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Trident Seafoods Improves Discharges to Alaskan Waters
Release Date: 3/3/1998
Contact Information: Florence Carroll
[email protected]
(206) 553-1760
March 3, 1998 - - - - - - - - - - - - 98-9
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Trident Seafoods Corporation of Seattle will pay $418,150 in civil penalties to settle a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency enforcement action alleging that two shore-based Trident processing plants in Alaska's Aleutian Islands violated their EPA wastewater discharge permits.
Trident agreed to the penalty in a consent decree entered last week (February 24) by the U.S. Department of Justice in federal district court in Anchorage. The consent decree settled a Clean Water Act civil complaint filed by Justice last year that alleged chronic permit violations between 1991 and 1996 at Trident's facility at Akutan, and repeated violations throughout the summer of 1993 at its processing plant at Sand Point.
Announcement of the settlement with Trident was made today by Chuck Clarke, EPA's Northwest regional administrator in Seattle.
"The most important part of the settlement is not the $418,000 penalty," Clarke declared. "More important is that Trident is taking measures to improve the environment at both Akutan Harbor and at Sand Point."
By terms of the decree, said Clarke, Trident is required to cut in half the biochemical oxygen demand of its total wastewater discharges from the Akutan and Sand Point processing plants taken together, and to reduce by at least 12 percent the biochemical oxygen demand at Akutan alone. Trident is the principal wastewater discharger to Akutan Harbor.
Conditions at Sand Point have already improved since the summer of 1993 when Trident's discharges caused fish wastes to wash ashore in areas populated by native villagers. Trident has since installed a plant which turns the wastes into fish meal.
The settlement also calls for Trident to conduct self-audits twice a year to ensure that both the Akutan and Sand Point facilities are in full compliance with all applicable environmental requirements, and have adequate management systems in place to ensure continued compliance.
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