I just moved to Juneau this past August and now live on Thane Road. I may not know much about Juneau but I do know that Lynn Canal is a great place to go fishing. Over this past summer I fished in two different spots down Thane, the Sheep Creek bridge and the little bay near Snow Slide Creek. Over the past couple months I’ve seen dump trucks coming in and out of the bay removing pieces of a dock, and I didn’t think much of it until yesterday when I noticed that they were now pulling a ship from the sand with two large pieces of heavy machinery gutting it and placing the pieces of broken wood into dumpsters.
My main concern is that they didn’t have a filter around the boat to make sure that none of the fuel and/or oil wouldn’t seep into the ground or even just leak out into the canal. However, this morning on my way to school, I saw men in yellow bodysuits dragging a yellow filter around the boat and facing it toward the water. That got me thinking, was that there last night? Was there a little or large spill last night, and they didn’t know about it until this morning? This worries me because I am not only a sport fisherman but also a commercial fisherman and I rely on the fishing season to help support myself. I’ve noticed that there have been drops in the salmon populations and that is very concerning. My questions are what are the construction companies doing to prevent a spill? If there is a spill, what are they doing to prevent further contamination and what are they doing to clean it up to prevent it from effecting the fish population? I would like these questions answered because it is impervious to the fishing community.
Carter Nielsen
Juneau