[Today’s post, as was yesterday’s, is a good lead up to the publication Stripah Love: Author’s Edition which will be serialized on these very pages, beginning on Sunday. SB SM]
from the Boston Globe
December 16, 2024
GLOUCESTER — For nearly a century, Neil Malick’s family hauled bushels of soft-shell clams from the mudflats around Boston Harbor to the state’s purification plant on Plum Island, where the shellfish soaked for three days in large seawater tanks to purge their slimy mantles of any contaminants.
Late last year, a coastal storm battered the island and shuttered the century-old plant, leaving Malick and others who dig for clams in the state’s “conditionally restricted” areas no easy way to cleanse their shellfish. The wells and pumps that supplied clean seawater to the plant had been destroyed. Later storms eroded surrounding dunes and inundated the plant’s interior.
“We have too many years in this business to let it go,” said Malick, 61, of Weymouth, who joined his family’s shellfishing business in 1984.
Over the past year, Malick and other diggers have urged state officials to repair the plant, the only one of its kind in Massachusetts. Clams harvested from such restricted areas must be purified before they’re sold to market.
Related
Anonymous donor pledges $1 million in hopes of stopping demolition of iconic Pink House in NewburyShell shock: Crisis for local clam industry
On Friday, following a tense meeting last monthwith diggers, state officials decided to close the plant permanently.
“It’s a really difficult situation,” said Dan McKiernan, director of the state Division of Marine Fisheries, at the meeting.
His staff shared a series of slides with the diggers that painted a bleak picture of their fishery, which has been increasingly threatened by climate change.
Since 1997, the number of soft-shell clams processed at the plant has declined by 95percent, with fewer than 150,000 pounds purified there in 2022, officials said. The value of that haul plunged from a high of about $11 million in 1951 to just $333,000 in 2022 — $45,000 less than it costs to operate the plant, they said.
The declining value has led to a similar drop in the number of diggers. There are now just 20 still active, down from nearly 140 two decades ago, officials said.
https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/20492786/embed?auto=1
The future of the fishery, they added, looks grim as the oceans absorb increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and become more acidic. The record-warm ocean temperatures also have been more hospitable to invasive green crabs, which have been thriving throughout the region. The crabs feed on soft-shell clams and decimate the eelgrass that protects them.
The warmer waters have also increased rates of shellfish diseases, such as neoplasia, which are like cancer for clams.
The impact of climate change has been felt by the state’s broader shellfish industry, too. The total amount of soft-shell clams harvested in Massachusetts — only about 4 percent of which come from contaminated areas — have declined by more than a third since 2010.
McKiernan said the state’s decision to close the plant permanently comes after officials provided nearly $100,000 in financial aid over the past year to the remaining diggers. He said the state would provide them with additional income-assistance through the end of the year.
The state’s decision also follows a report that estimated it would cost about $715,000 to reopen the plant.
https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/20493047/embed?auto=1
The report by a Norwood-based engineering firm also found that climate change makes it unlikely that a restored plant would survive for longer than 25 years on an increasingly vulnerable Plum Island.
“It’s likely to disappear because of sea-level rise and erosion,” Wayne Castonguay, the regional shellfish program supervisor, told the diggers.
Bob Stanley, a third-generation digger and owner of Stanley Seafood in Revere, acknowledged the challenges facing the fishery.
“It’s gone downhill quite a bit,” said Stanley, who has held a master digger permit for 48 years and witnessed how in 2016 neoplasia killed most of his clams in Boston Harbor.
Last year, the purification plant processed 1,400 racks of clams from 27 diggers — or just 8 percent of its capacity, state officials said. As a result, the plant last year generated an all-time low in revenue, earning just $9,000.
To keep the remaining diggers in business, McKiernan said the state would subsidize the higher costs of having the clams cleaned at a purification plant in Eliot, Maine, the only similar facility in New England.
With the cleaning costs four times higher at that privately owned plant, and the extra fuel and time needed to travel the additional 50 miles roundtrip to Maine, McKiernan estimated the state would spend about $75,000 a year to compensate the diggers for their additional expenses.
He also suggested the state could soon reduce existing purification requirements from some clamming areas, such as in Hingham and Hull, as the waters in Boston Harbor have become cleaner. The vast majority of clams that require purification come from those areas.
“I’m trying to give you options,” McKiernan told the diggers.
Few of the diggers appeared enthusiastic about the other options. They pleaded with McKiernan to bring the plant back into operation.
Kevin Boudreau, 65, a master digger from Quincy who’s been raking mudflats for most of his life, called the plant’s closure “the last straw.”
The prospect of driving back and forth to Maine multiple times a week, he said, was “too much” and “out of the question.”
“It’s just not feasible,” he said. “Once they close the plant — that’s it. We’re done.”
Still, McKiernan said the division couldn’t justify the costs of rebuilding the plant. The fishery, he said, had become too small.
“The number of clams just wasn’t sufficient,” he said.
Some diggers said they intended to appeal to state lawmakers to compel state officials to rebuild the plant.
Senator Bruce Tarr, a Gloucester Republican who attended the meeting, said he hoped the state would help the diggers, but he wouldn’t commit to pressing officials to rebuild the plant.
“One way or the other, DMF and our state government need to facilitate access to depuration to prevent the extinction of this important segment of the fishery,” he said in a statement.
For Neil Malick, whose father began digging for clams in 1931, the prospects for continuing the family business look dismal without the plant, which was built after a disease linked to shellfish shut down clam fisheries across the Northeast.
Malick, who hasn’t dug for clams to sell since last year, hoped his 19-year-old son would carry on the family’s legacy.
“My son will never have the chance to continue what my father and I have done,” he said.
He had hoped to continue clamming until he reached 70 years old, work that allowed him to earn more than six figures a year. But the plant’s closure has changed his plans.
“I’m done,” Malick said. “This is the end of an era — the end of a way of life.”