Reclaiming a Natural Resource: Water Quality and Safe Shellfish Harvest in Drayton Harbor

Geoff Menzies is the Drayton Harbor Community Oyster Farm project manager and is chairman of the Drayton Harbor Shellfish Protection District Advisory Committee.

The magic of Drayton Harbor got its grips on me more than 15 years ago. It was in 1990 that I responded to an ad in The Bellingham Herald seeking a manager for a Canadian-owned oyster farm in Drayton Harbor. Oyster farming in the fall and winter months had the potential to complement my spring and summer agricultural consulting business in Whatcom County. I could move from the upland berry fields in the summer to the intertidal oyster grounds in the winter. Not a bad life for someone interested in natural resource-based businesses.

For me, oyster farming allowed me to grow and provide a quality food product. There are few more noble professions in my opinion than growing a food product. I was obviously not the first victim of the lure of Drayton Harbor. People in this area have recognized for almost a hundred years that Drayton Harbor is a great bay for growing oysters. Hence the poem from the 1909 Homeseeker’s edition of the Blaine Journal:

Like most latter-day oyster farmers in the Puget Sound area, I soon found myself wearing my hip boots less and spending more and more time going to meetings. These meetings were, and really still are, about figuring out how to control non-point pollution on a watershed-wide basis. For those out of the loop, non-point pollution is difficult to trace to a specific pipe or source.

The pollutant of concern in watersheds like Drayton Harbor, that are highly valued for shellfish production, is fecal coliform bacteria. These types of bacteria are associated with all warm-blooded animals including us humans. As we live on and alter the landscape we tend to increase the potential for bacteria (ours and other critters) to run off of the land and into our streams and marine bays like Drayton Harbor.

When bacteria concentrations are too high in marine waters that are well-suited for shellfish harvest, those shellfish-growing areas are closed down in order to protect public health. Bacterial contamination in marine water indicates the potential presence of more serious pathogens, primarily viruses. These pathogens can accumulate in the tissue of filter-feeding oysters. When contaminated oysters are eaten, they can make people very sick.

This type of pollution problem is not evident to most members of our community. It is unseen and its impact is primarily felt by commercial shellfish growers, who make considerable investments in order to conduct their business. I invested in oyster farming in Drayton Harbor in 1992. After three years of planting oyster seed, our beds were closed in 1995 when bacterial levels exceeded state standards. I was forced out of the oyster business and shifted back into my upland agricultural activities, but continued to volunteer as a member of the Drayton Harbor Shellfish Protection District Advisory Committee.

Our role was to develop a water quality/shellfish protection plan for Drayton Harbor and work closely with the County Council to implement the plan. We’ve been working in this capacity for the past 10 years with sporadic and partial financial support from Whatcom County. Although the County Council adopted our May 2000 Water Quality Recovery Plan by ordinance (2000-028), there has been no proactive attempt by this body to finance or implement the plan.

State law that has been in place since 1992 (Chapter 90.72 RCW) gives our local legislative body (County Council) the authority to assess certain properties within shellfish district boundaries as a means of financing water quality improvements. Our County Council has never chosen to utilize this authority in order to provide a dedicated source of funding to clean up Drayton Harbor. Not a very progressive approach to restoring public health, in my opinion.

In early 2000, I received a phone call out of the blue from Betsy Peabody, the executive director of a nonprofit called the Puget Sound Restoration Fund (PSRF) on Bainbridge Island. Their mission is to mobilize funding from a variety of sources to achieve on-the-ground restoration of habitat and native species in Puget Sound. They are strongly committed to restoring water quality in shellfish growing areas in the Puget Sound.

I have been contracting with PSRF for the last five years, working to restore water quality in Drayton Harbor. This work has taken many forms. In our first collaborative project, we raised the necessary funds to conduct a video inspection of some of Blaine’s sewer pipes that were in close proximity to marine waters. When leaks were detected, we worked closely with the city to raise the funds necessary to make repairs.

After the repairs were made, we designed and conducted studies which documented that sewage from the collection system was not leaking into marine waters. Over the past five years, we’ve raised over $400,000 in cash and in-kind services to do the additional on-the-ground work that’s needed to restore water quality in Drayton Harbor.

Our list of community partners is a long one that includes area businesses, local and regional foundations, state and local agencies, citizens and first nations including the Semiahmoo First Nation in White Rock, B.C. Our key project, which has strengthened community partnerships, is the Drayton Harbor Community Oyster Farm. The idea of immersing community volunteers in all aspects of oyster farming in Drayton Harbor developed from a conversation with Betsy Peabody, myself and Ken Hertz, who was the chief operating officer at the Trillium Corporation at the time.

Ken felt strongly that we needed to plant oyster seed again in Drayton Harbor as a way to really engage the community. He was absolutely right. With initial financial support from Trillium and follow-up support from the Russell Family Foundation, this project brought together a great group of new volunteer oyster farmers, the self-dubbed “Farmers of the Tideflats.” These citizen volunteers have remained engaged in the project since start-up in early 2001. Instrumental to the project’s success was quarterly coverage in The Bellingham Herald for the first three years running. This provided a great forum to publicly acknowledge those who participated in pollution control projects as well as providing updates on water quality and oyster growth.

This community involvement project spawned numerous other field studies and community outreach events that were ultimately instrumental in us realizing a partial re-opening of shellfish growing areas in Drayton Harbor. Over the past year and a half, we’ve been able to harvest our community-grown oysters only because the community stepped up to successfully address many of the sources of bacterial pollution that threaten Drayton Harbor.

