TACOMA, Wash. — Early next month, Trident Seafoods vessel-operations manager Tod Hall will bid his wife goodbye, then leave home for the start of a six-month season catching and processing fish off Washington and Alaska. This year, instead of boarding the 316-foot Island Enterprise now moored at a Tacoma dock, he first will check into a hotel on the outskirts of Seattle. For the next 14 days, he will remain quarantined in his room with all meals delivered and even an occasional hallway stroll off-limits.
Hall will be one of the first of some 4,000 Trident shoreside processing workers and at-sea crew to undergo this two-week quarantine in Seattle-area and Alaska hotel rooms. Their confinement will be monitored by security guards and nurses who will do daily temperature checks. Two days before they exit, if Trident can secure enough supplies, they will be tested for COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus.
Such measures might seem extraordinary, but these are extraordinary times for Alaska’s seafood industry, which each year delivers more than half of the U.S. harvest from coastal and offshore waters.
Trident and other seafood-company officials hope to ensure that factory trawlers making their way through remote swaths of the Bering Sea do not replay any of the harrowing scenarios that unfolded on cruise ships this year, when waves of the virus sickened passengers.
“The chance of having one hiccup — it’s going to ruin the season for everyone,” Hall said. “The boat has to be virus free.”
Processors face another daunting challenge in launching salmon operations in remote Alaska communities, many of which suffered losses in the flu pandemic of more than a century ago and are fearful of thousands of seasonal workers spreading COVID-19. In the Bristol Bay region, which hosts the largest sockeye salmon runs on the planet, some have called for the summer season to be canceled to stave off the coronavirus pandemic that so far has yet to make its way to this Southwest Alaska region.
“We don’t want this fishery to happen,” said First Chief Tom Tilden of the Curyung Tribe, who co-signed along with Dillingham Mayor Alice Ruby an April 6 letter to Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy requesting he consider a Bristol Bay salmon closure. “The potential for devastating communities is there. And to us, it’s not worth the risk.”
Dunleavy has designated fishermen part of Alaska’s essential workforce and, so far, has supported continuing salmon harvests in Bristol Bay and other parts of the state.
“The state is actively working with the fishing industry and local government on protecting fishery workers and surrounding communities,” Jeff Turner, a Dunleavy spokesperson, said in a statement to The Seattle Times.
Through the spring pandemic, Trident CEO Joe Bundrant, along with other industry officials, has been working with health consultants to develop the quarantine procedures as well as other protocols for the upcoming seasons.
Bundrant leads the privately held, Seattle-based company founded by his father, Chuck Bundrant, that now ranks as one of the largest seafood companies in North America with a fleet of some 40 vessels and 16 U.S. processing plants that stretch from Akutan, in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, to Carrollton, Georgia.
Joe Bundrant faces one of the most difficult junctures in Trident’s 47-year history as he charts a course through a pandemic that has imploded sales to major restaurant and food-service customers and generated strong opposition to summer operations among some Alaskans.
Bundrant said pandemic precautions will cost millions of dollars. Those additional expenses would be a “drop in the bucket” compared to the financial blow from a major COVID-19 outbreak in the middle of the summer season.
“Our No. 1 priority, beyond anything else in the world, is keeping people safe. Our communities, our employees and our fishermen,” Bundrant said in an interview. “We have been designated by the U.S. government as an essential business to provide food, and we are doing everything in our power to do that.”
In the Lower 48, the risks of coronavirus spreading through the food-processing industry already have been starkly demonstrated.
In South Dakota, the Smithfield Foods pork plant suspended operations this month after being linked to more than 640 cases.
In Washington, Benton Franklin Health District has tied at least 51 COVID-19 cases to a Tyson Foods meat-packing plant near Pasco.
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