The town of St. Mary’s is reluctantly taking possession of an abandoned fish sauce plant in hopes that the toxic mess flowing from the building will finally get the attention it needs.

Mayor Steve Ryan says the dilapidated building, containing huge vats of fermenting fish sauce, has been leaking contents into the nearby ocean for years and stuck in a jurisdictional no-man’s land.

He says they don’t want to take possession of the plant, but it seems as though it’s the only route to take to get the funding needed to clean the mess up.

“We’re hoping to take ownership,” says Ryan, “by doing that we’re able to get the funds that we’re working with the province…and we have a commitment of a clean-up.”

Ryan says the town did not know just how serious the situation was until a Freedom of Information request revealed the toxicity of the effluent running from the plant. An Environment Canada study was conducted, the results of which showed that all fish exposed to the substance died within 15 minutes.

“They never passed that message on to us, to the province, to nobody,” told Ryan.

“As of today, we still haven’t got nothing formal to say what they found in that study, only that we went through the Freedom of Information Act we would still never know today what came out of that study.”

He told VOCM Open Line with Paddy Daly that he learned from a resident that DFO officials were on site two weeks ago.

Ryan says he requested that he be contacted and present if any further inspection occurred, but they came to the site and he was not contacted. “I don’t know what came out of the inspection,” says Ryan, who believes they’re trying to hide the results.