Oysters Could Save New York From More Sandys: Commentary

[xchrom]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-12/oysters-could-save-new-york-from-more-sandys-commentary.html

Kate Orff wants to grow oysters in New York’s Jamaica Bay. Not for you to eat, but to save the shore from mighty storms.

Great piles of mollusks will diffuse the energy of 10-to-15-foot waves, like those from Sandy that shattered boardwalks and beach homes and shot like missiles up city streets.

On a map in her busy, sunlit lower Manhattan loft office, she points to oyster-reef blobs she has proposed just off the end of New York City’s fragile Rockaway peninsula. They look as substantial as jellyfish.

Over decades, she says, oysters will grow atop a rock and shell base, attaching themselves to poles and ropes as they accumulate into serrated reefs.

[Xipe Totec]

1. Excellent idea!

At one time, oysters were so abundant in the Chesapeake Bay that their reefs defined the major river channels. The reefs extended to near the water surface; to stray out of the center channel often posed a navigational hazard to ships sailing up the Bay. Now, after decades of damage to reefs from harvest, increased disease, falling salinity due to the increased runoff that accompanies increased impervious surface, and increased sedimentation from runoff, a significant amount of hard bottom habitat has been lost. The oyster population in the Bay is less than 1% of what it once was.

http://chesapeakebay.noaa.gov/oysters/oyster-reefs

I believe that oyster beds can serve as the marine equivalent of fresh water wetlands; absorbing the strength and fury of flood waters and moderating the devastation caused by floods.

In the long term, oyster reefs can reclaim land from the sea.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. New York was once the major supplier of oysters to the rest of the US.

All fished out or killed by pollution now.

[HooptieWagon]

3. If the oysters can survive...

...it is true that they will reduce wave size. They will not reduce storm surge, which is a bigger problem... may even make it worse.