Following the Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster the Chesapeake Bay Bridge is getting new collision-blunting structures around its main support piers. In our weekly series with the Bay Journal Delmarva Public Media's Don Rush talks with reporter Jeremy Cox about the new protection.
RUSH: This year may have become the perfect storm for the oyster industry in the region. Weather, sewage spills and a potentially declining market have all hit those who ply the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Delmarva Public Media's Kevin Diaz has this look at one of the key industries in the area.
DIAZ: Talk to any Eastern Shore oystermen these days, and you'll hear words like crisis and disaster. They talk about ice, brutally cold weather, sewage spills, changing tastes, competition from other states and just an overall down market.
BROWN: What it is, is an economic disaster. It's something like 1929 when the Wall Street fell overnight.
DIAZ: That's Robert T. Brown of the Maryland State Waterman's Association. After years of rebuilding oyster beds and booming harvest, the industry had hoped for a banner season this winter.
BROWN: The last three years have been good, but this year would've been great, and then all of a sudden, that market fell apart. You couldn't work. It started out maybe working three to four, then it ended up it was down to two or three, then right now, one or two days a week, and you're lucky. And we've got a whole couple generations of people who aren't eating oysters now. And then on top of it, we had this big surge spill on the Potomac that has devastated our market because we're getting so much bad publicity on it.
DIAZ: A harsh winter of icy water didn't help, but he says the underlying problem is economic.
BROWN: The market is bad. If you work two or three days a week, and how's a person make it working two or three days a week, you can't survive like that.
DIAZ: Adding to the local waterman's woes has been an influx of oysters from southern waters as far away Texas. Here's Robert Newberry of the Delmarva Fisheries Association.
NEWBERRY: When the season first started out, our price of our oysters, I mean 30 to 35 a bushel. I understand there's logistics and things like that, but our oysters should be worth a lot more than that. And so it started out halfway decent, and then towards maybe the second or third week of the season in October, a lot of the guys were getting phone calls instead of going Monday through Fridays. "Guys, we've only got market three days this week" or four days, and then it went to three days and then two days, and I started doing a little research into it. Well, what it is is that first of all, you have the state of Texas is now harvesting a load of oysters. Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, North Carolina [too]. So there's that many more oysters on the market. But what is happening is people are not consuming. Our market here in Maryland is what we call the gallon market or the shucked oysters, and it's off by about... I'll be safe in saying 60% now.
DIAZ: Working with Eastern Shore lawmakers, the industry has asked for disaster aid from Virginia, Maryland, and the federal government. So far, that's brought only a two week extension of the oyster season into mid-April. But Newbury says that it won't fix the problem.
NEWBERRY: So they look at it, oh, there's a lot of oysters. Well, that's right. You can have all the oysters in the world go out and catch 'em, but if you can't sell 'em, why are you going to go out?
DIAZ: Maryland State Delegate Tom Hutchinson, who's been working with the waterman, said a long-term remedy is to market the region's oysters as a distinct brand. He's introduced legislation to support that approach.
HUTCHINSON: The approach which we take to market not only oysters, but seafood for Maryland needs some revision with the hopes that we can mimic a very, very successful program that's done in Alaska called the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, marketing Seafood for the entire state. So I think we've come to a point where we need to look at doing some things differently here, and unfortunately, the watermen are suffering over that this year, but we're working hard to turn that around because we do have plentiful high quality seafood from the Chesapeake Bay, as well as from the Atlantic Ocean.
DIAZ: For now, though all the oystermen can hope for is relief at the state and federal level... relief that is still hanging in the balance. For Delmarva Public Media, this is Kevin Diaz.
