ABBOTSFORD, B.C. -- Two brothers whose 60,000 turkeys were destroyed after an avian influenza outbreak in their flocks say the financial fallout is devastating.
Shawn Heppel said Tuesday that he and his brother will be without cash flow until late August due to the cull.
"It's three months minimum before we can start up again and four months after that until birds can be sold," Heppel said as Canadian Food Inspection Agency personnel completed the destruction of the turkeys.
"So we're looking at seven months without cash flow."
Workers with the agency began destroying the birds Monday by sealing the two barns on property near Abbotsford and flooding them with carbon dioxide.
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The turkeys were ordered destroyed following the discovery last week of an H5 virus. Tests are continuing to determine the full subtype and pathogenicity of the virus.
Shawn Heppel and his brother Mike operate separate businesses on the property. The vi-rus was detected in Mike Heppell's barn but all the birds in both barns still had to be de-stroyed.
Shawn Heppel said the brothers would have received about $1.1 million had they been able to sell the fully-grown birds at market, he said.
The CFIA, said Heppell, has already told him their compensation will be nowhere near that.
Compensation is available under provisions of the federal Health of Animals Act but a spokesman for the B.C. Poultry Association said earlier that there are disagreements be-tween the industry and the government about how compensation is calculated.
There are compensation programs through the provincial Agriculture Ministry that pro-vide some compensation "but those usually pay out a year later and they're usually a nickel on the dollar kind of program," Shawn Heppel said.
He said the outbreak has caused a lot of grief but likely won't mean the end of their farms.
"We've been in business a long time and this probably isn't going to put us out of business, but it's a big kick in the pants."
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Authorities have set up a three-kilometre quarantine zone around the affected property which now includes 24 farms not affected by the disease. Tests on those farms are so far negative.
There are multiple subtypes of H5 avian flu.
The agency has cautioned that the presence of H5 virus does not mean there is an outbreak of the H5N1 virus that killed nearly 250 people in Asia, Africa and Europe after surfacing in Asia in late 2003. Results should be known within days.
In 2004, millions of birds died or were destroyed in the Fraser Valley from an outbreak caused by a "high path" H7N3 virus.
The Fraser Valley experienced an H5N2 outbreak in November 2005.
