LUBEC – Losing her sardine-packing job at Stinson Seafood after 16 years was a “hard blow,” Eva Cox says.

But Cox, who is 38, believes she is young enough to be retrained.

The odds that she will find another job in her Washington County hometown have weakened considerably.

Lubec, population 1,602, has lost 25 percent of its jobs in just two months, the town’s community development director said.

Stinson Seafood, where Cox was employed, was the last of some 50 sardine-processing plants that operated in Lubec in the early 1900s. The July 19 closure of the 90-year-old plant adds another 99 people to the ranks of the town’s growing number of unemployed.

Connors Bros. Ltd. – the Canadian company that owns Stinson – is ceasing operation of its sardine processing facilities in Lubec and Belfast.

Cox believes her future lies in Belfast. “I went down to the Career Center in Machias and I was blown away with all the options,” she said. “I want to go to work for MBNA. My daughter works there and she loves it.”

Eve Preston, Lubec’s community development director, said the 99 Stinson positions are among 179 jobs that the town has lost in the past two months. “Those jobs are 24.9 percent of our employment base,” Preston said.

At R.J. Peacock Canning and Nordic Delight, manager Robert Peacock said he laid off all but 26 of his 80 employees at the end of May.

Peacock said he won’t have work for them again until September 2002.

He said his company processed 3,566,783 pounds of farmed Atlantic salmon last year- most of which came from the aquaculture pens off Lubec.

But this year’s crop was harvested early because of infectious salmon anemia, he said.

The deadly salmon virus, which has plagued New Brunswick fish farmers for years, was detected in pens on the U.S. side of Cobscook Bay earlier this year.

Many of the large multinational salmon aquaculture companies have farms and processing facilities in both the United States and Canada, and fish that didn’t die were taken to New Brunswick for processing, Peacock said.

“There’s not a marketable fish out there,” Peacock said of the ocean cages off Lubec.

Salmon take 18 months to grow once they are moved from freshwater hatcheries into their ocean cages. And workers at those salmon pens are also being laid off because of the lack of fish, he said.

The freezers at Peacock are now stocked with sides of frozen salmon fillets from Norway. Peacock said his remaining employees are either working on cleaning up after the disease outbreak through the part of his company that provides services for the aquaculture industry or they have been assigned to the value-added arm of his company, Maine Freeze. They are cutting the fillets into serving-size portions with special equipment developed by Maine Freeze, he said.

Peacock said one of his former employees – and one of the best manual workers he knows- came in after the announcement that Stinson was closing and “cried like a baby.”

“She was laid off here and went to Gates Fibre,” Peacock said, referring to the Eastport fiber extrusion plan that announced in May that it was closing and laying off 50 workers. “After Gates, she went to Stinson. And now, she’s lost that job.”

The Peacock layoffs, the Stinson closure, and last Thursday’s closing of Stolt Sea Farms’ salmon processing plant in North Lubec – which employed about a dozen people – means Lubec has lost a chunk of its economic base in just two months, he said.

And Preston said Lubec is suffering from more than the loss of processing jobs. McGonigal’s Store, which employed 15 people, closed earlier this year, she said.

Peter Boyce, manager of Stinson’s Lubec plant, said he had had no notice of the Connors-Stinson announcement.

He received word the day before the July 19 closure that Stinson and Connors administrators were arriving in Lubec the next day and wanted to talk to employees, he said. “They announced that they were closing the plant because there’s an overproduction of sardines,” Boyce said.

Except for a skeleton crew to close the factory and prepare inventory for shipping, the employees were dismissed that day. They’ll get eight weeks’ severance pay, based on their average weekly wage over the last year, he said.

But Boyce, who has 25 years of experience in sardine processing, said he wasn’t surprised by the announcement.

Connors Bros., which bought Stinson Seafood in the spring of 2000, had been adding machinery and updating the company’s sardine processing facilities in Bath and Prospect Harbor, but was not putting money into the Lubec or Belfast facilities, he said. The Bath and Prospect Harbor facilities will remain open.

“I saw the handwriting on the wall,” he said. “You only had to look at the inventory that’s been building up here over the last three or four months.”

Boyce believes foreign competition – particularly less-expensive canned sardines that are being imported from Morocco and Poland – is what killed the Lubec plant.

Inez Lombardo, who worked in the front office with plant administrator Kathy Salko, said people thought the employee meeting was going to be an update on the sale of Connors Bros.

Connors is a subsidiary of food giant George Weston Ltd. of Toronto. Weston announced in February that it was selling off all of its Canadian and Maine salmon farms and sardine factories to finance purchase of Bestway Baking Co. from the Uniliver Group.

At the time, Weston said it hoped to sell the subsidiaries within six months.

Lombardo said that when the Lubec workers were told their services “were no longer needed,” many began to cry.

“Their lives are being taken from them and it’s a shame because these are hard, hard workers,” Lombardo said.

“I’m heartbroken,” said Connie Ferris, who packed sardines at the plant for the last 13 years. “I loved it and I never took breaks. It was a challenge to see how many cases you could pack.”

Ferris said she has no idea what she is going to do.

“I’m 58 and I’m not going to move. But there’s nothing left down here, really,” she said.

Ferris said she can’t afford to pay $241 a month for health insurance. Stinson took $15.66 a week from her check as her share of the health insurance premium, but that will end when the eight weeks of severance pay expires, she said. If she wants coverage after that, she’ll have to pay the entire premium, she said.

“I’m going to have to drop that,” she said.

Laurel Riggs worked at Stinson for five years before leaving for a job at the nursing home. She returned to Stinson in 1990 and has been there ever since, packing four to five 100-can cases of sardines an hour.

“I loved it,” she said. “You could make what you wanted and you could come and go when you needed to.”

Riggs, who has already talked to staffers at the state Labor Department’s Career Center in Machias, said she wants to go back to school to take business courses, probably at the University of Maine at Machias.

But for many people, the job at Stinson Seafood is all they ever had, Riggs said.

“I feel very bad for the men,” she said. “There’s nothing for them but clam digging.”

But Cox, whose husband digs clams, said clam digging no longer brings in what it once did. “They’re $1.10 a pound and they used to be $1.80,” she said.

Free trade and, in particular Canadian competition, have ruined Maine’s wreathing industry and its clamming industry, she believes.

“And we’re surrounded by Canada up here,” she said.

But some of the older people who worked at Stinson are illiterate and some didn’t finish high school, Cox said.

“Back then, you went to work,” she said. “Now, they’re going to have to settle for $5.15 an hour with no benefits.”

Cox said Lubec is “pretty much a retirement community” now, and the people who have to work will have to leave. Cox said she will miss her co-workers at the packing plant, who became like a family to her.

“We knew it was a fading era, but we stuck with it to the end,” she said. “And I could make my scissors dance.”