Road closures due to landslides prevented King Salmon from delivering a week’s worth of harvest, an interruption that will cause a shortage of product on their customers’ shelves.
The landslides followed last week’s storms, blocking the routes for the salmon producer’s transport trucks.
The New Zealand company’s general sales manager said the road should reopen today, 24 August, but three days of harvest had been lost, reported New Zealand’s public broadcaster, RNZ.
“In terms of customer deliveries, that’s a week of deliveries that haven’t happened so there could be some shortages of product on shelves,” said the manager, Graeme Tregidga.
The company’s fish farms are in the Marlborough Sounds, while its processing plant is in Nelson, which is roughly 100 km (62 miles) away, or less than a two-hour drive, if taking the shortest route.
But even if the small town of Havelock reopens Wednesday, the trucks would need to do a large detour and that means a 16-hour round trip, Tregidga told RNZ.
“We are running at about 50 percent capacity simply to deal with the logistics of that,” he said.
“We’re incredibly grateful to both our own team but [also] our partners whom we work with to make all of this come together. We have third-party logistics providers for local transport operators and international freight, and it’s a real team effort here to try and find solutions to what is a moving situation.”
Sediment run-off from the bad weather had not affected the farms, said Tregidga. “The fish are happy and healthy, so that’s a positive.”
