Oregon DEQ fines Pacific Seafood $3.2 million for water pollution violations

An Oregon seafood company faces $3.2 million in fines for discharging fish parts, chlorine, oil and grease into the Pacific Ocean and two rivers across three sites up and down the Oregon Coast.

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality levied the fines on Thursday against three processing plants owned by Clackamas-based Pacific Seafood.

The company, which has 20 days to appeal the enforcement orders, described DEQ’s fines and permit requirements as unreasonable.

“DEQ is forcing seafood companies to treat wastewater to levels thousands of times cleaner than drinking water,” Pacific Seafood said in a statement. “According to DEQ, the heavy metals in Oregon’s tap water are safe enough for the drinking fountains in our schools, but not safe enough for seafood companies to pour down our drains.”

Pacific Seafood, a family-owned business with more than 3,000 employees, has more than 40 locations that harvest, process and distribute seafood, according to its website. Its packaged seafood products can be found in the frozen food aisles of many grocery stores.

Some of the violations identified in DEQ’s enforcement order date back to 2017.

DEQ’s second-largest civil penalty ever

The largest civil penalty, $2.9 million, is against the Pacific Seafood processing facility in Charleston, near Coos Bay, which DEQ says failed to install a wastewater treatment system by an April 2023 deadline and which continues to release fish parts in the water.

“Basically [it’s] detritus from them filleting the fish and other seafood that they process and all of that ends up in their wastewater,” said Erin Saylor, DEQ’s compliance and enforcement manager.

This fine is the second-largest civil penalty the agency has ever issued, just behind a $3 million penalty it issued against the owners of a landfill company in Benton County last month.

Most of the Charleston site fine, $2.4 million, is assessed based on the estimated economic benefit Pacific Seafood gained by not installing a wastewater treatment system, Saylor said.

“These interim years, we’ve had a lot of conversations with Pacific Seafood about the challenges they’re facing in being able to install a treatment system,” Saylor said. “Our conversations with them have just stalled out at this point. And we’re at the point where it’s clear that having those conversations isn’t working and it’s time to move forward with enforcement.”

The company presented a different take, saying some of the requirements DEQ has imposed are not possible with existing technology.

“Pacific Seafood has worked directly with DEQ since 2017 to attempt to meet the agency’s increasingly complex and difficult regulations in Charleston,” it said in an emailed statement. “Back in 2021 Pacific Seafood applied for a new wastewater permit for our Charleston facility, yet DEQ informed us in March 2026 – five years later – that DEQ was only beginning to draft it, leaving the plant without engineering benchmarks to design a treatment system."

Brookings, Warrenton sites also fined

DEQ also issued a $104,800 fine against a Pacific Seafood subsidiary, BioOregon Protein, also known as Pacific Bio Products-Warrenton, for discharging chlorine, a cleaning agent, into the Columbia River at higher limits than its water quality permit allows, and for failing to submit monitoring reports.

The third location, in the Southern Oregon town of Brookings, was hit with a $114,000 fine for releasing oil, grease and fish waste into the Chetco River and for exceeding wastewater levels for E. coli, ammonia and chlorine. The Brookings facility is no longer in operation, though the fines were for when the plant was open.

The permits in question, required under the federal Clean Water Act, set limits and conditions to protect the environment and nearby bodies of water. They are known as National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, or NPDES, permits.

In January, two environmental nonprofits sued one of the Pacific Seafood subsidiaries, BioOregon Protein, alleging it had violated its NPDES permit 6,180 times over the course of three years. That lawsuit is still ongoing.

If Pacific Seafood does appeal its enforcement order, DEQ will set up an informal meeting where the company can make its case for lowering the civil penalties.

If DEQ or Pacific Seafood can’t come to an agreement, the issue will be referred to the Oregon Office of Administrative Hearings – a process that could take years to resolve.

This story may be updated.