Ocean Lifeline Saved NS Lobster Pound Cut Off by Wildfires for 13 Days

The situation was bleak.

The wildfire was closing in and there were $5 million worth of live lobsters in tanks with no power, no cooling, no water circulation, and no way to fuel the generators.

“And the roads are closed. The roads were on fire. So it’s not like we can say, ‘wow, let’s just bring in a truck.’ So we had to find a plan B,” remembers Greg Sutcliffe, factory manager at the Fisherman’s Market lobster pound in Ingomar on the tip of South Nova Scotia.

It was one of two coastal Fisherman’s Market operations within the Shelburne County Fire Evacuation Zone.

At Ingomar, plan B was to get there by boat.

For Sutcliffe and his company’s headquarters in Halifax, as well as their parent company, Liverpool-based Mersey Seafoods, that meant arranging daily sea trips to the factory to make sure the generators were working. On two occasions, seaborne deliveries of 8,000 liters of diesel fuel kept the generators running.

Tense missions

“It was smoke, smoke, smoke and red glow,” recalled Sutcliffe, who had to count the firefighters on their way to and from Ingomar.

“It was like the fog was rolling in, but with particles in it.”

On the first trip, diesel was pumped from the boat with a portable generator and pumped into containers.

During the second trip, a small excavator lifted 1,000 liter containers from the boat and carried them to the factory. A forklift lifted the containers and used gravity to fill the tanks.

“This isn’t even remotely part of what you would normally do in a day, but that’s what we had to do,” Sutcliffe said.

He was often accompanied by the factory’s Filipino temporary foreign workers.

They never signed up for the emergency evacuations, enveloping smoke or seasickness some experienced during one of the deliveries, with 8,000 liters of diesel sloshing around in tanks on the back of a fishing boat in a ten-foot sea.

“It’s the first time we’ve seen waves like that and we thought about the boat [would] sink,” recalled James Ballesceas, one of the Philippine workers.

“About the wildfire, all I can say is that it is uncommon in the Philippines. We see it on TV and now we are experiencing such a disaster and it is so terrifying. In my mind, we have [got] lucky that our company, our house – they didn’t [burn].”

Sutcliffe and seven Filipino workers were moved twice during the emergency. First on the first evacuation and again when a fire broke out where they had moved in Sandy Point, NS

During the crisis, Sutcliffe carried on after being told his own house had been destroyed by fire – wrongly, it turned out.

Workers at the Fisherman’s Market plant in Blanche, NS – on the neighboring peninsula – were also evicted from their homes.

That factory contains live lobster and more than 750,000 pounds of frozen seafood.

It also lost power.

“Well, just pray the generator starts, and it did,” plant manager Carl Townsend said.

At least Blanche was accessible by road.

Each morning, factory workers like Townsend—fishermen in need of supplies and the occasional fuel truck—gathered in the Barrington area and escorted off to the various wharfs and lobster factories in the fire zone.

Fisherman’s Market was one of several seafood companies with coastal operations within the fire zone.

Working to save the company

“Over there [were] lights are always flashing. [It] made you feel a little special for all the wrong reasons,” Townsend said.

Like others who worked in the fire zone to save their businesses, Townsend spoke of the suffocating smoke in the area.

Townsend says there are two things that worry him: running out of fuel—until the convoys get going—and the generator. The Wi-Fi was down, so there was no way to remotely monitor the cameras installed in the facility.

The generator did fail once, but that was fixed before the temperature rose too high.

In the end, both Fisherman’s Market factories made it. No one was injured, the product survived and jobs were saved.

‘Almost like a euphoria’

“I don’t think there are words to describe it. It’s almost like euphoria. It’s just lifted quite a weight,” said Fisherman’s Market president Monte Snow, who oversaw operations in Halifax.

Snow said the Mersey Seafood companies rallied.

Shelburne Ship Repair served as a sea base for supplies to Ingomar until Shelburne Harbor was closed to maritime traffic to make way for water bombers.

Groundfish and scallop company Scotia Harvest in Digby helped arrange fuel deliveries to Blanche through West Nova Fuels. The Scotia shipyard also sent tanks, piping and plumbing.

“It wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the collective teamwork,” Snow said.

“It would have been impossible for one facility to go it alone or the other facility without the support of Scotia and Mersey, and shipyards and the fishermen and very dedicated crew.”