Kali­fa Clyne

The En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA) is in­ves­ti­gat­ing re­ports of hun­dreds of fish found dead and float­ing in a sec­tion of the La Pas­to­ra Riv­er in San­ta Cruz yes­ter­day. CEO of the EMA Joth Singh said the au­thor­i­ty was alert­ed to the sit­u­a­tion when fish were found float­ing in the riv­er, and im­me­di­ate­ly dis­patched of­fi­cers to in­ves­ti­gate. The au­thor­i­ty al­so re­port­ed it to the In­sti­tute of Ma­rine Af­fairs (IMA) but up to late yes­ter­day there was no an­swer as to what had hap­pened to the fish.

The alert came from the NGO Pa­pa Bois Con­ser­va­tion and one of its di­rec­tors, Marc de Ver­teuil. In a brief tele­phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day, de Ver­teuil said res­i­dents told him yes­ter­day morn­ing that "thou­sands" of fish were dead in the riv­er. "I went to check it out and I spoke to some eye­wit­ness­es, but by the time I got there, there was about 100 fish dead in the riv­er, in a very small area. "It looked like a pret­ty sig­nif­i­cant event." La Pas­to­ra res­i­dent Alex Fran­co de­scribed yes­ter­day's or­deal as a "freak in­ci­dent."

"Noth­ing like this has hap­pened here be­fore." Fran­co, who lives near the riv­er, sets traps to catch fish for food. He said he had set fish traps on Thurs­day af­ter­noon and caught three fish but when he checked his traps the fol­low­ing morn­ing they were full of dead fish and hun­dreds more were float­ing down the riv­er. Fran­co said as late as 6 pm yes­ter­day EMA staff were still do­ing tests on the wa­ter out­side of his home.

Res­i­dents of La Pas­to­ra use the riv­er for fish­ing and for ir­ri­ga­tion for agri­cul­tur­al land. In re­cent months there has been a fish kill in Bras­so and an in­ci­dent in which hun­dreds of dead and dy­ing cor­beaux were found in Ch­aguara­mas. No ex­pla­na­tion has yet been found for ei­ther.