Unalaska, AK – Highland Light Seafoods, a Seattle-based seafood company, has been fined $135,000 by the Environmental Protection Agency for violating the Clean Water Act in Alaska waters.

An EPA inspection in 2008 revealed that the company's catcher-processor the Westward Wind had been in violation of environmental standards for 5 years. The Westward Wind did not comply with its National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit, and discarded more seafood waste than it was permitted to by law.

In 2006, the Westward Wind dumped waste near the Pribilof Islands without a permit. Chris Gebhardt, a compliance officer with the EPA, says that the area is given special protections because of the islands' exceptionally diverse bird population and its large marine mammal population.

"We created a special general permit in the Pribilof Islands with more reporting requirements because of the sensitivity and ecological importance of the islands," says Gebhardt.
Gebhardt says that the Westward Wind also violated its pollutant elimination permit when it discarded seafood waste in Nazan Bay off Atka Island. Nazan Bay is a shallow cove with little water flow, which increases the likelihood that waste could collect on the ocean floor.

For almost five years, the Westward Wind failed to maintained accurate records that would keep track of how much waste was discarded and how large the pieces of waste were. Because vessels self-report this information, the figures they provide are crucial to the EPA.

"They never kept logs of their monitoring activities, which we need to ensure that the right kind of monitoring was taking place," says Gebhardt.

Highland Light is part of the Yardarm Knot Group. In 2004, Yardarm Knot was fined $11,000 by the EPA for fish waste violations at its land-based facility in Naknek.

Alan Chafee, president of Yardarm Knot, did not return a request for comment.