B.C. trawler snares section of costly undersea observatory

Margaret Munro -

A wayward fishing trawler has knocked out a key section of the $100-million Neptune Canada observatory on the sea floor off Vancouver Island.

The trawler was dragging its giant net across the sea floor — in an area where the fishers are not supposed to go — and hit one of Neptune's platforms, loaded with costly titanium instruments that monitor everything from earthquakes to tsunamis.

Repairing the system could cost anywhere from $700,000 to $1.7 million, said Chris Barnes, director of Neptune Canada, who describes the hit as a "major blow" for the observatory and its elaborate array of sensors, rovers and instruments.

The instruments on the "pod," which have been on the sea floor since 2009 and were designed to last 25 years, suddenly went dead just after 1 a.m. on Feb. 18.

It was unclear what happened at first. But the super-sensitive devices, which relay data to Neptune headquarters over the Internet in real time, collected plenty of incriminating evidence just before they died.

A seismometer, meant to monitor earthquakes, caught the vibrations caused by the trawler as it bore down on the pod — and the exact moment it hit. Engineering data shows when other instruments and cables were hit and suddenly stopped working.

"We can actually detect how the instruments got disconnected, the precise time and the precise sequence of events," Barnes said in an interview on Thursday.

He said the data shows which direction the trawler was moving, and even includes acoustic images of the giant fishing net coming down from the surface.

While the trawler has not yet been identified, the "internal investigation" into the observatory's "first fisher hit" continues, said Barnes. He said there could be "legal implications," but declined to elaborate.

The fishing industry and the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans were consulted when Neptune was designed and built to try to avoid problems on B.C.'s increasingly busy sea floor, where trawlers are allowed to drag giant nets across the seabed down to depths of more than 1,300 meters, said Barnes.

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