A Washington state jury on Wednesday awarded the Lummi Indian tribe $595,000 over the 2017 collapse of a net pen where Atlantic salmon were being raised — an event that elicited fears of damage to wild salmon runs and prompted the Legislature to ban the farming of the nonnative fish.
About 250,000 Atlantic salmon escaped into the Salish Sea when the net pen owned by Cooke Aquaculture — an anchored, floating enclosure off Cypress Island — collapsed. The northwest Washington tribe quickly mobilized to capture the fish, and Cooke paid a bounty of $30 apiece for the more than 43,000 recovered by the tribe's fishers — $1.3 million in all. |
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