from Sunday Herald, 09 July 2006
MORE than 20 million young fish from the Firth of Forth are being killed every year by Longannet power station, according to scientific surveys passed to the Sunday Herald.
Government fisheries advisors fear that the “slaughter on a mass scale” is seriously depleting the Forth’s natural resources, yet for years nothing has been done to combat the problem, they say.
Longannet, Scotland’s biggest power station, sucks in up to 90 tonnes of water a second from the Forth for cooling. Fish in the water, along with seaweed and other debris, are filtered out by screens and thrown away.
Unpublished surveys carried out for the station’s operator, ScottishPower, reveal that that is the unfortunate fate of 21 million fish a year, weighing 160 tonnes. Since Longannet started up in 1972, some 700 million fish could have been killed.
More than 30 species of fish have been found dead, including herring, whiting and sprat which are commercially important. River lamprey and sparling, both endangered species, have also been detected among the dead.
Such a large-scale loss of fish has alarmed the Fisheries Committee, a group of independent experts which advises the Scottish Executive. For the past eight years it has been pushing behind the scenes to try to get action to reduce the kill.
But no progress has been made, and the committee has expressed its “disappointment” to environment ministers. Some evidence suggests that simply broadcasting a noise would cause at least half the fish to swim away from Longannet’s 12 cooling water intakes.
“This is slaughter on a mass scale which has damaged the Firth of Forth’s natural resources – yet for years it has gone unnoticed and unpunished,” said fisheries consultant Niall Graham-Campbell, who has stood down after 10 years on the Fisheries Committee.
“In an agricultural context a single event resulting in a kill of 1% of the fish numbers in this annual kill would result in the imposition of a massive fine. Yet this continuing depredation of the Scottish environment appears to be ignored by the authorities.”
Graham-Campbell also criticised the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) for failing to take the problem seriously. “I am surprised that Sepa shows so little concern for this massive ongoing kill of the juvenile fish of many different species, some of which are of commercial importance and others of which are rare,” he said.
That is denied by Sepa, which is investigating the status of fish in the Firth of Forth. “Longannet’s operations will be having a contributory impact on fish populations in the Forth and, as with all ecological issues, we’re taking this seriously,” said Lex Pearce, a marine biologist with Sepa.
Most of the dead fish are small but, according to leading freshwater biologist Professor Peter Maitland, of the University of Glasgow, that is not surprising. “This area is well-known to be of importance as a nursery area for commercial stocks of North Sea species,” he said.
Maitland, the author of the Longannet fish surveys, is concerned about the risk to North Sea fish populations. “It is important that each nursery is given as much protection as possible so that there is adequate recruitment of stocks to the sea,” he added.
ScottishPower, however, claimed that there is no evidence that Longannet has actually damaged fish stocks. Nevertheless, it accepted that it should try to prevent so many fish from being killed.
The company is investing up to £500,000 in testing a “water wheel” system designed to lift out the fish and return them to the river. Other methods, including scaring away the fish with light or noise, had not proven effective, it argued.
The fish kill is “an unfortunate legacy of the decision made in the 1960s to site the station on a narrow stretch of the Forth estuary,” said a company spokesman. “ScottishPower is committed to the protection of the environment and accepts that it must minimise the impact of its operations.”
Very interesting stuff! And don't look so surprised that I visited your website and read a story! Love You Lindsay
Posted by: Lindsay Riddoch | 19 July 2006 at 07:21 PM