the Unalaska, a tiny town is on an island sandwiched between the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, near some of the richest fishing grounds in the world.

Kelty has been there for 45 years, and lately, he’s seen a lot of changes.

“We’ve had a huge increase in humpback whales coming right into the inner harbor by the road system. Just hundreds of them hanging around,” he said.

People have been pulling off of the road to watch what he calls the “whale show.”

Read the full story at KTOO