Grenada’s Health and Environment Department has said an investigation will be opened to determine what has caused scores of fish to die in the St John’s River.
The dead fish have been turning up in a section of the waterway which passes through the village of River Road and residents have undertaken a clean-up, removing and burying them.
Last week, this newspaper was called in to report on the situation and villagers speculated that the likely cause is the dumping of harmful waste.
Chief Environmental Officer, Andre Worme, was contacted and he said he would send a team to investigate, since our telephone call last week Tuesday was the first time that his department had been informed of the problem.
Worme said the Waste Management Act, while it focuses heavily on solid waste, does have some regulations which prohibit the dumping of certain chemicals and other effluents into the country’s waterways.
However he said the Act needs strengthening.
He spoke of the need for stronger policies relating to the disposal of industrial waste, particularly with the number of small manufacturers setting up shop on the island.
There is also the issue of hospital and medical waste as well as sewer waste.
Around the time that the dead fish begun turning up in an area just down the river from the bridge leading to the Mt Gay Hospital, maintenance workers had cleared drains, which had been blocked for several months, allowing poorly treated sewer water from a NAWASA managed plant, to gush into the St John’s River.
A previous fish kill, a few years ago, had been traced back to waste from the nearby Mt Gay Hospital.
Errol Thomas, one of the workers responsible for maintenance of the River Road section of the St John’s, told us, “this is not a first time thing”.
He said fish have been dying in the river for months and that Health Minister Nickolas Steele had “checked on it” but the problem has arisen again.
He said once the fish began dying again he informed his supervisor, commonly known as Madame Ras and she had said she would contact the Department of the Environment.
But last Tuesday, she told this newspaper she was unaware of the magnitude of the problem and had only facilitated some villagers who needed buckets to collect the fish for use.
She confirmed that Environment officials had not been contacted.
She suggested that the dead fish, concentrated in an area about a mile upstream from the river mouth, may have ventured out of the salt water and could not survive in the river water.
This latest incident has raised speculation that caustic soda, a cleaning agent, may be responsible for killing such a large amount of fish.
The Grenada Bottling Company, one of the production companies in the area that uses the cleaning agent was contacted on the issue of the dead fish.
Operations Manager Chris Warner said the Bottling Company, which holds the local franchise for Coca Cola, operates according to the parent company’s standards.
He said the company operates a waste water treatment plant as required by the parent company and that the cleaning agent is recycled.