Floundering North Carolina Fisheries Agency Endangers Workers and Wildlife

On a misty and breezy morning last fall, Marc Hamric, a North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries veteran, and two other technicians were conducting field work in Turnagain Bay, a remote area near Cedar Island.

They had brought their boat ashore, but because the water was so rough, it came loose and floated away.

One DMF technician swam after it and had trouble hoisting himself aboard. Hamric swam to rescue him. Meanwhile, the technician managed to get on the boat and steer back to shore, but didn’t know Hamric had followed him into the bay. 

As the two technicians searched the water for Hamric, one was on speaker phone with the team’s supervisors, sobbing as he explained what happened. The technicians eventually found Hamric in the water. They tried to resuscitate him. Shortly after an ambulance arrived, medics pronounced him dead. 

Chloe Dorin, then a biologist with DMF and one of the supervisors, was on the call. “I heard the whole thing,” Dorin said in an interview. “It has been a little over a year now, and I still think about him every day.”

The Carteret County sheriff ruled Hamric’s death an accident. Yet current and former employees say DMF routinely requires technicians to work while sleep-deprived and in dangerous conditions: in rain, wind and fog as dense as fresh concrete. 

Interviews and government documents depict DMF as a floundering bureaucracy that jeopardizes the safety of its technicians who work on the water. The division has also failed its state-mandated duty to protect aquatic life and coastal habitats, in part because of incomplete and incorrect scientific data, according to court records, state reports and employees.

Some current and former employees who shared their experiences asked not to be named for fear of retaliation. Inside Climate News also relied on internal emails, legislative and federal documents, a confidential whistleblower report filed with the state auditor’s office and a recent superior court ruling against the division. 

DMF, which is housed under the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality, is responsible for the stewardship of the state’s fish, clams, oysters and crabs in all coastal waters up to three miles offshore. 

It must comply with federal requirements, legislative mandates and rules passed by the state Marine Fisheries Commission, itself mired in internecine politics between commercial fishermen whose livelihoods depend on their catches and recreational anglers who fish out of tradition or need.

DMF did not answer questions from Inside Climate News about the allegations but provided a statement:

“The Division of Marine Fisheries is aware of claims made by former employees who recently left the agency. An initial review by the Division has found these claims to be unsubstantiated, misinformed or lacking proper context. The Division takes its role to provide science-based guidance to the Marine Fisheries Commission very seriously.

“There are policies in place to maintain a safe working environment for employees and ensure that fisheries data is reliable. DMF is always looking for ways to improve and is evaluating the feedback from these former employees to determine if there are additional steps we can take to improve safety and transparency.” 

After two years, Dorin said the workplace culture at DMF eventually became too much to bear. Not only was she concerned about worker safety, but she came to doubt some of the science that underpinned DMF decisions. She said she had uncovered several years’ worth of incorrect data regarding hard clams and poor scientific sampling protocols for bay scallops. She saw technicians break down under pressure.

“There are extraordinarily capable, hardworking people at DMF. In many ways, they are exactly why I feel compelled to write this,” she said in her Sept. 10 resignation letter to DEQ leadership, several state lawmakers and Gov. Josh Stein. 

“I have watched good people be ground down by a dysfunctional system,” Dorin wrote. “I believe serious consideration should be given to dissolving the division in its current form and rebuilding it from the ground up.” 

Stein’s office did not respond to a request for comment on Dorin’s letter.

In 1997, the state legislature passed the Fisheries Reform Act to address overfishing and plummeting fish stocks. Yet over the past 29 years, DMF has failed to manage fisheries and protect aquatic life and coastal habitats, according to court documents. 

Of the 13 species under DMF’s care, seven have collapsed, two are depressed and the status of three others are unknown, court documents show. Only one, red drum, is recovering. None shows signs of long-term viability.

DMF’s challenges—not only politics but also coastal development, degraded water quality and climate change—are legitimate, former and current employees say, but they don’t explain all of its missteps.

“We’re so impressed with short-term economic gain that we don’t take the long-term viability of the resource”—the fish and their habitats—“into consideration,” said Louis Daniel, a marine scientist and a DMF employee for 21 years, including nine as its director. He left the division in 2016, after he was demoted by then-DEQ Secretary Donald van der Vaart, an appointee of Republican Gov. Pat McCrory. 

“What’s in the best interest of the resource is in the best interest of everybody, and that’s where we have failed miserably as a state,” Daniel said.

Hamric had been with DMF for 28 years. He was beloved by his colleagues, employees said, and he won a DEQ Distinguished Employee Award in 2024. In her resignation letter, Dorin addressed his death. “There have understandably been many discussions about safety since then,” she wrote. “But there is a question I believe has received far too little attention: Why were staff operating on the water under poor conditions in the first place?”

Questions About Safety

On a sunny, breezy day in early October, Dorin boarded a 21-foot skiff in Morehead City to tour parts of the Intracoastal Waterway. Several men in a boat lugged a large mass shrouded in white cloth onto a dock, Dorin said, probably a tuna. Fish bit at bait at the foot of a cargo ship, where half a dozen people tossed their lines in the water.

