Goodbye, smelly fish

PROVO — With water levels swiftly declining and temperatures on the rise, carp in the Provo River are being left floundering.

Crews are removing thousands of carp from the lower end of the Provo River and taking them to the garbage dump to get rid of the awful stench of dead fish, said Cindy Gubler, a Utah Division of Wildlife Resources spokeswoman.

"It's a public health issue," said Scott Root, a DWR conservation outreach manager. "The fish are dying anyway. We just wanted to make it a little cleaner by cleaning up as many as we can."

DWR and Provo officials hired carp fishermen to net the thousands of fish. The group used electroshock equipment to shock the fish — stun guns, basically — leaving the carp still for about two or three minutes, just enough time to push them into a net.

"It's a lot like an electric fence," said fisherman Bill Loy Jr. as he held onto a large fishing net.

The carp have been stranded in the Provo River because drought has lowered the water level in Utah Lake. When water levels go down, the temperature of the water goes up, so carp in Utah Lake swim upstream in search of cooler waters.

But when the city dams the river and water levels drop even lower, the fish are left without enough oxygen and go belly up.

Gubler said the carp are being removed now before it becomes a "big disaster." She said that in 1992, in a similar situation, nearly 45 tons of dead fish lined the same stretch of the Provo River.

Provo crews herded the fish downstream last month in an attempt to encourage the fish to move back to the lake. Because the carp would not move back into Utah Lake, a temporary fence was placed in the river to restrict the fish from pushing farther upstream.

"We want to get them out of the sections of the river where they'd most likely to be stranded when the (water) flows dropped," said Greg Beckstrom, Provo's deputy public works director.

Gubler said DWR is mulling options other than disposal in a local landfill, such as donating the fish to local food bank organizations or grinding up the fish to make fertilizer.

"We're looking at the cost for euthanizing the fish," Gubler said. "We want to do it in the most humane way possible."

But Root said other disposal options will not work and the carp are headed for the dump.

"We'll have a net full of fish and take them straight to the landfill," he said. "There is just no other use that is viable that we've come up with."

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