In addition to working closely with the city of Blaine, we worked with the Port of Bellingham in Blaine Harbor, which inventoried all of the live-aboard boaters to insure that they have adequate holding tanks on board. Thanks to assistance from the Horizons Foundation, we designed and installed signs around the harbor alerting visiting boaters to the sensitive nature of Drayton Harbor. Circulation studies and dye tests were performed to monitor how water and potential pollutants move throughout this marine system.

The Shellfish Protection District Advisory Committee now has 10 years under its belt working to fully restore water quality in Drayton Harbor. We have all partnered on several shellfish district oyster feeds and tideflat tours, which have helped us all reach out to the broader community. The result of the community’s hard work was the partial reopening of some shellfish harvesting areas in Drayton Harbor in June 2004. This upgrade included most of the prime oyster grounds and a section of beach along the Semiahmoo Spit on the Drayton Harbor side.

These areas are now “Conditionally Approved” for harvest rather than entirely “Prohibited.” This means that any time there is one-half inch or more of rainfall in a 24-hour period, harvesting is not allowed for the next five days. The reason for this is that bacterial runoff under these conditions indicates that it may be temporarily unsafe to eat filter-feeding shellfish. In order to protect public health, harvesting is not allowed during these wet weather events.

So things are better now than they were five years ago when the Puget Sound Restoration Fund launched the Community Oyster Farm project. Over the past year and a half, the volunteer “Farmers of the Tideflats” have harvested more than 2,000 bushel baskets of oysters, mostly in the middle of the night. These 40 tons of oysters yielded about 7,000 dozen single oysters with a market value of over $40,000. We expect to bring in another $10,000 in revenue from oyster sales by May of this year, when the harvest season is completed. The harvest season runs from September through June.

Most of these oysters are shipped to China but we have sold as many as possible directly from the Blaine docks to local citizens. It’s been quite a challenge to work around all of the rain closures, which naturally occur during prime oyster season. Last winter, we had 27 rain events that closed the harbor for a total of 120 days. Since September of this year, we’ve had 14 rain closures, which prohibited harvest for 51 days as of January 15. In short, it’s very difficult to operate under this current classification and makes transition to a commercially viable oyster farm quite the challenge.

In coordination with the shellfish district and with some new funds provided by Whatcom County, we’re now shifting our pollution control and outreach efforts to the upper watershed. Projects over the next two years will focus on water quality monitoring and source control efforts in the California Creek drainage. We look forward to active partnerships with the Whatcom County Department of Health, who we hope will move quickly to identify and correct problem septic systems.

Whatcom County Planning and Development Services has the responsibility to enforce the new Critical Areas Ordinance, which should help reduce runoff from livestock waste on some properties. We intend to use a portion of our oyster revenue to conduct a bacterial source tracking pilot study in the California Creek drainage. The purpose of this testing will be to detect the presence of human versus cow versus horse waste in both freshwater and in the marine waters of Drayton Harbor. We hope that the findings from this study will be used to jump-start targeted education and pollution control efforts in a timely manner.

We remain confident that water quality can be fully restored in Drayton Harbor. With this in mind, the “Farmers of the Tideflats” planted another acre of oyster seed in Drayton Harbor this past summer. These oysters should be ready for harvest by the spring of 2007. We also purchased 40,000 single oysters this summer from the Lummi shellfish hatchery. These are being grown using a new off-bottom technique. Some of these gems are already prime for the half-shell market and everyone’s raving about them. We’re selling these primo, extra-small delicacies on the dock in Blaine Harbor, to VIS Seafoods in Bellingham and to the Willows Inn on Lummi Island.

We look forward to ongoing partnerships with citizens, businesses, first nations and all government agencies as we continue our efforts to fully restore Drayton Harbor. Recovering marine water quality and the shellfish-dependent resource is a long and winding road. There are more twists and turns along the way than can be imagined.

The bottom line is that although this pollution problem specifically and initially impacts commercial, tribal and recreational shellfish harvesters, it represents a public health threat to our community. It is also an indicator of environmental degradation and the loss of quality of life in our community. As Whatcom County faces unprecedented population growth, impacts associated with urbanization of our rural landscapes will put more pressure on our marine water quality and natural resources like shellfish, which depend on clean water and healthy marine ecosystems.

I look forward to strong leadership from the Whatcom County Council over the next few years. It’s time for our elected leaders to step up and make even more difficult decisions, and not just in the Lake Whatcom watershed. If this council is really committed to protecting public health and fully restoring shellfish resources in places like Drayton Harbor, they will provide the necessary funding to help implement our shellfish recovery plan. The council has officially adopted our plan; they just haven’t funded it.

Without a dedicated source of funding to compliment all of the other partnerships and community efforts that are underway, it’s very likely that long-standing members of the Drayton Harbor Shellfish Advisory Committee will step down and move into other volunteer activities, where they receive a greater return on their investment.

The next two to three years will tell the story in Drayton Harbor. It’s been 15 years since the community recognized this watershed as one of the most threatened and valuable watersheds in Whatcom County. Volunteers in the community have now invested thousands of hours in meetings, outreach efforts, plan writing and oyster farming. In a unique community involvement project that has received local, statewide and national recognition, we’re now using the community-grown shellfish resource to help fund pollution control projects.

Partnerships are stronger than ever from all sectors of the community. But to sustain and strengthen these new partnerships and to fully recover Drayton Harbor for the long haul, we must have strong leadership from elected officials and dedicated funding from within our own community. Time will tell if the final story is one of success or ultimate failure. If we’re able to fully recover Drayton Harbor, it will be a wonderful achievement for our community. If not, I will have been personally enriched by the experience of working with so many wonderful people in our community for a noble cause. But, I will be deeply saddened, as will many of them, by our collective failure to get the job done. §