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No, not mine! Our beloved bivalves. What the oil doesn't kill, the fresh water will. They will not bounce back quickly like after Katrina. Only beds that got covered in mud died after Katrina, and they could quickly be re-seeded.

Here is a CNN vid. It would normally take a real pounding to separate these clumps. Not when they are dead and dying...

I say 5 years minimum for local beds. Hope I am wrong. The dean says will be up and running full steam in this fall. Humph. Hope he enjoys his chargiilled mussels. I won't.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/201 ... cnn?hpt=T1

Wow. How is the fresh water getting in? BP's idiotic greedy behavior did that too? I wonder how? Maybe Scott Boswell at Stanley has the idea. He's putting a po-boy on the menu that's "West Coast Oysters Louisiana Style." If that's the best we can do, I'm sad.

Jonathan

The way I understand it is fresh water is being brought in to disperse (dilute) the oil.

Since the beginning of the leak, all fresh water diversions have been opened to maximize the fresh water flow in order to help offset the oil intrusion. Davis Pond through the upper Barataria, Canarvon in St. Bernard, lock gates on the river, siphons in Alliance, etc. That has a large affect on just about all of the oyster beds east and west of the Mississippi locally. Not so west of Terrebonne, but just about everything east of there. Salinity levels very, very low.

Here is a quote from May 28 newsfeeds:

Meanwhile Louisiana officials have been using freshwater from the Mississippi River in an effort to push the oil slick farther offshore. The state’s Office of Coastal Protection and Restoration opened six freshwater diversion structures and a navigational lock along the lower Mississippi to try and prevent oil from seeping into sensitive coastal wetlands on either side of the river delta.

The combined flow of the diversions has added 22,500 cubic feet of water per second to the river flow, or 600 million gallons per hour.