[StBernard] Oyster producers face deadline on BP compensation

Westley Annis westley at da-parish.com
Tue Nov 23 08:36:35 EST 2010


Oyster producers face deadline on BP compensation
By Rick Jervis, USA TODAY
NEW ORLEANS - Oyster growers along the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast
are facing special challenges as the deadline arrives Tuesday to file for
compensation from short-term damage from the BP oil spill.

Already battered by a summer during which their fishing grounds closed and
their oysters perished by the thousands, harvesters along the coast are now
struggling to obtain accurate estimates of the damage to their oyster beds,
says Mike Voisin, an oyster processor from Houma, La. Voisin sits on Gov.
Bobby Jindal's Oyster Advisory Committee and the state Oyster Task Force.

Oyster beds were virtually untouched by encroaching oil from the BP spill,
but suffered massive mortality from two freshwater diversions - openings
along the Mississippi River that allowed fresh water from the river to flow
into surrounding estuaries to push the oil away, he says.

Half of Louisiana's 390,000 acres of privately leased oyster beds are
expected to die off in the next two years, Voisin says.

Putting an accurate price tag on the damage to oyster beds requires hiring a
state-certified assessor who charges between $100 and $1,000 per acre, fees
oyster fishermen will need to pay out of pocket, Voisin says.

Kenneth Feinberg, administrator of the BP compensation fund, has said the
fund will not pay for those assessors.

"It puts the oyster farmer in a predicament," Voisin says.

"Farmers who have gone through a very difficult summer already are
struggling to be able to afford any kind of appraisal or assessment."

As of Saturday, the BP fund - known as the Gulf Coast Claims Facility - had
paid or approved 122,000 of 412,000 claims, distributing $2 billion in
emergency compensation funds, according to facility statistics. Another
80,000 claims were under review, and 61,000 had been denied.

As the deadline for emergency payouts expires, the facility shifts to its
next phase: paying one-time, long-term payouts. Claimants who accept a
long-term payout relinquish their right to later sue BP, Feinberg has said.

Brad Robin, a sixth-generation oyster fisherman from Louisiana's St. Bernard
Parish, says he has received one-third of the emergency payout he requested.
About 75% of his family's 10,000 acres of oyster beds were destroyed this
summer, and a strange sponge-like fungus is spreading on some of them, he
says. He doubts they'll reproduce next year.

A certified biologist to assess the damage will cost him about $500 an acre
- money he can't afford, he says.

"There's no light at the end of the tunnel right now," Robin says. "There's
no young oysters, and that's the future."

Tom Soniat, an oyster biologist at the University of New Orleans, says
oystermen have been hit particularly hard because of the combination of
their grounds closing, their inability to inspect and revive their oyster
beds, and the bad publicity the Gulf oyster received during the disaster.
But oysters are resilient creatures that can adapt to changing environments,
he says.

"In the long term, I see recovery from this," Soniat says.




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