ESSEX, MD—Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski visited the Essex waterfront on Tuesday morning to spotlight the second year of a program to remove derelict crab pots and fishing gear from the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay, and announced a collection site for oyster shell recycling.
In conjunction with Maryland non-profit Oyster Recovery Partnership, the County program has mapped thousands of submerged crab pots and fishing debris for targeted removal. Local watermen are finishing a two-week effort to pull this marine debris from a 3,000-acre area of the Chesapeake Bay, northeast of Hart Miller Island, off the Back River Neck peninsula.
“Removing and recycling this debris is a vital project for the health of our waterways, and we’re proud to again bring together the environmental science community and local watermen for this win-win project,” said County Executive Olszewski. “In removing thousands of derelict crab pots, we not only protect and improve the environment, but we do so in a way that also supports those who depend on the Bay for their livelihood.”
Baltimore County Department of Environmental Protection and Sustainability (DEPS) provided a $150,000 grant to the Oyster Recovery Partnership (ORP), to manage this collaborative project, deploying side-scan sonar technology to locate concentrations of submerged debris in important local crab fisheries, and hiring crews of watermen to remove and document the debris.
“For the second year in a row, ORP is happy to be able to support our commercial watermen partners by working with them to retrieve and recycle lost gear in Baltimore County waterways, improving the blue crab fishery and Chesapeake Bay health,” said O
Need this out in the Tangier, Pocomoke Sound .
Keep up the great work