On Wednesday 8th March 2011, the King Harbor water was full of dead sardines floating and decaying. The reason of this drastic situation was caused due to a lack of oxygen in the seawater. It was reported by the Department of Fish and Game that no sign of water pollution, algal blooms or toxins were found and the city authority said that it might take days and cost $100 000 to tidy up the water surface. A team of 200 employees have been able to remove 35 tons of fish by skimming technique. Nonetheless, more than 30 tons were left at the bottom of the harbor despite volunteers and employees further helped in cleaning up the marina by different other techniques such as vacuuming with high pressure pipes, fishing nets and individual hand catching.
Bill Workman, Redondo Beach's city manager said “The quicker the removals of the dead fish are done the better it is.” The decomposition of the corpses will cause various problems such as high risk of bacteria developing and water contamination which can affect other marine life such as perchs, macrels. Furthermore, the cleaning up needs to be done rapidly or else the oxygen in the atmosphere will also be affected.
The Marine Biologists expects to analyze deeper in this particular matter with modern and sophisticated equipments from another incident which happened in 2005. The main priority is to clean out the harbor quickly and for this, the city is looking for more volunteers and is seeking helps from its locality.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0310-dead-fish-20110310,0,7727294.story
