SALMON IN TROUBLED WATERS

“SKAGIT 911. WHAT IS YOUR EMERGENCY?”

“I’m not quite sure if this is a 911 emergency or not, but my husband and I are on our boat in Secret Harbor, and the middle fish pen is breaking apart, and we don’t know who to call,” Jill Davenport told the 911 operator for the police in Skagit County, about a hundred miles north of Seattle, Washington.

“What do you mean by the middle fish pen?” the operator asked.

“In Secret Harbor, on Cypress Island, there’s three fish pens,” Davenport explained calmly. “There’s a bunch of equipment and stuff that, like a forklift and generators and stuff, that are potentially going into the water. And we don’t see any humans around. It’s huge, and the whole thing is buckling. There’s a forklift that looks like it’s about ready to go in the water.”

“We are passing that information along,” the operator replied.

Davenport and her husband, Jeff, were on their way with their young children to set crab pots off Cypress Island, a largely undeveloped island in Puget Sound about halfway between the mainland and offshore San Juan County, at around 3 in the afternoon on Saturday, Aug. 19, 2017. As they approached Cypress Island, they heard a loud clank from one of the three salmon farms. They turned and saw a thick chain drag across the metal walkway linking the 10 cages that formed one of the farms. As they watched, the underside of a cage rose out of the water, its nets covered with a thick layer of mussels and kelp. Davenport thought to herself, “When you see seaweed, something is seriously wrong.”

The farms were known as Sites 1, 2 and 3. They consisted of floating steel rafts linking 10 individual cages, arranged in two rows of five cages each. The floating collection of cages, known as net pens, was held in place by a mooring system composed