A 3,000 pound trout heist is weird. Unless the thieves had a ready restaurant(s) to take it off their hands, they probably lost money on their effort.

As far as hatchery accidents that result in fish kills, that's just part of the cost of being in the hatchery business. It doesn't matter how many redundant backup pumps, alarms, alarm dialers, and even double-redundant backup systems, you can never eliminate the possibility of a breakdown. You can only reduce the probability of such occurrences. Even with on-station employees. On station employees greatly reduces losses because alarms receive vastly faster responses than when the nearest responder lives miles away - oh, and the alarm dialer that alerts the distant responder fails at the same time as the pump.

If people understood how a well equipped hatchery is managed, they would be surprised that losses aren't more frequent.

Sg