US military use oyster reefs as storm protection

Earle Naval Weapons Station, where the Navy loads some of America’s most sophisticated weapons onto warships, suffered 50,000,000 US dollars worth of damage from Superstorm Sandy. Now the naval pier is fortifying itself with some decidedly low-tech protection: Oysters.

The facility has allowed an environmental group to plant nearly a mile of oyster reefs about a quarter-mile off its shoreline to serve as a natural buffer against storm waves.

Other military bases are enlisting the help of oysters, too. In June, environmental groups and airmen established a reef in the waters of Elgin Air Force Base Reservation in Florida, and more are planned nearby. Oysters also help protect Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia.

Three oyster reefs protect the USS Laffey museum in South Carolina, and military installations in Alabama and North Carolina have dispatched their enlisted personnel to help build oyster reefs in off-base coastal sites.

They are hundreds of places around the world where oyster reefs are being planted primarily as storm-protection measures, and a bill just introduced in US Congress would give coastal communities 100 million US dollars over the next five years to create “living shorelines” that include oyster reefs.

“Having a hardened structure like that oyster reef will absorb some of that wave energy,” said Earle spokesman Bill Addison. “All the pipes and cables that are on the pier now, all of that was washed away and had to be rebuilt. And there was a lot of flooding that came into the base. Will this protect us against all of that? No, but it will do a significant amount of good to protect the base and the complex and our surrounding communities.”

The NY/NJ Baykeeper group has been experimenting with oysters at the Navy pier since 2011, originally as a way to see if the natural filtering ability of the shellfish might help improve water quality in the murky Raritan Bay – and they did.

In summer 2016, the group planted the oyster reef primarily as a storm protection measure – a trend that has taken hold around the world within the past decade or so, according to Bryan DeAngelis, a program coordinator for The Nature Conservancy in Rhode Island. Every coastal state in America is using oyster reefs as either a combination storm-protection, a water improvement project, or both.

Meredith Comi of the NY/NJ Baykeeper environmental group lifts concrete cages that are submerged offshore to create oyster reefs at the Earle Naval Weapons Station in Middletown, NJ.

In addition to cleaning the water, oyster reefs help blunt the force of incoming waves.

“They are nice speed bumps,” said Meredith Comi, an official with the Baykeeper group.

Environmentalists say “living shorelines” including oyster colonies, are far preferable to and cheaper than armoring the coast with steel sea walls or wooden bulkheads that invariably accelerate sand erosion in front of such manmade structures.

“Waves are affected by the roughness of the bottom,” said Boze Hancock, a marine restoration scientist with The Nature Conservancy who has studied and participated in oyster projects around the world. “Picture a wave trying to roll over a huge sponge, compared to one rolling over an asphalt parking lot. The ‘sponge,’ or rough, uneven oyster reef, sucks the energy out of the wave as it rolls toward the shore.”

US Representative Frank Pallone Jr., a New Jersey Democrat, recently introduced The Living Shorelines Act, which would make coastal communities eligible for 100 million US dollars in federal grants over five years to be used for oyster reefs and wetland plants. However, its prospects remain uncertain in the Republican-controlled Congress.

In most spots, the oysters are designed not to be harvested and eaten. But in other places, including New Jersey, the oysters have been planted in polluted waterways where shellfish harvesting is prohibited, leading to concerns about poachers stealing them and making customers ill.

Such a dispute forced Baykeeper to rip out an oyster reef that it planted a few miles from the Navy pier and relocate the shellfish to waters near the pier that are patrolled by gun-toting boat

(AP)