by Erin Miller
Stephens MediaIt happened again — a West Hawaii resident observed Kona Blue Water Farms employees pouring something into their fish pens and wondered what it was doing to water quality and the environment.
State officials at two departments said they haven’t received any recent complaints about water or environmental quality around the Kona Blue Water Farms fish pens.
Kona Blue’s Neil Sims, attending a conference in Canada, provided a brief response via a voicemail Wednesday afternoon. He said the activity observed was a standard therapeutic treatment. Sims was unavailable for additional comment Wednesday evening.
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Kona Blue takes water samples and reports the results back to the state Department of Health, said Matthew Kurano of the Clean Water Branch.“To our knowledge, they’ve passed (those tests),” Kurano said, adding he’s seen no reasons for any compliance violations in recent months.
Kona Blue leases about 90 acres offshore of Unualoha Point on the Kohala Coast where it is raising fish in floating pens.
DLNR Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands Administrator Sam Lemmo said his office has asked Kona Blue to fix some of its benthic monitoring reports, which look at the conditions of the ocean floor below the fish pens. That’s the only recent area of concern, Lemmo said.
“I haven’t found any negative effects yet to our resources we’re protecting,” Lemmo said.