Millions of dead fish wash up on Yorkshire beach after Storm Emma

Millions of dead fish and sea creatures washed up on Yorkshire's East Coast over the weekend. Tidal waves and gale force winds from Storm Emma are believed to have caused the “huge dump of animals”, says The Daily Mail.

Photographs from Fraisthorpe beach near Bridlington show velvet crabs and lobsters on the shore, with many people “filling buckets and boxes and carrying them away”, The Yorkshire Post reports. There were several dead seals “among the casualties”.

Commercial fisherman Jack Sanderson was at Fraisthorpe with a group of fishermen rescuing live lobsters to release back into the sea.

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“It was just like a war zone, total chaos,” said Sanderson.

“We have had strong easterly winds up to force nine and combined with a 6.2 metre tide, and the fact there was a lot of cold, frost and snow, meant the water temperature dropped two degrees in one day, which is massive.”

Bridlington is considered the “lobster capital of Europe”, says The Yorkshire Post. In 2014 it brought in over 420 tonnes — “more than anywhere else on the Continent.”

Sanderson said he is hopeful that the amount of sea life on the beach was a reflection of healthy numbers and that this natural disaster would not prove “totally catastrophic” for the industry.

Jason Harrison, skipper of the Scarborough shellfishing boat Shannon, added: “There were hundreds of thousands of lobsters, millions of mussels, you can't count the number.

'The number of velvets was scary. I’d say 80 to 90% of the lobsters were dead.”