By John Burton
The oyster bed restoration project has been working off Naval Weapons Station Earle for the past few years, NY/NJ Baykeeper says, which is now hoping the state legislature will allow the environmental group’s program to be re-established elsewhere in area waters.
Baykeeper is keeping its fingers crossed that the state Senate on Sept. 24 will vote favorably for a bill that would again allow the organization to develop oyster beds and reefs for research and educational purposes, to study the effects they have on water filtration and shore stabilization. The group has been conducting some research in about a ¼- acre reef it established at the U.S. naval station in 2011. Both Baykeeper and a Navy spokesman maintain the work has been positive and productive.
“They’ve had very good results,” said Dennis Blazak, community plans and liaison officer for Earle, speaking of Baykeeper’s efforts.
“We think it’s going very well and hopefully it’ll pass,” said Sandra Meola, commu- nications and outreach associate for Baykeeper, Keyport, referring to the pending legislation.
The state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) had expressed concerns that the oysters raised in the Raritan Bay and elsewhere where the water quality failed to meet federal clean water standards, could be illegally harvested by poachers and sold off for unsafe human consumption. The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) required the state to put in place more stringent protection but the DEP said it didn’t have the manpower or resources for additional security. So, in 2010 the beds located in Keyport Harbor and in the Navesink River off Red Bank were dismantled and the oysters destroyed.
Following that, Baykeeper had struck up an “informal” arrangement with Earle’s then commander Captain David Harrison, according to Blazak. Baykeeper was able to obtain a state permit given the site select was established as a marine security zone – “An area patrolled by the Navy 24 hours a day,” Blazak said.
The beds were created between the station’s trestles, the long piers that extend from the land into the bay where naval ships dock.
Since allowing the oysters to continue at that location they’ve “had very good growth rates and survival rates,” Blazak said.
Meola said her group has been monitoring the oysters to see how long it takes the shellfish to reach maturity and how well they tolerate the environment. What they found is “they grow extremely fast,” there she said.
This exercise has real world ramifications both Meola and Blazak stressed. A healthy oyster population helps clean the water; and as the fish population grows and their reefs continue to expand it creates another offshore wave break that would help in storm resiliency, preventing some of the Sandy-like damage from tidal surges.
For the U.S. Navy that translates “into another way to adapt to sea level rise and climate change,” Blazak said. And as naval research indicates, there could be as much as 1 1⁄2-feet to 7-feet of sea level rise by the end of the 21st century. “It would be good if we started to do something now,” Blazak observed.
The local waters had been rich in oysters and other aquatic life. But overharvesting, coastal development and pollution starting in the early 20th century had rendered the oyster population “functionally extinct” here, Meola said.
In preparation of the vote later this month, Baykeeper and its supporters have been “doing a hard push” to educate and encourage senators’ support, Meola said.
