Fish bang prompts appetite firm to spend $14.5M to bury subsea cables

It’s a fish story no one saw coming, during slightest not Halifax-based appetite firm Emera.

The primogenitor association of Nova Scotia Power disclosed this week to a Utility and Review Board that it spent roughly $14,492,000 this summer to bury a Maritime Link cables fibbing on a building of a Cabot Strait between Newfoundland and Cape Breton.

The cables were protected since an unprecedented blast in a redfish race in a Gulf of St Lawrence is about to trigger a analogous bang in bottom trawling in a area.

Also famous as sea perch, redfish were not on anyone’s radar when a $1.5-billion Maritime Link was designed and built to lift Muskrat Falls hydroelectricity from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia.

The dual 200-kilovolt electrical submarine cables travelling a Cabot Strait are a longest in North America. They are any 170 kilometres prolonged and import 5,500 tonnes.

Nova Scotia Power business are profitable for a Maritime Link in lapse for a smallest of 20 per cent of a electricity generated by Muskrat Falls over 35 years.

The electricity is ostensible to start issuing by a Maritime Link in mid-2020.

First time cost disclosed

In August, a association buried 59 kilometres of subsea cables one metre subsequent a bottom at inlet of 400 metres.

“These cables had not been formerly trenched due to a deficiency of fishing activities during those inlet when a cables were creatively installed,” spokesperson Jeff Myrick wrote in an email to CBC News in October.

Ratepayers will get a check subsequent year. Until now, a association had declined to redeem costs relating to safeguarding a Maritime Link.

The check will be presented to regulators when a association relates to redeem Maritime Link costs from Nova Scotia Power ratepayers in 2020.

Myrick pronounced a association was behaving after conference with a Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Unexpected consequences

After years of overfishing in a 1980s and early 1990s, redfish quotas were slashed and a duration imposed on some redfish.

Confusingly, there are indeed dual redfish class in a Gulf of St. Lawrence.

But really clever new year classes, that have coincided with warming waters in a gulf, have constructed redfish in large numbers.

There is now believed to be three-million tonnes of redfish in a Gulf of St Lawrence.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans is approaching to boost quotas in a entrance years and a fishing attention is gearing adult in a large way.

Earlier this month, Scotia Harvest announced it will start construction of a new $14-million fish plant in Digby next open in partial to routine increasing redfish catches.

Article source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/emera-subsidiary-spent-14m-on-submarine-electrical-cables-1.5400204?cmp=rss