On a good day the wind blows the fumes right out to sea, but the residents of St. Mary’s, Newfoundland aren’t always that lucky. When the wind comes from the northeast, it carries the stench of over 100 vats of rotten, nearly 20-year-old fish sauce into the homes and business of everyone in the tiny community. The reason: the hollowed-out shell of what was once the Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company, which closed its doors in 2001.
At first the factory seemed like a good idea. When it originally opened in 1990, it was said to be bringing with it between 14 and 50 jobs, an opportunity that St. Mary’s current deputy mayor Steve Ryan equated with landing Amazon’s HQ2 in terms of its significance for the town: During the 2011 Canadian census, it had a population of 439. “For a town like this, 50 jobs is just amazing,” Ryan says, noting the factory would have also fed the municipal tax base. Unfortunately, the Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company was short lived, shuttering just 11 years after it opened, mired in regulations and legal battles. What residents are left with is a stink so strong that it feels like a wave; get hit, and it will knock you off your feet.
According to Juliette “Sis” Lee, a St. Mary’s resident for more than four decades, the stench in the summer is “cruel,” “worse than rotten eggs.” “If you’re out there [near the factory], you will throw up,” she says, adding that she’s seen hikers walking along the road suddenly get sick when they catch a whiff. Lee has had to rearrange her life around the factory fumes; she parks her car at her brother-in-law’s house, and leaves her home entirely in the summer, boarding up the windows and doors in an attempt to keep the smell out of her belongings. Even though she’s one of the closest residents to the factory, she knows others — including those living at a retirement community less than .5 km away — are even more impacted. “I can get in my car and drive away,” she says. “Some of them can’t.”
The fumes leave Lee feeling conflicted, in addition to nauseous. She loves her home, and the St. Mary’s community, but feels let down by the government’s ineffectual management of the problem. To her, it seems like the federal government is blaming the provincial government, and the provincial government is blaming the federal government: “They’re walking away from it,” she says. “We’ll take any help in the world to get it cleaned up, [but] everyone seems to have turned a blind eye.”
When it was built, the Atlantic Seafood Sauce factory served as a logical complement to the town’s largest employer, a fish processing plant right down the road. At the time, fishing was abundant in Canada, and many small towns in Newfoundland Labrador were centered around processing plants mostly open in the summer (in the off-season, employees would receive unemployment or travel to find other work). When it opened, the Atlantic Seafood Sauce factory processed capelin, a small fish native to the Arctic and North Atlantic and a primary food source for Atlantic cod. The processing plant exported female capelin to Japan, where their eggs are used in sushi preparation as masago, but the male capelin were simply dumped. Sahn Ngo, the owner of the Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company, decided to capitalize on that waste.
Ngo began to develop an understanding of fish sauce long before he made plans to open his factory. Prior to coming to Canada as a refugee in 1975, he served as a captain of a Vietnamese navy ship. During that time, Ngo made many visits to PhuQuoc, which he describes as “the capital of fish sauce in Vietnam.” By speaking with factory workers there, peering into “big vats” of fish sauce, and reading and researching on his own, he came to understand the process. According to Ngo, not just any fish can be used to make a good fish sauce: “It must [have] slippery skin, [and be] small and watery,” he says. The male capelin fit the bill, and the processing plant was happy to give them away rather than pay the required fee to dump them.
In the late ’80s, unemployment was high in the Atlantic region, and the Canadian government created an agency to fund opportunities that’d bring jobs to the area. Ngo submitted plans for a fish sauce plant using male capelin, and was approved within a month. According to Ngo, the initial cost was around two million CAD, money necessary to built a 20,000-square-foot factory, purchase 120 4,000 gallon vats, and to afford the other equipment. As part of the program, the Canadian government would help offset those costs. Although the plan was approved right away, Ngo delayed construction for a year so that he could set up a fish sauce lab in his own basement and be sure he could manufacture a product good enough to sell internationally.
