RALEIGH, N.C. — Nearly 600,000 trout grown by the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission died at a McDowell County hatchery during the rains brought by Hurricane Helene, the state agency has reported.

Landslides and flooding around the Armstrong State Fish Hatchery north of Marion compromised the water quality to the facility’s raceways, or tanks, and hatchery building. “Extensive repairs” will be necessary to repair the facility, but Wildlife Resources Commission officials are still evaluating the damage.

“We lost the facility. The facility’s going to need to be rebuilt, but we lost not only this year’s fish but next year’s fish, too,” said Corey Oakley, the assistant chief of the Wildlife Resources Commission’s Fisheries Management Program.

The Armstrong Hatchery is responsible for stocking trout in public waters across an 11-county region in Western North Carolina.

Typically, Armstrong raises 20% to 30% of the trout that North Carolina stocks in a given year, Oakley said. It’s likely, he added, that the damage to Armstrong will result in fewer trout being stocked, but the exact impact isn’t clear yet.

There are 36 raceways at the hatchery, which typically draws cold, clear water from the Armstrong Creek watershed. The Wildlife Resources Commission grows brook, brown and rainbow trout there.

During Helene, Armstrong Creek flooded substantially, destroying all of the pipes that drew water from the creek into the raceways. The pipes that make up that system were either washed away, damaged or disconnected by the rushing water, Oakley said.

Most of the damage was inflicted over about an hour-long period during the storm, Oakley said. In addition to the pipes, the floods destroyed more than a mile of roads that run through the facility along the creek.

“What we ended up with in the raceways was either no flowing water because the raceways were high and dry because the pipes got busted and the water couldn’t come into the system or we had raceways that had muddy water that was coming into the system,” Oakley said.

Either situation was lethal for trout, which depend on clean, oxygenated water.

The vast majority of the fish that were being grown at Armstrong died in the raceways, either from lack of water or from muddy water entering the system, Oakley said. Their carcasses will be scooped out eventually and buried somewhere on the facility.

It takes fish about two years to grow enough that they can be moved from the tanks to the wild. When Helene hit, there were trout at Armstrong as small as a couple of inches and as large as 14 inches. Some of those fish would have been stocked this fall, Oakley said, while others would have been stocked in the spring and even more next fall.

“We lost a whole production system, basically. We didn’t just lose right now,” Oakley said.

Oakley found a note of optimism, though, for Western North Carolina’s wild trout population.

Helene’s flooding scoured creeks and rivers throughout Western North Carolina, creating rocky habitats with very little silt where trout thrive. There is a good chance, Oakley said, that those habitats will lead to larger spawns in the near future.

“In a year to two years we probably will have a really great trout spawn in our mountain region,” Oakley said.

Trout fishing in Western North Carolina has a $1.38 billion economic impact, according to a report the Wildlife Resources Commission released last year. The report estimated that about 370,000 people fished for trout in North Carolina in 2022, with the typical angler making nine fishing trips.

As part of the effort to make up for some of the lost fish, the Wildlife Resources Commission is delaying a planned renovation at the Setzer State Fish Hatchery in Transylvania County, which was supposed to start in 2025. That project will be held off until the Armstrong Hatchery has returned to full operations, Wildlife Resources Commission spokeswoman Fairley Mahlum wrote in a press release.

Oakley estimated that repairs to Armstrong’s pipes, roads and water oxygenation system could take between 12 and 18 months, depending on whether workers are available.

Once the facility is rebuilt, trout will be added back into the tanks and given time to acclimate to the water there. The more familiar the fish are with the conditions, Oakley said, the less stressed they will be and the more eggs they will spawn.

“It’s a years-long process,” Oakley said, “not a months-long process.”

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