State shutting down shellfish beds in New Bedford, Dartmouth and Fairhaven

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The Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries is immediately shutting down thousands of acres of shellfish beds surrounding the New Bedford and Fairhaven wastewater treatment plant outfalls to comply with federal health and safety standards.

More than 18,000 acres of the Dartmouth, Fairhaven and New Bedford coastline, including quahogging areas off the outer New Bedford Harbor, will be reclassified from being conditionally approved shellfishing areas to prohibited. This means the state will not permit harvesting shellfish from these areas under any conditions.

The decision represents a roughly 11,000-acre increase in closures from the roughly 7,000 acres in New Bedford Harbor that were closed in October 2023 over concerns about sewage contamination. The state agency will not be revisiting the classifications for another year, at least.

Shellfish beds along roughly 90,000 acres of lower Buzzards Bay — from Westport to Mattapoisett, and out to the Elizabeth Islands — will also be reclassified, from being approved shellfishing areas to conditionally approved. These beds will be open to harvest except under emergency conditions like sewage overflows, which occur during heavy rains. Shellfish caught in those areas also cannot be sold to the European Union.

“Here in Massachusetts, we pride ourselves on our nation-leading seafood industry, including culturally and economically important traditions of shellfishing in Buzzards Bay,” Department of Fish & Game Commissioner Tom O’Shea said.

“While it’s difficult to see any additional areas closed to shellfishing, these actions are necessary to comply with national standards and protect consumers from real public health risks.”

The shellfish bed reclassifications will affect recreational fishermen on the west side of Fairhaven, and two commercial quahog fishermen who historically dredge the offshore beds, DMF officials said. These vessels had commercial landings worth less than $20,000 in 2022.

There will be no recourse for fishermen affected by the closures. However, they can use other open and conditionally open beds to fish, a DMF official said.

The reclassification of these shellfish beds also spells trouble for New Bedford’s future aquaculture industry. The city has been planning for more than five years to establish shellfishing operations along the city’s shoreline.

The New Bedford and Fairhaven wastewater treatment plants are operating within the bounds of their National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits, a DMF official said. Yet the local wastewater discharge from these facilities means that no shellfish grown off the coast of New Bedford can be marketed, except for seed shellfish to be transported to different areas with cleaner water.

These closures and changes are tied to updated wastewater treatment plant outfall modeling that the DMF conducted in 2023. The United States Food and Drug Administration found the state agency “deficient” in modeling wastewater dispersal from sewage outfalls in 2019 and pushed them to update these studies in 2022.

The changes to classifications surrounding wastewater treatment outfalls are not related to overall performance of these plants in general, nor are they in response to contamination from combined sewer overflows.

The modeling study for the New Bedford and Fairhaven treatment plants was contracted out to Dr. Changsheng Chen, the Commonwealth Professor & Montgomery Charter Chair in UMass Dartmouth’s Department of Fisheries and Oceanography. Results were generated by Chen’s peer-reviewed hydrodynamic model and finalized in October 2023.

Chen’s model showed sewage from the facilities’ outfalls may be generating high loads of bacteria like E. coli in local shellfish. As filter feeders, bivalve shellfish are highly vulnerable to contamination from polluted waters, accumulating contamination up to 100 times the concentration that is present in the water.

E. coli infections are linked to gastrointestinal illness in humans, including vomiting, diarrhea, and gastroenteritis.

When the results of Chen’s study first came out, more than 103,000 acres of Buzzards Bay were set to be prohibited to shellfishing, the DMF official said, based on FDA guidance for concentrations of wastewater effluent in the water. This plan would have also shut down established oyster aquaculture operations in Nasketucket and Apponagansett bays.

The state agency negotiated this current closure plan with the FDA — which represents an 82% reduction in the amount of shellfish bed acreage that would have been closed — while they gather additional data on bacterial loads in area shellfish, a DMF official said.

As a condition for reducing the total acreage closed, DMF officials will increase their water quality sampling for bacteria from five times per year to monthly in the conditionally approved shellfishing areas of lower Buzzards Bay.

The state will test oyster aquaculture operations in Apponagansett and Nasketucket Bays for bacterial loads from sewage effluent, before determining if those areas, and other offshore, must be closed.

Local pushback

Representatives from New Bedford and the local aquaculture industry are pushing back against the results of DMF’s modeling, and the rollout process of these closures.

While New Bedford was made aware that the results of Chen’s modeling were in by October 2023, city leadership were not allowed access to the results until just a few days ago, said New Bedford Port Authority executive director Gordon Carr in a Tuesday letter to the agency.

He added that given the consequences of DMF’s decisions will have a “detrimental impact” on the city’s ability to advance its aquaculture goals, the decision to reclassify the beds without giving New Bedford more time to review and plan for the changes is “unfair.”

“We hope the DMF will … pause the implementation of planned reclassification until a more robust and fulsome public dialogue can be held,” he said.

The model ordinance for the FDA’s National Shellfish Sanitation Program obliges the agency to make classification changes within 24 hours of receiving the results of the report, the DMF official said.

They acknowledged that while the report was delayed several months, the risk of being found noncompliant with federal health standards by the Interstate Shellfish Sanitation Conference — which regulates access to domestic and international markets — was too great to postpone closures.

In a Monday hearing on the reclassification, CDM Smith senior vice president Bernadette Kolb — on behalf of the city — asked why the results had not been peer-reviewed prior to the decision being made.

“It’s of a very large impact to a lot of people,” Kolb said. “We’re going to recommend that you should have that done.”

Massachusetts DMF Shellfish Program Leader Christian Petitpas said that Dr. Chen’s model has been peer-reviewed in other studies and is “world-renowned,” and a peer review was not a necessary step in putting this reclassification forward.

Scott Soares, manager of Padanaram Oyster Farm and the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development State Director for Southern New England, questioned why the DMF is making these changes in classification when hundreds of thousands of oysters and shellfish have been sold in the area, without anyone getting sick.

Water quality and shellfish testing in the areas of Buzzards Bay affected by this reclassification will be ramped up starting today, the DMF official said. They added that this additional testing may find that the shellfish bed closures can be altered or reduced.

The DMF will not revisit the decision with the FDA for at least another year, when their water quality sampling is complete. Petitpas of DMF added that there is also a chance that additional testing reveals that those 103,000-plus acres of shellfish beds originally set to be shut down — the “worst-case scenario” for the local shellfishing industry — could be closed entirely.

“Let’s knock on wood that that isn’t the case,” Petitpas said.

Email Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@newbedfordlight.org.