Just under 27 thousand fish escaped.
Chilean authorities received notification from the company on December 27, that there had been damages to the cages at the Tubildad site in the Los Lagos Region after a storm.
Today, according to a press release which was published by latercera, the company has now confirmed that an estimated 26,830 fish are now in Chilean waters.
The fish farmer has made a U turn of sorts considering that up until the news yesterday, Ventisqueros had been reinforcing the idea that incident didn’t constitute as an escape. However after an internal review of the post storm damage, the company has now confirmed the incident.
As a result of of a review, the company found that 2.7% of the total of that particular farm and 0.09% of the total company’s stock were missing.
“It is, as stated by Sernapesca, a minor escape involving fish in the process of harvesting and free of antibiotics,” the company said.
The Chincui site which reportedly was also damaged from the storm did not suffer from any escapes. “No damages were observed in networks or structures and with the statistics of the units processed in the process plant, no differences were detected between the stock of fish prior to the time of the notice and the final number of units processed. Thus, we rule out that there has been a fish escape in that farm,” the press release said.
The company said it was now working closely with Sernapesca.
“We deeply regret this incident. We know that we are permanently exposed to the ravages of nature and we have contingency plans established for it, which were also activated immediately in this case. However, we will continue to reinforce our operations and controls, in order to prevent the future occurrence of accidents and their eventual impact on the environment,” Ventisqueros added.
