Fish

to be delivered alive. This was not going to be easy.

PLANES, TRUCKS AND HELICOPTERS

By Thanksgiving Day 1977, technical equipment and supplies were being readied for something never done before — flying fish.

An ambitious transportation plan would start much like any other fish transport, with a 32-foot, tandem, 33,000-pound hauling truck, but this voyage would also include a U.S. Army C-130 cargo plane and a UH-1 Huey helicopter. Farmers were unaware their journey would also requisite a taxi ride with police escort past soldiers armed with submachine guns stationed on Panama City street corners.

The Journey Begins

January 1978 was wet and frigid in Arkansas with freezing precipitation falling on 12 days and rain on 7 others. Weather twice pushed the trip back. On one scheduled departure day, Lonoke ponds were frozen 6-inches deep. On the other, all C-130s at the Little Rock Air Force Base were dedicated to hauling supplies to other regions of the country crippled by ice storms.

February didn’t start any better, and in an act of desperation, ice was chopped out of pond drains on Feb. 11 and 1,000 gallons of (warmer) well water per minute was pumped in. This allowed the Amurs to be seined behind northern banks where they were dipped into buckets and transported to a shed for overnight.

On Sunday, Feb. 12, the next target date for departure, prayers were answered. Temps climbed from 19 degrees at midnight to a balmy 32 at 6:58 a.m. sunrise, allowing the fish to be handled for loading without shock. Non-stop drizzle and 10-15 mph northwest winds only made it miserable for the farmers.

Tired And Troubled

Hill recalls his share of the order was loaded last. It was late afternoon and sitting on the vinyl bench seat of a warm truck felt good to the already-tired farmers. A C-130 awaited them at the Air Base, ready to drop its gate and let the truck drive aboard.

A curve in the road caused water in the tanks to shift and create a short in the truck’s lighting system. So, a convoy of other farmers and assistants guarded fore and aft to augment any further complications. Arriving at the air base, the variable of a C-130 filled with fuel hadn’t been considered during an earlier practice loading. The ramp leading into the belly of the plane was now too steep. After two attempts driving up the incline, a group of men stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind and halfway up each side of the truck to push it aboard.

A Lonoke fish company’s 32-foot, tandem, 33,000-pound truck hauling 125,000 White Amurs landed in Panama on Feb. 13, 1978, aboard a C-130 cargo plane. The fish tanks were later slung beneath a U.S. Army UH-1 Huey helicopter for delivery to different drop points along the Panama Canal.

The truck had been approved by the U.S. Air Force “but occupied about every inch of the plane,” Hill remembers. “We were snug in there.”

Hill and the technical party were finally in the air at 10:30 p.m. The crew included Custer, Mark Stephens of Leon Hill Catfish Farm, Inc., Bill Whiting of Sea Ranch, Inc., in Sheridan, and an employee of another Lonoke fish producer.

White Water

Congratulations seemed in order but according to papers obtained from the University of Central

Arkansas library, “all hell broke loose” shortly after take-off. The oxygen metering equipment on the truck went berserk. A difference in cabin pressure from ground level pressure threw off all calibrations. The water temperature dropped from 40 degrees to 36 degrees and was saturated with oxygen before landing at 6:30 a.m. Tempering (changing the water temperature to acclimate) the fish on the way to the unloading site had likely been lost.

Nevertheless, a long list of U.S. and Panamanian officials met the Arkansans upon arrival at Howard Air Force Base. They provided a police escort through Panama City — a town of 1.5 million. The natives were on edge due to the U.S. military presence, the recent canal treaties and corrupt military leader Manuel Noriega, who would later be sentenced to prison for amassing millions through drug trafficking.

As expected, an attempt to temper the fish at Calamito Bay, the first unloading spot which was located deep in a tropical forest, proved futile. The Amurs were dying on the truck and in the bay. The water turned white with floating fish bellies turned heavenward.

