VANCOUVER, Wash. Groundfish stocks remain depleted despite drastic restrictions imposed last year on West Coast trawl fishing, federal regulators said. As a result, the Pacific Fishery Management Council voted April 10 to impose emergency limits on trawlers that could cut earnings from the already struggling fishery in half, industry groups said.

"Many boats are not going to be able to sustain the loss of income," said Steve Bodnar, Coos Bay Trawlers executive director. "This is devastating."

The cutbacks come just seven months after federal fishery managers sent Oregon and Washington fleets reeling by closing to fishing the largest area ever off a U.S. coast. Thousands of square miles off the West Coast were put off-limits to protect canary rockfish and eight other overfished species targeted by nets dragged across the ocean floor.

The value of the fishery has plummeted during the past decade. Sales from Oregon's groundfish fleet dropped to $14 million last year, down from $34.5 million in 1995. Its estimated economic contribution to the state fell to $26.4 million in 2002, down from $59.3 million in 1995.

The latest restrictions were sparked by new evidence that the numbers of fish unintentionally caught in trawl nets could be as much as four times greater than previous estimates. Scientists based the new estimates on numbers from shipboard observers who only began monitoring the fleet in 2001.

"The data was so obviously showing that the bycatch estimates were wrong," said Burnell Bohn, who represents the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife on the fishery council, a state and federal panel that sets ocean fishing rules. Conservation groups said the council set a precedent for using observer data to rapidly adjust fishery practices.

"This is a huge victory for better management of our Pacific groundfish," said Phil Kline, fisheries-program director for Oceana, a conservation group in Washington, D.C. 

Trawlers and seafood processors questioned the observer numbers and urged the council to consider the economic impact on fishing communities.

"The best available observer data is just not good enough," said Bill James, a trawler from California who attended the council's meeting in Portland last week. "You're closing down not just an industry, you're closing down small coastal communities. This is not right."