August 30, 2016 — Bob Considine, the DEP’s director of communications, said the menhaden population off New Jersey appears to be exceptionally large this year. He said the department had tested samples of the dead fish and “none appear obviously diseased.”
Loesch said that the fish kill was the first in Little Egg Harbor in the 39 years he has lived there. When the scale of it became apparent, the township council authorized the payment of overtime for the public works department.
On Sunday, volunteer firefighters and public works crews working in small boats trained fire hoses on the heaps of dead fish, sending them into the lagoons around Osborn island.
There, MUA employees used a vacuum truck to suck the fish up and transport them to a landfill.
“You can get a lot more volunteer firemen out on a Sunday than you can on a Monday,” Loesch said. “We were lucky.”