Ngo’s method took three months from start to finish. “The process is based on fermentation of the fish,” Ngo explains. It starts by mixing fish and salt in a large vat and leaving the mixture to ferment in a warm area. Over the following weeks the temperature and water levels are carefully controlled. Eventually the liquid is drained, and aged until it is clear, dark reddish brown in color, and the scent has matured to that “special smell which only come[s] from fish sauce.” Ngo is proud of the product he developed, and confidently recalls that at the factory’s grand opening “over 100 people” showed up, an impressive turnout for a town with a population under 500.
But the project was in trouble before it fermented its first fish, due in part to the factory’s flawed building plans. Rather than durable cement, the building featured drywall construction. When this drywall came into contact with the excessive moisture evaporating into the air during the fermenting process, mold grew quickly. It was only 11 years before the Canadian Food Inspection agency (CFIA) shuttered the plant, and deemed the product unsafe. Ngo didn’t give up right away. He sent his product to be tested in a government lab in Ottawa, where it was found to be safe for consumption.
As the mayor at the time, and employed by of a board dedicated to developing business opportunities in St. Mary’s, Sylvester Yetman was instrumental in bringing the Atlantic Seafood Sauce company to town. Today, Yetman recalls the praise that the sauce garnered, saying that once, upon learning he lived in St. Mary’s, the owner of Vietnamese restaurant in Ontario immediately proclaimed Ngo’s fish sauce — which she had obtained a sample of during Ngo’s early testing of the product — to be his favorite on the market, and begged Yetman to put him in contact with Ngo.
Yetman doesn’t deny the CFIA’s claim that the factory needed to be cleaned up, but also questions their authority on the product. “In my opinion they didn’t really have an understanding of the fish sauce, or of the fermenting process,” he says. He also calls into question why the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which was shortly taken over by CFIA, approved the plans for the drywall factory at all. Ngo shares skepticism about the CFIA’s inspection process. He suggests that a prior conflict with the CFIA over product labeling motivated them to close the factory before the inspection began. Ngo claims that he had been vocal about their interactions, and speculates “if they shut [us] down, nobody makes any complaints anymore.”
After the government-run lab found Ngo’s product to be safe, he went on to win a court case and an appeal against the government. Even after those victories, the CFIA moved to restrict the sales of his product to the province of Newfoundland. “If I sell there, who will use my product?” Ngo says, pointing out the small population of Newfoundland and its non-existent Vietnamese community. “I could sell maybe one or two cases a month[...] we can’t survive.” The CFIA declined to comment, citing the amount of time that has passed since filing its initial complaint.
But for Ngo, their ruling proved too restrictive to run a profitable factory. “We still had one million liters of fish sauce there,” he says. “The value on the market [was] about three million dollars, but they would not let us sell it. And for that reason, we just [left] it there.”
Ngo feels that he ran a good business, and the government unfairly barred him from operating. In his view, if the government wouldn’t allow him to sell the product, they could handle the disposal. Ngo paid off his debts before leaving, and feels the matter is settled. Although prior coverage of the factory closure portrayed Ngo as a ghost who absconded his duties, he doesn’t feel that way. To this day he spends half of the year in Canada, though not often in St. Mary’s. “The community is still very good to me,” he says. “When I go there I see my failure; that’s the reason I don’t want to go there.”
The factory is a painful memory for Ngo, but for those currently in St. Mary’s, it continues to define a painful present. After a 1992 moratorium of the cod fishing industry, many of St. Mary’s neighboring communities developed tourism-based economies. As part of the Irish Loop, a string of small scenic towns along the coast of the Avalon Peninsula, St. Mary’s should be positioned to join them in their success, but some residents fear that the factory is holding them back. Travelers often drive through the Irish Loop and stop in small towns along the way, but, according to resident Juliette Lee, “you don’t stay in St. Mary’s. You pass through St. Mary’s because of the smell.”