Hill says some of the fish “acted like they were drunk” and he attempted a rogue technique learned to revive them. “I went and grabbed a limb with some brush still on it lying close to the water,” he says. “I picked it up and started slapping the water with it. I saw some guys do that to make the fish jump, get their gills functioning and oxygen going. One of the other farmers saw me doing this and came over and asked, ‘What in the hell are you doing?’ I said, I’m trying to get those fish turning upside down off the top!”

More than 90 percent died.

Panama was not happy.

Making It Right

According to the archived papers from UCA, the Panama Canal Company had received the fingerlings in good health at the air base in Little Rock. So, contractually, the farmers were in the clear. Exhausted and disappointed but not liable, the farmers would get another chance.

Before the disaster, Plunkett had already extended the contract for an additional 125,000 fingerlings. After the disaster, he remained committed to import- ing the Amurs. The farmers vowed to deliver on a second trip and to make up for losses on the first.

The parties agreed that the Panama Canal Company would construct a holding facility for the second shipment to Paraiso, a town located on the north side of the canal. Water from the canal would be drawn through a pipeline into plastic swimming pools, which were set up in the open-air gymnasium of an abandoned school. Two 30-ton chillers were installed to drop the water temperature to 57 degrees and the flow rate set to 58 gallons per minute. This would allow the temperature to be raised slowly and fish to acclimate.

It was all a waste of time and money, according to 94-year-old Wade Finley, another retired Lonoke fish farmer. “The Army Corps of Engineers wanted to see the fish living in that pool for a week before putting them in the canal,” he says. “It wasn’t necessary.”

Finley, a pioneer in tranquilizing fish, would be on board with his expertise and a portable oxygen meter for the second trip. He had flow meters installed on the truck, too, because “you have to be able to measure the flow of oxygen and they didn’t have that on the first trip,” he says. “They just had valves and turned on the oxygen.”

Turn Down The Air

No rain and 55 degrees (11 degrees above normal) were the conditions in Lonoke on Wednesday, March 12, 1978. Netting the tiny Amurs, driving them to the air base and onto the C-130 was a breeze.

In flight, Finley focused on regulating the oxygen.

“Their defense mechanism is for their gill tissue to die to limit the amount of oxygen going in their body,” Finley says. “The same thing happens when fish gather beneath a dam to feed where water is flowing fast. They get used to that higher oxygen rate by killing their gill tissues and then when they migrate back down the river into normal oxygen levels they die.”

Researchers report fish first appear disoriented in super saturated water, consistent with Hill’s observation on the first trip, before dying. Too much oxygen is fatal.

“I monitored it all the way (to Panama) and found out I needed to turn it down as far as I could where they could barely live,” Finley says. “When we got down there, the Corps of Engineers had a big oxygen meter setup with those tanks, but it couldn’t give you an instant reading. It took several hours to get the results of the oxygen level. You can’t do that with fish, they’ll die while you’re waiting on the results, so I used my portable meter.”

Problem Solving Solution

Upon arrival, all fish were alive and water temperature in the tanks on the truck and in the swimming pools were 57 degrees. The transition rendered no losses and after a week of non-stop monitoring, the fish were primed and ready for release in the canal.

On March 16, 1978, the Amurs were loaded into tanks equipped with agitators and slung beneath the Huey helicopter for delivery to different drop spots along the canal. During flight to the first stop at Laguana Bay, the water rushed to one

15,000 ships making close to 1 million passes through it annually. It’s perhaps the most crucial piece of infrastructure supporting the free flow of international trade in the western hemisphere. It saves 8,000 miles from a journey around the southern tip of South America.

It wasn’t like that in the spring of 1978.

Sitting by the kitchen bay window at his historic home on Park Street in Lonoke, Hill points to a swath of archived papers lying on the table and says, “I read all that, again, this morning. I’ve read it twice. I had forgotten all that went into (getting those Amurs in the Panama Canal). It helped the world.” •