“Welcome to Nasketucket Bay,” Dale Leavitt says. His electric skiff has just passed through a culvert under the West Island causeway.
He’s giving a tour, for a conference on the ocean economy, of his oyster-growing operation off Fairhaven. “You’ll see over here on the left, that’s our work barge. It’s full of cages right at the moment.”
Further on, log-shaped floatation devices are laid out in rows in the water. They suspend shellfish cages just below the surface.
Each cage can hold nine oyster bags, enough to grow about 2,000 market-size oysters. The whole thing is anchored by concrete blocks that weigh as much as a train wheel.
Massachusetts farms grow 54 million oysters a year, and West Island Oysters is one of the largest oyster farms in the state at 47 acres.
Leavitt co-owns the farm; he’s also a marine scientist, retired from Roger Williams University.
Though Nasketucket Bay is considered healthy, emergency shellfish closures designed to protect the public from fecal bacteria have hit the South Coast hard since 2024.
Oyster farmers in the region say they’re at risk of collapse.
“We've already lost one farm in Nasketucket Bay, and we're probably going to lose another one very shortly,” Leavitt says. “I mean, when you're closed 50% of the year to being able to sell oysters, it sort of impacts your cash flow.”
It all started two years ago, when newly publicized data showed that in a heavy rain, tens of millions of gallons of stormwater and sewage can overflow from New Bedford pipes.
Those incidents are called CSOs, for “combined sewer overflow.”
The overflows aren't new, but the release of data and the resulting closures are.
Farmers warn something needs to be done before they go broke — like stopping the overflow of sewage, for one. But they also contend that shellfish beds could reopen faster if the state had more frequent testing and better models of bacterial concentration.
Because sometimes, heavy rain may not actually make high bacteria counts reach the oyster beds.
Matt Camisa, a regional shellfish supervisor with the state Division of Marine Fisheries, has been trying to develop a better model of CSO concentration. That means collecting a lot of samples at inconvenient times, as he told an audience at the New Bedford Ocean Cluster conference in April.
“The rain comes when the rain comes,” he said. “So I can't tell you how many times I've left my house at night, at eight o’clock, with a sampling rod and a cooler and a bucket full of bottles, to go sit on the pipe in the dark and watch the stuff flow, and take my samples every 15 minutes.”
It hasn’t been easy.
“That was actually my idea,” he added, getting a laugh from the group. “It's crazy, isn't it?”
Camisa tests CSO water to determine the concentration of fecal bacteria.
He thought if he could capture data for an entire rain event — say, every 10 or 15 minutes for hours — maybe he could show that a weighted average of the bacterial concentrations is lower than the numbers used now. He hopes to safely reduce shellfish closures.
A closure is initially set to last 21 days. After seven days, the state can, at its discretion, decide to test the oysters and reopen the area. But a rainy stretch of weather can stack closures one after another.
In the South Coast town of Marion, the nonprofit Marion Institute held a summit last fall on aquaculture and wastewater.
In an interview, Executive Director Liz Wiley said the federal 21-day closure rule is not based on demonstrated risk.
“This was done proactively, without any research really supporting it,” she said. “That's not to say that we don't think that CSOs should be fixed and that the wastewater treatment facilities and the root cause of the issue shouldn't be addressed. It really should.”
New Bedford has been working on it. By 2016, the city had reduced combined sewer overflow 94 percent from a baseline in 1990.
The cost to finish the job is staggering. A decade ago, it was estimated at $1.2 billion.
Wiley said penalizing the shellfish industry in the interim isn’t fair.
“We're not saying don't test,” she said. “We're just saying, test. And if there's an issue, then yes, that justifies a closure. But if there's no issue, then it doesn't justify the closure.”
Legislation is pending on Beacon Hill to create a wastewater financing commission specifically for the South Coast. Among other things, it would look for ways to fund a reduction in CSOs.
Back on West Island, Dale Leavitt docks the skiff and brings out some oysters. He’s teaching the group how to slide a short-bladed knife inside the shell and break the hinge.
“So I go in on the side here," he says, "and pry the two shells open and cut that muscle. And there we go.”
Colleen Trahan, of Mattapoisett, shucks her very first oyster.
“Oh! That was cool,” she says. “I love oysters, and it always looks really hard, and it's not. It's just getting it in the right spot and wearing a glove.”
She’s not the only one who loves oysters. Just ask the folks who raise millions of them a year to meet the demand — and who want to keep doing it, in clean water.
Oyster growers and their fans say whether the recent spate of closures is justified or not, we can do more to keep untreated waste out of the water.