Patrick Monsigneur has lived in St. Mary’s for 10 years. He and his wife relocated after their children moved out and they retired, originally drawn by the beauty of the land and of St. Mary’s harbor; “it was Newfoundland that brought us out here,” he explained simply. Today, he and his wife run the Claddagh Inn, a small lodge with a view of the St. Mary’s Harbour, and of the abandoned factory. As a business owner, he has tried to work with the municipality to get the plant cleaned up, or at least evaluated for toxicity. “We know there’s lots of mold in there,” he says. “I don’t think it’s been definitively tested.” These worries were echoed by residents who’ve seen inspectors enter the factories in hazmat suits and respirators, noticed that rats have fled the premises, and wondered what exactly they might be breathing in.
There’s not a lot known about spills of this nature, according to Don MacDonald, the Canadian Director of the Sustainable Fisheries Foundation and a certified fisheries scientist. By his best estimation, the odors are coming from trimethylamine and dimethylamine, two of the chemical compounds associated with characteristically fishy scents. Though they’re unpleasant, they’re unlikely to be toxic in an open-air environment.
Unfortunately, there could also be some more pernicious gasses and bacteria at play. “Most likely a fish is 20 to 30 percent protein, the rest is moisture and a few other minerals,” MacDonald explains. “When protein breaks down, it breaks down into ammonia, or hydrogen sulfide if it’s in an oxygen-free environment.” Both of those gases can be toxic, but MacDonald says that they only pose a great risk if inhaled at a high concentration, like in the environment inside the ruined factory: “You don’t want to go in there if you don’t have to.” The greatest health threat to the community would occur if runoff from the factory were to enter a water source, what MacDonald says would be a “very very serious problem.” A slow run off from the factory over time is unlikely to cause major problems, but if a large amount of the substance were to enter the ocean all at once, it could result in localized damage, and perhaps a temporary low-oxygen level in the water, which would lead to a fish kill in the harbor. This sudden jettisoning of rotten fish sauce into the harbor is only likely to happen if the entire factory crumbles into the sea. Unfortunately, some residents believe that just such a disaster is imminent.
Steve Ryan has observed the factory conditions growing steadily worse over the past several years. “One side of the roof is ready to cave in, and on the other side the ocean is coming in under the building,” he says. Ryan fears that if either of those events occur, the entire town could need to be evacuated.
Perhaps the most promising and most discouraging event for the factory happened in 2016. That year, the provincial government approved a cleanup plan, and a private company began the process. But the cleanup was halted soon after it started when it became clear that the contractors were dumping several dozen vats of rotten fish sauce directly into the ocean. According to Ryan, the provincial government ordered the factory’s drains to be blocked to prevent any more sauce from seeping into the ocean. Now fish sauce that leaks from the remaining vats pools on the factory floor. Now, rather than being contained, the fermented mixture of water, salt, and fish carcasses covered the entire factory floor.
In response, Steve Ryan worked to find a new contractor; drawing up a new plan for clean up, locating a waste site, and lining up everything but the money. The current contractor quoted Ryan a price of around $700,000 CAD (approximately $522,000 USD) to cart the waste to an approved dumping site 5 hours away, a cost that just isn’t possible with the small tax base in St. Mary’s.
“Whatever money we get as a town we put into our water and our sewage system; we’d never be able to handle a million dollar cleanup project as a town,” Ryan says. There’s no path forward unless the larger provincial and federal governments provide funding. Sherry Gambin-Walsh represents the district of Placentia-St. Mary’s in the provincial government, and according to her, finding the money isn’t that simple. “You have to decide where you’re going to spend the money health care or cleaning up,” she says. Gambin-Walsh also states that the factory isn’t solely a provincial responsibility, saying that “the three partners need to come to the table to get this done: Federal government, provincial government, municipal government.”
When asked if the factory will be a priority if she’s elected, Walsh insists that any concern of her constituents is a priority, but also that this isn’t the only abandoned building in her district. She has never personally smelled the factory.
Madeline Muzzi is a writer and video producer based in Brooklyn, NY. Sarah Grillo is a NYC-based illustrator who loves travel and food, and is currently a Senior Visual Journalist at Axios.
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler
Editor: Erin DeJesus