Trident settlement

Trident Seafoods will pay up to $23 million dollars to improve its compliance with the Clean Air Act. That’s part of a proposed settlement reached Tuesday between the seafood processing company and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice. KDLG’s Izzy Ross has more.

In a statement the EPA said that between 2009 and 2016, Trident failed to repair leaking refrigeration appliances, and in more than 280 instances it did not create adequate servicing and compliance records. The agency also said that at times, Trident used uncertified technicians to work on refrigerant equipment.  Trident spokesperson Joe Plesha (PLEH-sha) says the violations were the result of poor organization.

“Any sort of leaks that occur on a freon refrigeration systems have to be repaired within a certain period of time. The repairs then have to be logged in. And over the years, we have not done that as diligently as we should have. For example, we didn’t have records of some of the repairs that were done. We didn’t have those sorts of processes in place.”

In addition to the $23 million Trident has committed to spend to reduce coolant leaks and improve compliance, the company will pay a $900,000 civil penalty.   Plesha says these changes will not affect their processing operations.

“It won’t have any impact on our processing whatsoever. And a large number of the retrofits are on vessels that are relatively old and needed to be upgraded in any event. It is a costly process, but the world is moving away from freon in any event, so it’s something that eventually we will have to do.”

Three of Trident’s pollock catcher-processor vessels that operate in the Bering Sea had refrigeration leaks. [WEB: these were the Island Enterprise, the Kodiak Enterprise and the Seattle Enterprise, as well as the freighter vessel Eastern Wind.] As part of the settlement, Trident will retrofit or retire appliances on a total of 14 vessels to use a less harmful refrigerant.  EPA public affairs specialist Suzanne Skadowski (ska-DOW-ski) says that Trident was one of several retail and seafood industry companies the EPA requested records from.

“In 2015 – 2015 and 2016 – we were reaching out to these companies knowing that this was a problem for some of them and maybe all of them — that they’ve got aging refrigeration equipment, either in their stores for the grocery stores, or else out on these fishing and processing vessels and facilities.”

According to the EPA, Trident violated the Clean Air Act by failing to promptly repair leaks of the refrigerant R-22. That lead to refrigerant leaking at high rates for thousands of days, releasing more than 200,000 pounds of the gas into the atmosphere.

“They emitted over 200,000 and now they’re saving 100,000. And so if we’re saying 100,000 pounds is almost 150,000 cars, those emissions were equivalent to 300,000 cars. That’s a lot in one year.”  

To prevent oversights of this magnitude in the future, Plesha says Trident has implemented an environmental management system.

“Actually, starting back in 2016, we’ve developed a really comprehensive record-keeping, monitoring program, testing program, as well as proactive measures to make sure that leaks don’t occur. On our larger vessels now, we at least annually remove all the freon from the refrigeration system and pressure-test the entire system to determine if there are any leaks. We now have leak alarms throughout the systems, etc.”

This is the second settlement Trident has reached with the EPA in less than a year.

Last March, Trident paid nearly $300,000 [$297,000] for Clean *Water* Act violations, specifically for discharging more fish waste than was legal. In 2011, Trident paid $2.5 million for a similar settlement for violations that occurred in the early 2000s.

Trident is one of the largest seafood processing companies in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. It has 17 processing plants nationwide — 11 are in Alaska. These include plants in Naknek, Sand Point, Chignik Lagoon and Akutan.