KEKAHA — Derek Pellin, a long-time South Side resident, got a smelly surprise when he visited Majors Beach on Tuesday. “There were dead fish washing up all over the shore,” Pellin said. “I walked about 100 yards and I saw
KEKAHA — Derek Pellin, a long-time South Side resident, got a smelly surprise when he visited Majors Beach on Tuesday.
“There were dead fish washing up all over the shore,” Pellin said. “I walked about 100 yards and I saw like 300 dead fish and if you drove out there, it was stinky all around the ditches.”
By Tuesday afternoon, thousands of dead fish were reported along the beaches, according to Don Heacock, Kauai district aquatic biologist with the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources.
The aquatic carcasses were also reported at the mouths of Kinikini Ditch, which follows along the Pacific Missile Range Facility, and MacArthur Park Ditch.
“With all the dead fish and shrimp that’s flushing out there, some of the surfers have spotted sharks,” Pellin said.
Robert Purdy, public affairs officer at PMRF, confirmed there were a “number of fish that were found expired in the vicinity of the base area.”
Carl Berg, chairman of the Kauai branch of the Surfrider Foundation, was also at the site Tuesday and Wednesday.
“The guards (at PMRF) were saying ‘You may want to hold your nose today, but it was much worse before today, we were gagging,’” Berg said.
Jim Sweeney, president of Sunrise Capitol, confirmed Wednesday there was a fish kill on their shrimp farm in Kekaha.
“We spent the better part of three days cleaning it up and it did get pretty stinky,” Sweeney said.
Matt Kurano, enforcement supervisor for the Hawaii State Department of Health Clean Water Branch, said the department received notification of the fish kill Wednesday and contacted Sweeney.
The department regulates Sunrise Capitol under their national pollutant discharge elimination system, or NPDES, permit.
“He confirmed that last Monday, Feb. 1, there was a fish kill due to low oxygen in their pumping system because the pumping system had been shut off overnight,” Kurano said. “As of today, we understand whatever fish had been washing up was because Sunrise Capital had done some work to purge dead fish out of their system.”
In a Feb. 9 statement from Heacock to Bruce Anderson, director of DLNR’s division of aquatic resources, Heacock said he visited Kinikini Ditch and a nearby beach on Tuesday. He said in addition to the tilapia, which is a fresh water fish present in the ditches, he found hundreds of dead mullet, papio, aholehole, and ‘o’opu akupa.
Berg said the bodies of octopus, clams, and lobsters were also strewn across the beach.
He said the Kauai Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation has been worried about something like this event happening ever since Sunrise Capitol renewed their NPDES permit five years ago.
“They wanted to expand their facility and we got a contested case hearing with the Department of Health against the permit that they were going to issue,” Berg said. “At the very end, the health department said this permit is contingent upon the farm not creating a public nuisance.”
According to Kurano, the whole incident could be a violation of the NPDES permit, which “prohibits discharge of pollutants not authorized by the permit.” No determination has been made on that yet.
“Dead fish aren’t what we want entering our marine waters for a litany of reasons and that would not be an allowable discharge,” Kurano said. “We are still in preliminary investigations, and we’ll be gathering more information.”
Sweeney said the company has cleaned up the fish carcasses and buried them and he feels “like the issue is over now.”
“But we apologize to the public,” Sweeney said. “We’re trying to be good neighbors and we certainly don’t want to create a foul odor, especially for those folks on the base.”
Berg said Surfrider advises if you see, taste or smell, a major pollution event, to call the Hawaii Department of Health at 241-3323 to file a complaint.
