Crews are cleaning up the thousands of dead fish that have washed up along Lake Champlain’s New York shoreline, including a stretch where public campgrounds and beaches are being prepared for opening this spring.
Lakeside residents in Vermont began reporting thousands of dead alewives showing up along the shore earlier this month. Vermont fisheries biologists say alewives, a species not native to the lake, are sensitive to frigid temperatures and likely died off during the winter.
Officials in the Essex County town of Moriah tell the Press-Republican of Plattsburgh that the stench from fish rotting on the shore would have affected the opening of local campgrounds.
Inmate work crews from a nearby incarceration camp are dumping the fish in large trash containers that are then hauled away to a landfill.