The Municipality of Kincardine says it is offering its apologies and support to the Lake Huron Fishing Club after 10,000 fish were lost from the club’s brown and rainbow trout hatchery in a watermain incident.
The Municipality says a construction crew was working along Huron Terrace in Kincardine when it struck a watermain on the morning of October 15th.
Adam Weishar, Director of Infrastructure and Development says in a statement, “The watermain was not mapped and therefore was untraceable which caused a loss of water supply for a period of time. The main was repaired and water supply restored but unfortunately fish were lost during this time.”
Mike Hahn, Vice President of the lake Huron Fishing Club says the fish that died account for about 10 per cent of those in the hatchery.
He notes, when their water supply stops, the device that naturally aerates the water through gravity stops and the fish begin to run out of oxygen and die.
He says, “Recognizing that these fish were literally dying by the hundreds as we tried to transfer them to different tanks where there’s more oxygen…everybody’s so caught up in the moment with trying to save fish– it took one person to just say hey, why don’t we get a means of pumping water down here.”
He says his wife Cathy Hahn got in touch with the fire department for help, saying, “They immediately dispatched a pumper truck down and we started pumping water into the hatchery. Otherwise we would have lost a lot more than that.”
“You literally have minutes to react, to either transferring the fish so that instead of 1,000 lbs in a tank there’s only 500 or find a means of aerating the tanks or just pumping new water into the hatchery and that’s what we were able to do with the firetruck,” says Hahn.
Hahn says it was just a couple of hours from the time the water source was severed, to the time volunteers had figured out a way to save the hatchery’s stock.
“It was a big effort between the Town and the contractor and the club,” says Hahn, adding “Everybody was working hard. They realized something happened that was out of everybody’s control. Everybody reacted to the crisis and somewhat of a major crisis was averted as far as I’m concerned.”
He says the water supply was from an artesian well and it was never anticipated that supply would be suddenly severed. Hahn notes the town is working with the club to come up with a safeguard in the event the water supply ever stops flowing into the hatchery again.
Hahn notes, the hatchery mananger and a founding club member have a way of being directly alerted if a something happenes at the hatchery or an alarm trips or the power goes out. “Even half an hour is devastating to our hatcheries. We’d begin losing fish almost immediately,” says Hahn.
The Municipality says it met with members of the hatchery this week to extend apologies and identify ways to support the Lake Huron Fishing Club for the loss of fish and for their additional efforts to address the clean up.
It says the consultant and the contractor involved with the construction as well as the Municipality of Kincardine, have each agreed to make a $2,000 donation towards the hatchery, totalling $6,000.
“That is very nice of them and we really appreciate that as a club,” says Hahn, noting the $6,000 roughly covers the loss of the fish. He says, there’s ‘no price’ you can put on thousands of hours of volunteer time, but explains, “From a budgetary standpoint if we had to go out and replace those fish, just kind of by the same weight, or same gram per fish I’m sure it would be very, very close to the $6,000. I think they were very fair in what they gave us.”
He says, “The Town reacted very, very quickly and since the incident they’ve been working very hard with the hatchery manager to come up with a bit of redundancy so that if this were ever to happen again we wouldn’t lose so many fish.”
Hahn says the whole idea of the ‘put and take fishery’ is to rear the fish and put them into Lake Huron where anglers can enjoy catching them, “The sole purpose is to increase angling opportunities for Ontarians and that’s what we’ve been doing for 37 years,” says Hahn.
He says numbers vary, but a really good hatch of rainbow and brown trout and Chinook salmon between the Kincardine and Port Elgin hatcheries could be as much as 250,000 fish going into the lake every year. He says this year they had a great hatch of both brown trout and rainbow trout.
Despit the loss, Hahn says, “We roll with the punches and we move forward.”
The big annual event for the Lake Huron Fishing Club is the Chantry Chinook Derby which is set to take place from July 23rd to August 7th 2022.