January 25, 2021 — One of North America’s largest fish processing plants is shutting down as a COVID-19 outbreak grows and owner Trident Seafoods struggles to test its 700-person workforce.
The plant, on the isolated island of Akutan, is the second in the Aleutians to shut down this year, just as the billion-dollar Bering Sea pollock fishery was set to kick off.
Now, fishermen and industry leaders are anxious that they might not have places to offload their catch and that their plants might be the next to close down, said Dan Martin, who manages a fleet of nine pollock trawlers for a company called Evening Star Fisheries.
“Any hiccups like this, you really have to reshuffle the deck and try to figure out, ‘Okay, what’s the next step?’” said Martin, a retired skipper. He called the shutdowns “everybody’s worst nightmare.”
The winter fishery for Bering Sea pollock, which goes into products like McDonald’s fish sandwiches, officially opened Wednesday. But two of the region’s largest processors are both shut down: the Trident plant in Akutan, and the UniSea plant located 35 miles to the southwest in the Aleutian port town of Unalaska.