The first signs of a cleanup of the millions of dead fish that blanketed the Darling-Baaka River in far west New South Wales began on Thursday afternoon when two men in a tinny began netting the carcasses.
The mass fish kill, reported last Friday, saw millions of dead fish floating to the top of the river along a 70km stretch, centred on the town of Menindee, where locals - who are breathing in the smell of rotting fish - are angry and frustrated at river management and the delayed response by government officials to the crisis.
A multi-agency emergency management centre was established last weekend and in a town meeting on Tuesday, residents were told that the removal of the carcasses, which has to be done before they sink to the bottom, would begin that afternoon.
However, extensive delays in driving the heavy machinery and boom equipment from Sydney to the region meant the operation being led by NSW Police was unable to start until late Thursday when the first boom was pulled across the river.
The first official attempt at removal began several hours earlier when a father and son team hired by the emergency response operation began hand netting fish carcasses.
They were later joined by two other boats of hired contractors to gather some of the remains of the rotting carcasses that have not yet decomposed and that have sunk into the river.
The dead fish were stacked in commercial fishing crates, driven to shore, dumped into a wheel loader bucket and then a tipper truck, before being driven to a site where they will be buried outside of town.
Inspector Matt Goldman of Fire and Rescue NSW, whose team installed the boom equipment and will be working on the operation in the coming days, said the complexity of a multi-agency operation and the remote location caused the delays.
“We are here out in Menindee, it does take some time to get all our resources in one place to get all the staff and equipment that we need, the heavy machinery from all over the state,” he told Guardian Australia.
“There are a number of agencies working together here to try and assist the people of Menindee.”
Menindee local David Baker said the response had come too late.
“This happened in 2019 and they [the state government] haven’t learned from that,” he said.
“I think they got two truckloads of fish out of the river in 2019 and there were millions of fish that died then.
“There are going to be more of these events in the future, so they need to get their act together.”
Baker said he feared the delayed cleanup will have little impact because the majority of fish killed last week have already sunk to the bottom of the river or floated downstream.
“They are going to get not even 1% of what died in the river, it’s really a waste of time,” he said.
“It’s a political stunt to say they are doing something about it.”
Fellow Menindee resident, Mick Clausen, said he also believed the cleanup had come too late and the dead fish were already affecting the quality of the water.
“All I can say is it stinks,” he said. “You wake up through the night and it is hard to get back to sleep because all you do is smell decaying fish.
“They are all rotten, they are all sinking and when I turned my pump on yesterday, you could smell it through the water, through the hoses, it stinks, and I think it’s too late.”
NSW Greens MP, Cate Faehrmann, who was the only politician to attend Tuesday’s town meeting, told Guardian Australia that people were right to feel frustrated.
She has called for a royal commission into the management of the Murray Darling basin.
“People seem very dissatisfied by the response to this cleanup,” she said.
“It’s more than five days now, they knew a fish kill was coming, they knew a fish kill was on the horizon and they should have been planning this much earlier to deal with this as soon as they could,” she said.
Menindee is reliant on the river water, so the unknown effect that the decomposed fish will have on overall river health is now of primary concern to residents.
UNSW Prof Richard Kingsford said the decomposing fish will “contribute to increasing nitrogen, carbon and phosphorus in the water as the main nutrients which can also increase blue-green algal blooms”.
Barwon MP, Roy Butler, who came to the site of the fish excavation on Thursday, said he would be speaking with locals about the many theories of what happened to cause these latest fish kills, and would support an independent investigation as to what happened.
“I think there needs to be an independent investigation to look at what has actually happened and [to] get to the bottom of those causes because there are theories running around that it is other things,” he said.
“[We need to] get to the bottom of what really happened with an independent person and then come up with a series of recommendations if we can to try and avoid this happening again.”
