For 25 years, the small town of St. Mary's, Newfoundland and Labrador, has lived with a problem you could smell long before you could see it. Now, after a quarter-century of holding its nose, the community is finally getting an answer to one very pungent question: how do you get rid of 110 vats of rotten fish sauce?
A quarter-century of stink
The culprit is a long-abandoned fish processing plant that left behind 110 enormous vats of fermented fish sauce. Over the decades, the containers have sat as an unwelcome landmark — a reminder of an industry that moved on and a mess nobody wanted to claim. For residents living nearby, the lingering odour has been a constant, unpleasant companion.
Fish sauce, when made on purpose and in the right conditions, is a prized ingredient in kitchens around the world. Left to rot in industrial quantities for years on end, it becomes something else entirely: a smelly, stubborn liability that no one is eager to deal with.
200 truckloads to a cleaner town
The solution, it turns out, is as straightforward as it is laborious. Crews expect it will take roughly 200 trips with a standard-sized dump truck to haul the contents away and finally put an end to the problem. That's a lot of round trips for a town this size, but for residents who have waited 25 years, every load is a step toward fresh air.
It's the kind of slow, unglamorous environmental cleanup that rarely makes national headlines — until the scale of it sinks in. One hundred and ten vats. Two hundred truckloads. A generation of waiting. When you add it all up, the St. Mary's fish sauce saga becomes one of the more memorable cleanup stories Canada has seen.
Why these cleanups matter
Abandoned industrial sites are a familiar challenge across Canada, from shuttered mills to derelict processing plants. When operators leave and assets are walked away from, the cost and responsibility of cleanup often fall on the communities left behind. The St. Mary's case is a vivid, nose-wrinkling example of how long these problems can linger when there's no clear owner to foot the bill.
For a place like Ottawa, where former industrial lands along the Ottawa River and beyond have been remediated and reinvented over the years, the Newfoundland story is a reminder that environmental legacies don't disappear on their own. Someone, eventually, has to do the hauling.
A happy, if smelly, ending
The good news for St. Mary's is that the end is finally in sight. Once the last of the 200 truckloads rolls away, the town can close the book on a problem that has dogged it for 25 years — and breathe a little easier, literally.
Source: CBC's The Current (cbc.ca).
