By JOHN McCOY
Charleston Gazette-Mail
WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. — Eleven months after flooding knocked the White Sulphur Springs National Fish Hatchery out of business, it’s almost open for business again.
(Photo by John McCoy)
“By 2018, we’ll be able to meet our [trout-egg] obligations again,” said Tyler Hern, the hatchery’s lead fish biologist. “We won’t be completely back to normal until 2019, but we’re getting there.”
After the devastating floods of June 23, 2016, a full comeback hardly seemed possible. The fast-rising waters of Wades Creek tore through the facility, damaging buildings and raceways and washing away almost all of the 45,000 trout on station at the time.
“It was discouraging to see the damage,” Hern said. “The first thing that went through our minds was ‘Where in the heck do we start?’ ”
It’s easy to understand why.
The creek’s raging waters ripped metal siding off the 100-yard-long raceway building and damaged beyond repair all 11 of its garage-style rolling doors. The flood dumped up to 2 feet of debris and sediment into the raceways of the facility’s brood stock building. The hatch house, less hard hit, still had several inches of mud in its raceways.
A contractor had just finished shaping the ground for two new mussel-propagation ponds. The flood washed away all that work. Insulation and drywall had to be replaced in nearly all the facility’s buildings.
Damage estimates came in at $1.7 million to $1.8 million. Hern said some of the staff wondered whether U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service administrators might close the 117-year-old facility.
“The [USFWS] leadership said we didn’t need to worry about getting closed. They said the work we do here at the hatchery is important to the agency, and they said we’d rebuild,” Hern recalled.
The hatchery’s primary mission is to provide 9 million trout eggs a year to federal water project sites around the country. Excess brood-stock fish get stocked in West Virginia trout streams. The hatchery also serves as a propagation center for crayfish and mussels.
Hern said the first thing the staff had to do was get rid of the dead trout that littered the grounds and move to nearby streams the remaining 2,000 live fish that remained.
“We couldn’t keep the live fish here because we’re a disease-free facility and those fish were considered contaminated,” Hern said. “They could be stocked, but they couldn’t be used for egg production.”
Hatchery workers also set to the backbreaking task of cleaning out the sediment-filled raceways. Hern said the agency’s leaders sent young Fish and Wildlife Service fire-crew trainees in to provide labor.
“There were 12 of them, all between the ages of 18 and 24. They were like a small army. We’d give them what we thought was a day’s worth of work to do and, by lunchtime, they’d be finished and asking us what we wanted them to do next,” Hern said. “We wouldn’t have been able to do without them.”
A contractor that specializes in fire and flood damage came in to treat the buildings for mold and to replace soaked insulation and drywall. A crew arrived to disinfect the hatch house’s raceways and prepare them to receive eggs that would be hatched into trout.
“We received our first batch of eggs in September, from the Erwin National Hatchery, in Tennessee,” Hern said. “We received another batch from our Ennis, Montana, facility in January.”
Trout from the Tennessee eggs have already reached 6 inches in length. The Montana hatchlings are 2 to 3 inches in length. Hern said the older, larger fish should already have been moved to the main raceway building by late April, but workers were still in the process of stripping out and replacing the raceways’ contaminated liners.
Work on the brood stock building is ongoing. Hern said the contractor expects to complete the work by the end of June. After that, crews will replace a recreational walking trail, four-fifths of which was washed out by the floodwater.
To commemorate the hatchery’s comeback, the Fish and Wildlife Service is planning to hold an open-house community event on June 24, the Saturday after the first anniversary of the flood.
Hern credited the support of the citizens of White Sulphur Springs for helping to get the facility back on its feet.
“We’re proud and grateful to work in a community like this,” he said. “In the weeks and months after the flood, we had a lot of volunteers, people from the community just trying to help out. We extend our thanks to the town, the community and to the state of West Virginia. We couldn’t pick a better place to work.”
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