Revelations about abandoned fish sauce plant spark community concern at meeting in St. Mary's

Shianne Hynes attended school in St. Mary's, on Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula, not far from a long-shuttered fish sauce plant. There were times it wasn't a great combination.

"I'm a graduate from the school just up here, Dunne Memorial Academy, and there were days in our gym class where we could barely breathe because of the smell when we were outside," Hynes said.

Residents have been asking for years to have rotting fish sauce in the derelict building at the edge of St. Mary's Bay cleaned up.

Hynes was one of about 70 people who attended a meeting at the town hall on Friday afternoon.

Council called the meeting in the wake of a CBC Investigates story which uncovered six-year-old Environment Canada testing results on effluent from the abandoned facility.

Federal inspectors visited the site in late 2016, after receiving reports of liquid waste from the building flowing into the ocean. A pipe was immediately sealed to stop it from entering the water.

When tested in a laboratory, the effluent killed all fish within 15 minutes, and was described as "acutely lethal" to fish.

CBC News recently obtained those Environment Canada test results through access to information, after a wait of nearly four years.

The mayor says he was not aware of those findings, and neither was anyone else in the community of 309 people.

But they now want the problem dealt with, once and for all.

"We don't think that our small town should not be responsible for any of the clean-up," Mayor Steve Ryan said at Friday's public meeting.

A focus at Friday's town hall was on what the Newfoundland and Labrador government could do to help.

Several people at the meeting questioned why the premier wasn't there.

On Thursday, CBC/Radio-Canada asked Premier Andrew Furey whether the province is going to do anything to help the people of St. Mary's.