News

Ironically, water was a very bad thing for the fish

BJ Ramer recalls looking up at the ceiling, which came crashing down in the flood.

By Bill Moss, Published: March 29, 2016

BJ Ramer has made the most of being a fish out of water.

A lover of the ocean and a fierce defender of all its inhabitants, she started a public aquarium in 2001 in her kitchen.
“Before that,” she says, “I had been a volunteer for an organization called Oceans for Youth and I went to schools and talked about ocean conservation and my experiences diving, realized it wasn’t enough. Over 60 percent of our kids never see blue water. So I thought we need to do more.”
In 2001, she led her first educational diving and ocean conservation trip, swimming with manatees on Florida’s gulf coast.
The ECCO Aquarium and Ocean Center opened in the 500 block of North Main Street in October 2011.
All went swimmingly, you might say. No one knew whether tourists strolling on a small town sidewalk in the Blue Ridge Mountains would be drawn to seahorses, sharks and eels but they were. The fish census grew. More and more children and adults arrived for classes. Families with children paid admission.
Then disaster struck — ironically in the form of water. Ramer and her crew of volunteers had just finished cleaning and renovating the system when, literally, the roof fell in and the flood came down.
On Feb. 26, a water heater from the residential condo upstairs broke, sending thousands of gallons of water through the floor. Dirty water and chunks of ceiling tile poured into the fish tanks, contaminating the saltwater habitat and killing 41 sea creatures, many of them star attractions. City firefighters responded, helping to round up fish, clean tanks, remove soggy ceiling tile and bring order to chaos. A month after they first got the emergency call, ServiceMaster crews are still working on the cleanup. Fish are still dying.
“We don’t know how much they ingested,” Ramer said on a recent Sunday. “They’re fish. They might think it’s food when it crumbles. See how yellow that water is in that tank? It had tile in it.”

'People were kicking the door'

FFA members Alex Baker, Hayden Whaley and Oscar Martinez pose with a shark and ECCO interns Katlyn Kanup and Kortney Clark and BJ Ramer after presenting a $500 check for the aquarium’s recovery.Ramer is not 20,000 leagues under the sea without an air tank. She just feels like it.

“Yesterday people were kicking the door,” she says. The attitude of people seems to be “It’s just water. Wipe it up.”
“I don’t think people realize exactly what happened,” she says. “They think it was just a little water leak. This is major stuff. We had to cancel programs. We’ve lost over $5,000 of revenue because of this. Last year we did over 7,000 guests and we were only open 9½ months and we did over 3,700 people in classes.”
“We had just used the majority of our reserve money to reboot all of these tanks and buy new decorations and new sand,” she says. “We just put a whole new lighting system back here. That got trashed.”
There are potential insurance claims from the residential condo insurance, the building and the Ocean Center. Ramer’s insurance has a $1,000 deductible.
“I don’t want them to buy me a car,” she says of the adjusters. “I just want it fair. And I want it back.”
She’s hoping to reopen soon.
“We’re shooting for April 1st but I’m not going to hold my breath,” she says. “We lost all the sand, all the live rock — everything had to go. We’re going to be in debt probably 20-grand to fix this. We’re looking at almost $2,000 just for the lost fish.”
She pulls out a fish catalogue and points at a popular species she plans to order as soon as the tanks are habitable.
“Seahorses — $79.99, for one, and that’s with our corporate discount,” she says.
ECCO’s high school interns started a Go Fund Me page (there’s a link on the ECCO Facebook page). The center plans its first Seafest, on June 11 in the First Citizens Bank parking lot, as a fundraiser. She hopes to raise $15,000 to $20,000.
Ramer plans to ask the Tourism Development Authority for help, too. She argues that ECCO is one of the drivers of tourism.
“We send a lot of those folks for lunches or they go shopping,” she says. “They ask us, ‘Where else can we go? What else can we do?’ And we’re always telling them.”
On Tuesday three students from North Henderson High School’s Future Farmers of America club gave Ramer a brighter outlook.
“The reason we wanted to raise money for her is that we heard about the accident,” said Alex Baker, reporter for the FFA, “and we were in need of a community service project to help somebody out that was less fortunate.” Baker and club members Hayden Whaley and Oscar Martinez presented Ramer with a check for $500 for recovery.