Marine Harvest has only days to catch the remainder of its escaped salmon.
The Government will not give more deadlines so that Marine Harvest can recapture the hundreds of thousands of salmon still at large in Calbuco, in the Los Lagos region as reported in the news site Biobiochile.
After the 30-day extension, the company will have until September 4th will to recapture the entirety of its fish.
Early in July, a Marine Harvest salmon farm in Chile suffered a major fish leak caused by a massive storm that damaged the confinement structures. The farm complex is located at Isla Huar, just out from the salmon farming capital, Puerto Montt.
In August, SalmonBusiness reported that the reported number of fish that had been captured was much lower than first estimated. To date only 38,000 – just 5.5% of the 900,000 have been retrieved.
The Seremi de Economía, Francisco Muñoz, explained that at the end of the deadline, Sernapesca will have to refer the incident to the Superintendency of the Environment.
Under Chilean law, a company has 30 days to recover the salmon after an incident. Within that period, it must recapture at least ten percent or “environmental damage is assumed. ”
