Improved oyster harvest after Hurricane Andrew
Buddy Daisy and Earl Melancon by Susan Testroet-Bergeron, 2012; 4700.2561
TEMPESTS: Storms in the Archives
Buddy Daisy: So right after Hurricane Andrew came through, it . . . I don't know what it done. It changed the environmental out there some kind of way. And them reefs took up . . . I mean, they formed oysters like out of this world. This boat that I got up there on this wall would leave my house at four o'clock in the morning and run to Lake Pelto. That's a six-hour run. And come back with as much as 300 sacks of oysters sitting on the deck of that boat. When you looked at one, you looked at them all. They was all pretty round, single oysters, big oysters. And what caused it, I really don't know. I think the river was kind of high that year or something. I don't know exactly what really changed it but something changed it. An oyster is an animal that's going to tell you the environmental how it is. Earl?
Earl Melancon: Yeah, I mean, I think that last statement, Buddy, is kind of the crux of the whole thing. It's an animal that's on the bottom. It never moves once it sets on the bottom. It's only in the water column as a larvae for two to three weeks. Once it sets to the bottom, it cements to the bottom and will never move again. And it does become a good environmental sentinel for what's happening in the estuaries.