The Environmental Protection Agency has fined Aleutian Leader Fisheries $59,000 for alleged violations of the Clean Water Act.

The company owns the 94-foot F/V Judi B, which processes groundfish and dumps the waste into federal waters off the coast of Alaska. The EPA requires vessels to self-report their seafood waste discharge, but the Judi B wasn’t doing that, according to compliance officer Chris Gebhardt.

“We didn’t know if they were operating, if they weren’t operating, the amount of discharge, where they were discharging. So when we approached the Judi B, we found out that they were continuing to operate, but just were not doing the daily monitoring that’s required from their seafood permit.”

Gebhardt says the monitoring, and subsequent self-reporting, is the only way the EPA keeps track of where and how much waste is being discharged. That’s important information for scientists trying to gauge the health of the ecosystem.

“Usually what our ecologists here that specialize in the seafloor are worried about are the worms at the bottom of the food chain that provide food for higher species on the food chain. Fish have the ability to go in and out of zones that are impacted or dead, but these worms, of course, don’t have the ability to.”

The alleged violations span three years, from 2008 to 2011. Gebhardt says the Judi B’s non-compliance appears to be anomalous in the company’s fleet, which mostly consists of larger vessels.

“So, once the company became aware of it, they gave it the same level of scrutiny that they did their other boats. Since the inspection, the vessel has taken big steps towards getting into compliance.”

Aleutian Leader Fisheries didn’t return requests for comment, but Gebhardt says they’ve installed a better grinder aboard the vessel, to ensure that it’s meeting the EPA’s half-inch standard, and they’ve turned in annual reports from previous years.