Dorin is 30, just over 5 feet tall and lithe, with a buzz cut of brown hair, large blue eyes and a luminous smile. On the inside of her left forearm she sports a tattoo of a spotted salamander, the subject of her master’s thesis at Appalachian State University in Boone. 

Dorin started at DMF as a temporary technician and within nine months received a promotion to biologist She managed several technicians and conducted gill net surveys herself. It is a critical and risky job, done on open water and often at night.

Technicians unfurl several hundreds yards of net, which stand vertically in the water with the aid of floats and weights. The size of the mesh ranges from 3 to 6 ½ inches, depending on the species the technicians are trying to catch.

The purpose is to catch certain types of fish, then measure and weigh them, and identify their sex to help biologists determine the health of the species. 

DMF uses the survey data to publish a stock assessment and to guide species management. The division’s decisions—limiting the number and size of species that commercial and recreational anglers can harvest, the length or cancellation of a fishing season—can make or break livelihoods.

DMF’s federal gill net permit dictates the terms of the surveys. Twice a week from mid-February through mid-December, teams of two gill net technicians ride motorboats into bays and sounds in the late afternoons or early evenings. The nets then “soak” for 12 hours while the targeted species—as well as other aquatic life—are trapped. 

The afternoon trip, plus the net-setting, can take six to eight hours. Technicians then go home, sleep a little, and return in the middle of the night or very early morning to do the scientific analysis. They remove the nets and measure, tag and determine the age and sex of the catch, and log the numbers of animals that are dead or alive.

Several current and former employees said some technicians have stayed in hotels on very long trips, but that DMF’s expectations, which include boat maintenance and extensive paperwork, are unrealistic.

Other employees said they’ve not been well-trained on crucial safety measures, such as shooting flares and navigating a boat at night. Sometimes, instead of hands-on instruction, they watch slideshows. 

Still others said they had to wait several months to receive personal lifejackets for the first several months of the job, and in the meantime had to borrow them.

Employees said they have seen coworkers fall asleep at the wheel while hauling boats behind state-owned trucks, “or get really tired and are dazed or zoned out.”

Sometimes exhausted technicians have falsified the soak time so they can rest, Dorin said, which can skew the accuracy and quality of the data. 

Dorin said she doesn’t blame the technicians, who say their concerns have not been addressed by management. 

DMF could ask federal regulators to adjust the soak times, which could have beneficial trade-offs. While potentially reducing the number of captured fish, a shorter soak time could also reduce the catch of unintended species, like sea turtles and sharks, and it would be safer for the technicians. Managers at DMF’s Wilmington office, Dorin said, have instructed technicians to set nets for only four hours because of the high number of sea turtles being caught. 

“I have watched what these schedules do to people,” Dorin said. “The extraordinary workload placed on technicians creates incentives to falsify timesheets and field records simply to make an impossible schedule appear possible.”

Systemic Mismanagement

River herring, a foot-long fish with shiny teal-and-white scales, is one of the most legendary species in North Carolina. The fish has its own festival. At its peak, commercial fishermen caught 20 million pounds each year. Before DMF enacted a moratorium on river herring in 2007, the annual catch had cratered by 99 percent—to just 110,000 pounds.

The fate of the river herring is one of dozens of examples of DMF’s mismanagement detailed in a court ruling published in August. In 2020, the Coastal Conservation Association, a nonprofit composed of recreational fishermen and conservationists, sued DMF for allegedly mismanaging its fisheries to the point of collapse.

The trial started in January and lasted five weeks.

Over a 190-page decision in August, Wake County Special Superior Court Judge Bryan Collins Jr. eviscerated DMF for its “systemic, decades-long pattern” of management that favored the commercial industry “to the detriment of North Carolina’s coastal fisheries and the general public.”

Although overfishing and habitat destruction has nearly eliminated some species in coastal waters, the state responded that “DMF does not use the term ‘collapsed’ regarding marine fisheries management,” Collins wrote.

“Notably, the State did not contend that it was improper to make such an assessment,” the judge added, “only that it would not engage in such an exercise.” 

At trial, DMF witnesses did not rebut any of the plaintiffs’ claims, but rather only confirmed them, court records show. The division’s own witnesses confirmed that it is not managing its fisheries to achieve long-term viability, as legally required, and employees had no documents to guide staff on meeting that standard. 

Tina Moore, a bivalve expert at DMF, testified that the hard clam had been overfished, but the division has no rebuilding plan for the species or the bay scallop, whose commercial catches are “essentially zero.” 

Dorin did not testify at the trial, but said she encountered several instances of incorrect data. When she began overseeing the bay scallop program, Dorin said she discovered a predecessor had miscalculated data that allowed harvesting seasons to open in 2022 and 2023, in contradiction with the species’ management plan.

