on the cover / By HSU Investigative Reporting students

Meltdown

His office is also located within the worst-case scenario zone. But that doesn’t bother him. “Not if they are doing everything the way they should be doing,” he said.

When the ice plant closed, it left markets and restaurants without a local supplier for bagged ice. Jason Worrell is the frozen foods buyer for the North Coast Co-op in Eureka. It sells about 50 bags of ice a week around this time of year, and that will go up in the summer. The store received no notice that Eureka Ice would shut down; he knew when he read about it in the newspaper. Soon after it closed, ice supplier Arctic Ice of Coos Bay stepped in with ice deliveries. “I was happy that someone else showed up, because they are not going to open a commercial ice house over night,” Worrell said. “It was a good thing they came to fill the void.”

But Arctic Ice doesn’t supply the flake ice the fishermen need at sea. County Supervisor Bonnie Neely said the county felt the situation was urgent, because an estimated 525 fishing jobs were at stake. “We felt if it went for another season with no ice available, that the fishing fleet would start looking at other options.”

Cindy Trobitz-Thomas, director of redevelopment and housing for Eureka, said the city, too, knew it couldn’t waste any time. “The city realized there was a need,” she said. “If you have fish, you need ice.”

To make sure fishermen have a source for flake ice in Humboldt County, Eureka is using $500,000 in grant money from the Headwaters Fund and $250,000 from the Eureka Redevelopment Agency to contract with frozen food company Pacific Choice Seafood for a new ice plant on a publicly-owned pier adjacent to the Pacific Choice operation.

Fishermen will still have to seek out other ways of storing their product, however, as the new facility will only provide ice, not cold storage. The new ice machines will be installed adjacent to Pacific Choice’s dock and will use anhydrous ammonia.

Humboldt State Economics Professor Steven Hackett questioned the pressing need to replace the ice plant, given that the fishing industry in Humboldt County makes up just 5 percent of the total economy. “On a good year, it probably brings in about $10-20 million,” he said.

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