An animal-feed company was yesterday fined £10,000 for a slurry spill that killed almost 80,000 fish and threatened Cork city water supplies.
Some 78,000 salmon, rown trout and sea trout were killed by the spill into the Martin river near Blarney, Co Cork, from a piggery owned by MMF of Ardnacrushy, Macroom, on July 18th, 1997.
A South Western Regional Fisheries Board senior environmental officer, Ms Patricia O'Connor, told Cork Circuit Criminal Court the spillage affected 12 kilometres of the river.
The Martin is a tributary of the Lee, from which Cork gets its water supply. The ESB at Inniscarra dam had to release water to flush the slurry down the Lee.
Ms O'Connor told the court fish stocks were very low in the Martin because of the spill, and it would take six years for fish numbers to rise to pre-spillage levels.
The immediate clean-up costs were £15,000, and the fisheries board estimated restocking costs at £90,000, but it had no plan to do so as this would involve farmed fish.
Ms O'Connor agreed with MMF's barrister, Mr Terry O'Driscoll, that the company had co-operated fully but added that the spill could have been avoided if there had been proper management systems.
Mr O'Driscoll said the spill happened when an outside specialist contractor was collecting slurry from a tank at the piggery and did not close a valve.
The contractor was spreading the slurry on a nearby farm and had left the valve open to make for quicker collection from the tank. A "small amount" of slurry had entered a nearby stream. The piggery's tank system was up to standard and had been operating without problem for 20 years.
The company had paid £15,000 to the fisheries board for clean-up costs. It had since invested £30,000 in upgrading the piggery even though it had met all environmental standards before the incident.
Mr O'Driscoll said the company had also sponsored an environment-awareness scheme in nearby schools. He said pig-producers were currently going through a bad spell and asked Judge A.G. Murphy not to impose any penalty, or a minimal one.
The judge noted MMF had paid £15,000 but said he would not take into account the company's £30,000 spending on upgrading work, because it would have had to do that anyway as new environmental protection technologies were developed.
He said he was conscious of the exemplary element of the case and it was important that potential polluters understood they faced substantial fines. "If I mitigate the fine in this case too greatly, I think the wrong interpretation will be taken," he said.
He fined MMF £10,000 and ordered it to pay £2,000 costs. He gave it six months to pay.