Bay scallops are nearly wiped out along the North Carolina coast, Dorin said. “Those seasons should not have opened.”

Dorin also discovered 76,000 rows of hard clam data listing widths and lengths had been transposed and gone uncorrected from 1996 until 2024. These errors affect the reliability of size and growth analyses that guide decisions on managing the species. 

DMF published the data in years’ worth of management plan updates. Dorin fixed the error and footnoted it in a 2026 fisheries management report. 

Daniel, the former DMF director, said if these accounts are correct, “it is a catastrophic failure of a reliance on data that are meaningless because they’re not being done properly.”

Dorin said when she mentioned the hard clam error to a manager, they responded, “Good thing no one will ever notice but you, Chloe.”

“I have never forgotten that sentence,” Dorin said.

Accidentally Ensnared 

When the technicians reel in their gill nets to examine the catch, they find targeted species, like blue fish, Southern flounder and spot. But they also capture endangered species.

One DMF employee said they had seen hundreds of baby sharks dead in the nets, a report corroborated by another technician.

“I have witnessed the fatality of multiple scalloped hammerhead sharks,” an endangered species, one employee wrote in an email forwarded to Inside Climate News, “as well as the fatality of over 100 other adult sharks. All of those were a direct result of the gill nets we set.”

The nets also entangle sea turtles and Atlantic sturgeon. DMF employees calculated that from July 2021 to September 2026, DMF’s gill net program logged 172 “interactions” with sea turtles, meaning the turtle was caught in the net. Of those, a third of the turtles were found dead; others might have died later from trauma incurred in the net.

Employees say finding even a live sea turtle is “heartbreaking.” 

“No one wants to see a sea turtle in a net,” an employee said. 

Technicians are trained to identify, measure, log and even resuscitate sea turtles, according to DMF, and tag all live turtles. Dead turtles are sent to the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission for examination. 

Employees say tired, time-pressed technicians likely don’t report every protected sea turtle, Atlantic sturgeon or endangered shark caught in DMF gill nets, as required. That means the division could be ensnaring greater numbers than permitted by the federal government under the Endangered Species Act.

A DMF employee told Inside Climate News that technicians generally report dead sea turtles, but not always live ones, as required by the federal permit. “You’re sleep-deprived. You’re going to look at the turtle and say to yourself, ‘I didn’t see it. I’m just going to release it.’”

Atlantic sturgeon are also being killed. Over the past five years, 10 percent of 149 Atlantic sturgeon captured were found dead in the nets, federal data show.

Dorin confirmed that dozens of endangered sea turtles and sharks have been needlessly trapped in gill nets; many of them died.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which is composed of representatives from East Coast states, concluded that the Atlantic sturgeon remains depleted along the entire seaboard not only because of overfishing but bycatch, habitat loss and ship strikes.

Before becoming DMF director in 2007, Daniel led the congressionally established South Atlantic Fishery Management Council, on which he represented North Carolina. He was an expert witness on behalf of the CCA at the trial.

Daniel told Inside Climate News that the state’s fisheries have been wiped out “because we allow things that no one else allows.” 

Crab and oyster dredging kills species on the beds of the sounds. Shrimp trawling and gill netting in estuaries—essentially nurseries for fish—accounts for hundreds of millions of bycatch, fish that have the misfortune to become ensnarled in a net intended for someone else. 

Other states, the August court decision noted, prohibit or sharply limit the use of destructive gear in estuaries and fish nurseries. 

Trawling and dredging, Daniel said, is the marine equivalent of clear-cutting a forest. The gear has destroyed sea grasses and corals, oyster reefs and sponge communities, Daniel said, “and the interstitial spaces for all these little creatures to live in. Now it’s just a flat, barren bottom.” 

Investigating the Agency

As part of his August ruling, Collins directed the Coastal Conservation Association and the state to confer and report back to him about possible solutions to the issues raised at trial. Before the 45-day deadline, the state appealed Collins’ decision. It now goes to the N.C. Court of Appeals. No date has yet been set.

The State Auditor’s office announced in April that it is investigating DMF. State Rep. Jake Johnson, chairman of the House Select Committee on Oversight and Reform, recently requested financial and operational information from DMF. 

“North Carolina fishery management has shown an inability to keep up with science and a failure to utilize relevant data and reports,” Johnson wrote to the division.

Johnson cited a 1,000-page report released by the North Carolina Collaboratory that found similar problems to those presented at trial. The Collaboratory is a state-funded research agency that includes members of universities and government.

Among its conclusions, the Collaboratory recommended DMF needs an independent scientific oversight committee, binding catch limits, more robust protection of estuaries and greater transparency.  

Onboard the skiff, Dorin headed back toward Morehead City. A flock of oystercatchers vogued overhead. A pod of dolphins frolicked in the water. She gazed across the sound.

“Sometimes when I am out in public, I catch sight of a man who looks like him and, for a split second, think I see Marc,” she said. “My mind still does that to me.”