Picking up the Pieces

An Opus for Oysters

The seafood market is perhaps one of the most difficult to gauge when it comes to assessing just how much damage the hurricanes caused.

“A lot of boats did survive, and they are out there shrimping and fishing. There are processors up and running, too, but it’s going to be a slow revival much like life is in the rest of the state,” says Bell, a seafood processing expert.

The area from Baton Rouge to Lafayette skirted the edges of Katrina and Rita, but any seafood processor, and there were many in the path of Katrina, were devastated.

“A lot of those business are not up and running,” Bells says. “Then Rita came up on our Western flank, in places like Cameron, where there’s a lot of shrimping and processing. There are some places that are back to normal, but there are a lot of them that were highly impacted. Up north, the processors were able to get going again in a week or two.”

When it comes to shrimp, the resources is there, it’s just finding the people to catch them and the docks to unload them on and the processors to handle them, he adds. Usually, shrimping and fishing is good after a hurricane, but for oysters, it’s a different story. Oysters have to be tested for contaminants as does the water that harbors the beds oysters live and breed in. Roughly half of the oyster beds in and around the impacted areas Gulf were destroyed by bed silting and scouring. On Sept. 23, molluscan shellfish beds in Terrebonne Parish and all areas west to the Louisiana-Texas border were closed because of the possible adverse environmental effects of Hurricane Rita. The harvest areas remained closed until the state and federal officials are confident that the waters are free of bacterial and chemical contamination.

“After any hurricane, there are preliminary closures of oyster harvest areas until they can be tested. If it’s an impact zone, silting and scouring of oyster beds and suffocates and kills the oysters,” Bell says. “If the bed was demolished or there were a lot of deaths, it can take two to three years to rebuild it back to its commercial operating level.”

Agricultural Agony

At the time of this report, it was estimated by Florida Citrus Mutual, a Lakeland, Fla.-based organization representing Sunshine State citrus growers that Hurricane Wilma wiped out an estimated 17 percent of the state’s total citrus crop, including nearly half of the grapefruit. The loss, at least $180 million worth, as the preliminary damage estimate also does not include financial losses from wrecked barns, equipment, processing and packing facilities. But Mutual estimated that another 11.3 million boxes of grapefruit likely are lost because of Wilma, 47 percent of the crop as forecast before the storm by the Florida Agricultural Statistics Service in Orlando.

The preliminary loss to oranges was pegged at 24.4 million boxes, or 13 percent of the state’s crop. About 96 percent of the Florida orange crop is typically processed into orange juice. Florida citrus growers supply 80 percent of the nation’s orange juice supply and 38 percent of the world orange juice supply.

Bankston warns, however, that the impact, whether it’s on an oyster bed, a grapefruit grove or a rice field in the delta, time will reveal the true impact of the hurricanes.

“You’re going to have to look two or three years down the road to see what the long term effects are,” he says. “There are businesses that were in New Orleans that have relocated. We’ve definitely got an impact on the agriculture, including the forestry segment. There’s salt water intrusion in rice fields that will effect the fields for several years, if not indefinitely.”