Fish die in Bowen and Bowen private pond

Residents of Ladyville are sounding alarm over what appears to be an environmental hazard that has been affecting aquatic life in a private pond on the Bowen & Bowen bottling compound.  The massive fish kill has led to an investigation being launched by the Department of the Environment and the Public Health Department but according to Nolan Michael, Bowen & Bowen’s plant manager, what has taken place is the result of an overgrowth in algae inside the pond.

Nolan Michael, Plant Manager, Bowen & Bowen

“What happen is I believe on Sunday we started noticing that the fish in the pond had some trouble breathing. They were coming to the surface and gasping for air. We immediately sent out our laboratory technicians out and they started monitoring the conditions of the pond. What we found was that the total dissolved oxygen in the pond had decreased drastically. We believe this occurred due to an algae bloom that occurred. A massive algae bloom occurred and by Monday a number of the fish had started to die.

nolan michael

We continued to monitor the pond, check the conditions, we started adding aerations to the pond to return the dissolved oxygen inside of the pond. But absolutely at no time was there any chemical spill that took place, no contaminants were entered into the pond. We’re still investigating to see what caused the algae bloom but there was no chemicals that spilled from our facility into the pond area. Since then, we had notified the Department of the Environment as well as Public Health and we conducted an aggressive cleanup campaign and our mitigation efforts, such as the aerations, has proved fruitful. As you can see, the pond has returned to normal and everything, even the dissolved oxygen is back to normal. All the waste water from this production facility is channeled to the most modern waste water treatment facility in the entire country next door to us so there was absolutely no contamination coming from this facility that was entering the pond.”

Isani Cayetano

“Residents in this particular area also raised initial concerns that because of the number of fish that were dying you also had people coming on to the property fishing and just taking away some of the stuff that floated out of the pond. Can you speak to us a bit on that?”

Nolan Michael

“Well, obviously because he fish were gasping for oxygen, it made them much easier to catch. It is a private pond on Bowen and Bowen’s property and it’s not a fenced area and so forth. I personally was here until very late last night asking a number of people, probably like five people, to please do not attempt to catch the fish at this time and to please leave the property. However, it’s not a fenced area and we can’t stop anybody from coming to catch the fish. And it was easy fishing sat that point.

Michael also said that four years ago the plant was forced to release ammonia into the nearby pond which also resulted in the death of fishes.  While initial reports were that this may have been another such incident Michael reassured that there was not any chemical agent leaked into the water.