ST. JOHN'S — There's an iceberg brouhaha brewing in Newfoundland that's pitting tourism operators against the province's growing iceberg vodka industry.

The long-running dispute flared up again last week when the mayor of Bonavista says an ice wrangler was breaking chunks off one of the season's last icebergs right in front of a boatload of tourists.

Betty Fitzgerald says people were calling from all over Canada and the United States about the berg, which had grounded in Bonavista Bay just a few kilometres offshore.

"People were coming from all over just to see that iceberg," Fitzgerald says.

She blames harvesters for whittling the mass of ice, which she says then caused the tourist attraction to float away.

But the company that contracts harvesters says the iceberg was 10 kilometres from shore.

The harvester was using a net to pick up "bergy bits," small pieces of iceberg that have fallen off the main berg, says David Hood, vice-president of Iceberg Vodka Corp.

Although the company has a licence from the provincial government to harvest icebergs for water, Hood says he called the harvester and asked him to stay away in order to avoid any further problem.

"And they did. It's a non-story, as far as I'm concerned," he says.

The company, which contracts two different harvesters, said they do not go into tourist areas.

"I don't consider eight miles offshore a tourist area," Hood said, calling the whole issue "silly and ridiculous."

Iceberg Products produced 120,000 cases of vodka distilled with iceberg water last year -- $30 million worth.

The company is allowed to harvest up to 500,000 tonnes of iceberg annually, equal to the size of one iceberg – "one of the little ones," Hood says.

The vodka is distilled and bottled in Newfoundland. The company will begin producing bottled water for the U.S. and international marketplace some time this month.

The provincial minister has said there are rules in place to prevent such confrontations.

Fitzgerald says she has no problem with the company wrangling icebergs, but she wants stricter regulations that keep them away from tourist areas.

"We were very hard hit by the northern cod closure," she says. "We've got to rebuild somehow, and tourism is the only way we can do that."

Other tour operators are in tow.

Cecil Stockley has run Twillingate Island Boat Tours in the ocean region known as Iceberg Alley for 20 years.

And too many times his tours have been interrupted with gunshots or chainsaws as harvesters try to break a berg into manageable pieces, he said.

"People come from all parts of the world to see an iceberg, and the last thing they want to see is somebody out there blasting it with a water cannon or shelling it so they can make vodka," he says.

Stockley said he has no problem with Iceberg Products making use of the ice, but asks that they do so offshore and gather ice that has calved off already.

"Once it comes off the berg it's free game for them to get their ice," he said. "There's lots of ice around here."

The berg battle prompted one online commentator to suggest that free sample bottles of vodka could dampen the controversy.

"I say if it creates jobs let them go ahead," wrote another visitor to the Newfoundland magazine, The Downhomer. "You can't recycle them. (They're) going to melt anyway."