It’ll take about 200 trips with a standard-sized dump truck to put an end to a stinky problem that has plagued the town of St. Mary’s, N.L., for the past 25 years.
“I’ve smelled a rotten whale before but this, this is a major stink — major — going through the town, right next to the school all these years and decades,” said Yvonne Bishop, who is both a school-bus driver and deputy mayor of the 300-person town. “It’s time for it to be gone.”
The Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company in St. Mary’s closed its doors 25 years ago, leaving behind 150 towering vats of fermenting fish sauce. Each is about three metres high and 2.2 metres wide at the base, slightly wider at the top.
It’s been a long wait for residents, who say the situation became even worse when a storm damaged the abandoned building in January, making the building more dangerous.
Now, 110 of those vats remain, many with rusted out and leaky bottoms, and the floor, in places, is 30-centimetres deep with debris from the fish-sauce-making process, says Mayor Steve Ryan.
Ryan says the crisis with this plant has been on the agenda at every town council meeting for the past 10 years.
“We’re a small town in rural Newfoundland on the Avalon [Peninsula] and we’re forgotten about,” he said. “And it’s kind of getting personal because why would any government — provincial or federal — want this in anyone’s town?”
For years the federal and provincial governments were at a stalemate about which level of government should pay for the cleanup, and the owner of the company was believed to have left the country.
But relief should come this summer when the waste will be transported to a landfill about 160 kilometres away in a town called Sunnyside. A tender for that work was issued in May, and the government of Newfoundland and Labrador is footing the bill with funds set aside during its 2025 budget.
The Town of St. Mary’s announced June 5 the contract was awarded to Capital Environmental, whose bid was just over $1.74 million.
A careful cleanup
Moving the malodorous mess will be complicated business.
Glenn Sharp, the consulting engineer who designed the disposal plan, says the state of material left behind ranges from liquid to solid, the latter consisting of the ground-up capelin fish and salt used as a base for the sauce.
He says the contractor will be tasked with removing both liquid and solid material and mixing it with peat — a soil-like material made of dead plant matter that’s commonly used in gardens — to solidify it, which will help prevent leaks during transport and storage.
The mixture will be sealed and buried underground in enormous landfill cells, Sharp told Mary-Catherine McIntosh of the CBC’s Audio Documentary Unit. The cells will hold an estimated 2,000 cubic metres of material.
“People can’t really relate to that as a size, but 10 cubic meters fits into a standard dump truck. So you’re looking at approximately 200 dump trucks to be moved.”
Dump trucks with sealed liners are one option. But Sharp said transport could be done with larger vehicles and fewer trips, provided the fish-infused peat is moved in leak-proof containers.
A celebrated beginning
The Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company opened in 1990 and closed about a decade later.
But at its beginning, the idea for the business was heralded as smart, sustainable and good for local employment.
Capelin are small fish in the smelt family. Back in the 1980s, there was only a market for female capelin fish, which were prized for their high content of eggs, or roe, and typically exported to Asia.
The male capelin were dumped.
Sanh Ngo, captain of a Department of Fisheries and Oceans research ship at the time, saw all the wasted fish and got the idea to use them to make fish sauce, the kind that’s used to flavour almost everything for millions of people every day in his homeland of Vietnam.
It was a plan the Canadian government liked enough to fund.
But things didn’t go according to plan. Ngo says he discovered that without the heat of the Vietnamese sun, the sauce would take years of fermentation, not months.
Nevertheless, on the plant’s eventual opening day, then-trade minister John Crosby — Newfoundland and Labrador’s most prominent federal politician at the time — flew in by helicopter to cut the ribbon.
Ngo and his wife would load their Dodge Ram with bottles of the sauce and peddle it in Asian groceries and Vietnamese restaurants across the U.S., Ngo said, noting he had orders from as far away as Australia.
But in 2001, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency found problems with the covers for the vats of fermenting fish, citing mould and flies in the plant. The products were detained, the plant closed and the company faced charges under the Food and Drug Act.
At his home in Scarborough, Ont., where he lives today, Ngo says the inspector didn’t understand how fermentation works.
“The first thing, they come to my plant for the inspection and they asked, ‘How long has the sauce been in the tank?’ And I say, ‘Five, six years.’ And he said, ‘Too old. Should be dumped,'” Ngo said.
“He should have had training before he could come to that conclusion.”
A provincial judge found that inspectors failed to demonstrate how the problems they found would contaminate the sauce, because the vats were protected with a thick layer of salt and plastic sheets. They also took no samples, despite requests from Ngo.
But the CFIA appealed the decision, and though it lost again, by that time seven years had passed; Ngo had lost the registration he needed to operate and never got it back.
He and his family had left town after the inspection and didn’t return.
Small town struggles
For Mayor Ryan, the high hopes the town once had for the fish sauce plant are symptomatic of the need for economic opportunity in small towns like his.
“If anyone’s coming to do business in our town, we’re easy to get along with,” Ryan said. He jokes that back in 1990, the town council probably would have said yes to a nuclear waste facility. “We get excited if it creates employment.” He says the council is a lot more careful now.
Ryan says the town took ownership of the land after Ngo failed to pay municipal taxes.
In an email to the CBC, a spokesperson for the province said that while in this case it stepped up with funds to protect the community, its legislation operates on the principle of polluter pays.
“Government action to remove the waste does not preclude future legal/enforcement action against the polluter as appropriate.”
Worse before it gets better
While the town’s fish-sauce era draws to a close, Sharp warns the smell will likely be worse during the cleanup period.
He says he expects the process of taking the material and mixing it with peat moss will be “highly odorous.” The peat moss itself has no odour-inhibiting powers, but the containers used for transport should keep smells to a minimum, Sharp says.
Once filled, each landfill cell will be sealed “like a Ziploc bag,” with a cover put on top and barriers put around so no vehicles can drive on top, potentially damaging the seals.
Sunnyside Mayor Wanda Simmonds said she has “no concerns” about smell or other negative impacts from the landfill, and that the money the town will be paid — $150 per cubic metre of stored material, or an an estimated $300,000 “tipping fee,” Sharp says — will go toward municipal building renovations, bolstering emergency funds and keeping property taxes down.
Residents of St. Mary’s say it’ll be a momentous occasion when the last load leaves town.
“I am really hoping we’re going to have a bonfire down there,” Deputy Mayor Bishop said. “I’m going there with my family and my friends to celebrate that this is gone. And I’m going to tell you, there’s not going to be a dry eye.”
Ryan says he agrees.
“It’s going to be a big event; I can guarantee you that.”
