An oyster garden? BP oil spill money to fund 4 new projects on the Mississippi Coast
Fifteen million dollars in funding for oyster cultivation and wildlife restoration is headed to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, more than a decade after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill damaged fisheries and habitats and ravaged the state’s seafood economy.
The money will fund habitat management over thousands of acres at the Wolf River and Hancock County coastal preserves. Ten million dollars will be used to restore and create hundreds of acres of oyster beds, and another half-million will go to an oyster gardening project.
The Mississippi Trustee Implementation Group, the stakeholders charged with developing environmental restoration plans as part of the multi-billion-dollar settlement with BP, approved the plans, which Gov. Tate Reeves announced Thursday.
“This is a great day for Mississippi and our coastal communities,” Reeves said. “With over $15 million in restoration projects, we will be able to ensure the vitality and longevity of our precious natural beauty and resources along the Gulf Coast.”
The trustees include the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, which will administer the projects.
The projects represent a tiny sliver of the massive, expensive effort to address the damage done by the oil spill, laid out in a 2016 restoration plan for all of the Gulf states.
The effects of the oil spill, the introduction to the plan said, hurt “such a broad array of linked resources and ecological services over such a large area that they can best be described as an injury to the entire ecosystem of the northern Gulf of Mexico.”
Oyster beds were particularly damaged, and a decade later, many reefs in the Gulf have yet to come back. Some Gulf Coast oyster fishermen have turned to farming instead, and one just-approved Mississippi project will support those efforts.
Here’s more about each of the projects:
Wolf River Coastal Preserve Habitat Management – Dupont and Bell’s Ferry Tracts ($3.1 million)
Work over the 2,500 area near where the Wolf River meets the St. Louis Bay will include chemical and mechanical treatment, road repair, culvert replacement, hydrologic restoration and prescribed grazing.
Hancock County Coastal Preserve Habitat Management – Wachovia Tract ($1.76 million)
Management activities at the 1,203-acre area south of I-10 and east of Pearl River will include mechanical, chemical and prescribed fire treatments to restore habitat.
Oyster Spawning Reefs in Mississippi ($10 million)
Between 100 and 400 acres of oyster cultch material — the rock and stone bedding that promotes oyster colonization — will be placed in up to six spots in the Mississippi Sound, St. Louis Bay, Back Bay/Biloxi Bay, Graveline Bay and Pascagoula Bay.
Mississippi Oyster Gardening Program ($500,000)
This money will fund the continuation of a five-year project to grow oysters in gardens hanging from piers, wharves and docks on the Mississippi Sound and its bays and estuaries.
