Mitsubishi-owned Cermaq will pay CAD 500,000 ($389,798/€344,403) for a major diesel fuel spill at a salmon farm in British Columbia in 2017.
A Canada provincial court handed down the sentence to Cermaq Canada on Tuesday, following the company's guilty plea to a charge under the Fisheries Act of unlawfully depositing a deleterious substance into Raleigh Passage at its Burdwood farm in the Broughton Archipelago, the CBC reported.
Crown prosecutors asked for a CAD 1.4 million ($1.1 million/€964,326) fine for Cermaq, the news site said. However, the judge chose to decrease that amount, deeming there was no proven harm to area wildlife and that "Cermaq has accepted responsibility and is sincerely remorseful."
Canada's Coast Guard staff assessed the situation at the time and determined the company lost about 600 liters.
After the incident, Cermaq implemented material changes to its practices and procedures at the fish farm to address the underlying causes that led to the offence and to prevent similar incidents in the future, according to the court.
Cermaq reconfigured the fueling system by plumbing an electric generator to the larger tank, thereby eliminating the need for fuel transfers. They made a similar change to the system at another fish farm. Cermaq also added spill kits and spill booms sufficient to encompass the feed barge, which was the site of the fuel spill.
Cermaq is said to have cooperated fully with the investigation of the spill, and paid for all the costs incurred by a team responding to the incident, which included representatives from the Ministry of Environment, the Coast Guard and the Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis and Dzawada’enuxw First Nations. Those costs were approximately CAD 885,000 ($689,994/€609,612).
The salmon farming operation where the spill occurred has since been decommissioned.
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