DATE: Thursday, November 6, 1997            TAG: 9711060485

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B5   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   76 lines

GROUPS UNITE TO BUILD AND STOCK OYSTER REEFS IN ELIZABETH RIVER

Oysters have not been plucked from public fishing grounds in the Elizabeth River since 1925. Pollution and toxic contamination from the industrial heart of Hampton Roads are mostly to blame.

Unfazed by the long odds, an eclectic coalition of government officials, environmentalists, volunteers and business interests is working to build and stock two artificial oyster reefs in the Elizabeth.

Not that the projects are meant to revive the river's vanquished shellfish industry. Rather, organizers say, they are intended to help purge pollutants while encouraging civic pride and hope in a waterway long thought dead.

``We think the oysters can grow there, create a base-line population, and can enhance water quality,'' said Rob Brumbaugh, a marine scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a project sponsor.

Oysters are natural filters of pollution, recycling and cleansing thousands of gallons of water a day through their innards. The Baywide crash of oysters in Virginia and Maryland, Brumbaugh said, has resulted in economic and ecologic devastation.

One reef is expected to be constructed next spring. Imported oyster shells will be piled onto about an acre of shallows near the Western Freeway Bridge on the Western Branch of the Elizabeth River, in Portsmouth.

The other oyster reef, which organizers hope to finance in 1999, would be built almost identically at an undetermined site in the Lafayette River, an Elizabeth tributary, in Norfolk.

The reefs would join others being constructed in rivers across the state to jump-start population growth. The Virginia Marine Resources Commission, grasping for ideas on restoring native stocks to the lower Chesapeake Bay, has built nine artificial oyster habitats since 1993.

Some have blossomed, others have not. But the reefs offer perhaps the best chance at reviving a species ravaged by pollution, overfishing and disease, Jim Wesson, state director of oyster restoration, has said.

Earlier this year, Virginia set a reef in the Lynnhaven River in Virginia Beach. The Lynnhaven once was renowned for its plate-sized oysters that were the favorites of kings, presidents and tony restaurants in New York and San Francisco.

Surveys showed that oyster growth this summer at the Lynnhaven site was weak. But experts, noting the newness of the reef, said they were not surprised or disheartened.

A $40,000 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is paying for much of the Western Branch project. Middle school and high school students in Portsmouth and Norfolk are growing baby oysters, or spat, and Brumbaugh said he hopes they will be transplanted to the reef by next May.

Students and civic groups also are raising spat for the Lynnhaven reef, and the Norfolk Rotary Club recently sponsored an event asking waterfront residents to grow baby oysters in backyard creeks and streams for the proposed Lafayette project.

The Rotary Club, in conjunction with the state and the Elizabeth River Project, a grass-roots environmental group, is trying to raise $18,000 for construction of the Lafayette oyster reef.

One possible site is a small cove behind the Larchmont Library, off Hampton Boulevard in Norfolk. There, volunteers recently turned a dilapidated waterfront lot into a small wetlands park, winning an international award for environmental restoration in the process.

Marjorie Mayfield, executive director of the Elizabeth River Project, said a reef would be a nice complement to the wetlands park. But she and others are unsure whether environmental conditions in the cove would support an oyster population.

While the Elizabeth River has been closed to public oystering since 1925, watermen for years afterward continued to grow and gather seed oysters. During the 1950s and '60s, especially, these small oysters were pulled from the Lafayette, the Western Branch and Tanners Creek and grown to market size in cleaner waters elsewhere, usually Mobjack Bay.

But the entire Elizabeth River was declared off-limits to shellfish harvesting of any kind in 1982, when levels of pollution got too high, according to the state Health Department. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic

Portsmouth's Reef KEYWORDS: OYSTER REEFS

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