Quebec provincial police have taken over an investigation into an overnight fire at a shrimp processing plant in the town of Matane, roughly 400 kilometres northeast of Quebec City.
The fire at the Fruits de mer de l’Est du Québec factory forced some local residents out of their homes for several hours early this morning before firefighters extinguished the flames.
Matane Mayor Eddy Métivier said the plant was a “total loss.”
The blaze erupted 10 days after the factory announced it was closing its doors.
Sûreté du Québec (SQ) spokesperson Stéphane Tremblay says firefighters were initially leading an investigation into the cause of the blaze but received information that led them to transfer the case to investigators with the provincial police force’s major crimes unit.
Local MNA Pascal Bérubé posted a video from the scene on social media, showing a large cloud of smoke emanating from the plant just before 7 p.m. on Friday.
Fleeing residents return home
The municipality asked residents in the surrounding area to evacuate their homes at midnight.
Around 120 people were evacuated but were able to return to their homes at around 5:30 a.m. on Saturday after no threat to local air quality was detected.
Jean-Pierre Chamberland, the president of Fruits de mer de l’Est du Québec’s board of directors, says the evacuation was necessary because the factory contained ammonia, a chemical used for refrigeration.
“Ammonia is a very dangerous product that can be fatal if inhaled,” he said.
Chamberland says nobody was inside at the time of the fire.
“Everything was blocked, everything was closed,” he said.
Local shrimp industry in trouble
On March 18, the factory announced its closure, blaming its shuttering on the lack of workers from abroad and decreasing supply of raw materials.
Over 50 local employees lost their jobs and around 150 temporary foreign workers were expected to begin work for the start of crab season.
Although the loss of the Matane shrimp industry factory has cost several hundred workers their livelihoods, Patrice Element, director of Quebec’s shrimp fisheries office, said he didn’t expect the factory and others like it in the region to continue operating for many years to come.
Element said the shrimp industries in Quebec and eastern Canada have been struggling with fewer shrimp to catch and process in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and rising operating costs.
At the same time, he says the factory could have been used to possibly focus more on processing snow crab and lobster, which are more abundant than shrimp in the area.
Kristina Michaud, the Bloc Québécois MP for Avignon-La Mitis-Matane-Matapédia, says the community had been hoping that another seafood processing company could move into the facilities and give the factory a second life.
Michaud says that local leaders are now focusing on making sure other factories in the region — which she says are also waiting on temporary foreign workers — stay open.
“There’s a crisis right now in the fisheries industry but we’re trying to do as much as we can to save it because there are a lot of jobs on the line for people in our community,” she said.
Bérubé said the loss represents the death knell for the local shrimp industry in Matane, ruing what he called “the disappearance of all traces of shrimp for the last 50 years.”
According to Bérubé, work in the industry is a “tradition that is dying out.”
“We’re having a hard time recovering from the shock of this closure,” he said.
