West Java’s Indramayu – On Friday, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Minister Sakti Wahyu Trenggono opened a fish cold storage facility with a capacity of 300 tons in Indramayu, West Java, and said he anticipated fishers to make full use of it.
“(This cold storage) is little, but I think it will be useful,” he said as he opened the facility.
He expects the small-scale facility to serve fishermen near the Karangsong Fish Trade Place (TPI).
The facility was symbolically handed over to the district government of Indramayu and will be operated by the Mina Sumitra Fisheries Cooperative.
“We turned over the cold storage to the Indramayu district government to be properly managed,” Trenggono said.
He claims that if the cold storage facility is not properly managed, it will swiftly deteriorate. He added that he hoped it would not happen.
“If it is not properly maintained, it will get damaged quickly, and that is what needs to be prevented,” he explained.
Meanwhile, House of Representatives member Ono Surono stated that the ideal cold storage capacity is 1,000 tons, but the size of the Indramayu facility was lowered owing to budget constraints.
“If there had been no COVID-19, a thousand-ton (cold storage) facility could have been developed,” he explained.
A cold storage room is a chamber that has been carefully engineered to keep a specific temperature. According to the ministry’s website, the facility in Indramayu will serve the primary purpose of preserving the quality of fish captured by fishermen by allowing them to freeze and store the fish.
A cold storage facility typically includes an air blast freezer with a temperature range of -35 to -40 degrees Celsius and a cold storage freezer with a temperature range of -18 to -25 degrees Celsius.