Proud, Humble Oystermen Fear Losing a Way of Life

APALACHICOLA, Fla. — The little homes and the oyster-shucking houses near the waterfront don't presume to elegance. A lot of them are tumbledown, with crunchy oyster shell driveways, cock-eyed porches and walls that lean a bit in one direction or the other, testament to some long-ago hurricane blow.

The biggest building in town is the three-story courthouse. There's only one stoplight and not a single four-lane road in all of Franklin County. You could take the entire population, 12,000, and fit them in one end of Atlanta's Georgia Dome and they might be overlooked.

Which is exactly how the leather-faced oystermen and shrimpers feel these days.

Not everybody here is mad with Atlanta, where a record-setting drought and water shortage have prompted water managers to reduce the flow in the river system that feeds the Apalachicola River, a broad, meandering stream with natural vistas so stunning they take your breath.

But there's plenty of common-sense aggravation.

"We know they've got to have drinking water in Atlanta and we don't want to talk harsh on them," said Keith Millender, whose family has dug oysters and netted shrimp for generations. "But tell them to stop filling up their swimming pools and washing their cars. We've got to earn a living, and they can sacrifice, too. If they can't get to their boats on Lake Lanier because their dock is standing dry, tell them to do what we do: get a dingy and paddle out."

Georgia, Alabama and Florida have been locked in a battle for years over allocation of water from the river system that starts with the Chattahoochee and Lake Lanier north of Atlanta and eventually reaches the Gulf of Mexico at Florida's Apalachicola Bay.

Now the legal wrangling has given way to desperation, as Georgia officials warn the booming Atlanta metro area – home to an estimated 5 million residents – could run dry within months. But downstream users in Alabama and Florida also need water for electricity generation and support of the vibrant seafood industry along Florida's Gulf coast.

Attempts at compromise — including a visit by the three governors to the White House — have failed so far, and now the battle lines are hardening.

In sleepy Apalachicola, people are accustomed to Mother Nature bringing crisis and disaster. Years of bad harvest for no apparent reason, hurricanes, floods and red tides that render the oysters unfit to eat have often left them reeling.

But they carry on. All they know is work, the kind done with their hands. Speculation is a waste of time and won't put food on the table.

"We were raised up here since we were knee-high to a grasshopper and we worked all the time, weekends and holidays," said Millender's cousin, Mike, who runs an Eastpoint fish house where a bumper sticker plastered on the aging cash register reads: 'Love your oysterman.' "We go through good years and bad, so I'm not scared. The oysters always come back. But we flat need some water."

Oysters have been an economic mainstay here from before the 1840s when Dr. John Gorrie invented the ice machine to cool down his yellow fever patients, a gadget some waterman probably immediately put to use chilling a dozen on the half shell.

But there's far more than oysters here. Shrimp, clams, crab, grouper, red fish, flounder, mullet, trout and snapper all thrive, drawn to the river and protected bay where larvae mature on the rich nutrients washed down from upstream. Juveniles grow fast, hiding in the flats and marshes. Now those marshes are drying out.

Salinity is as common a topic of conversation here as the weather, because salinity, the delicate mix of fresh and salt water, is one of the magic keys to the seafood cornucopia that is Apalachicola Bay. Less fresh water means higher salinity, and too much salt is bad news for the critters the economy here depends on.

"I hear the salinity's up to 18 parts per million in the bay," a waitress declared recently at a local restaurant. "Normal is two and a half. We're in for a world of trouble."

The drought that's baking Atlanta has already done a lot of damage here, too. The river's flow had dropped on its own, before water managers reduced it further, and salt water has been creeping in from the Gulf and across the bay, steadily overwhelming the river's depleted flow of "sweet" water.

Catches have been dropping for months. No shrimp to speak of were netted in the past two years. One fisherman recently caught a 2-foot trout, a fish that years ago would've weighed eight pounds or more. This one weighed half that, a sign to some of the starvation diet imposed by the disruption of the food chain.

The Nov. 16 decision by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to further restrict the river's flow by holding more of it behind upstream dams is only hastening the fishery's looming crash, locals say.

"Drought is natural but it's been exacerbated by what man has done," said Dan Tonsmeire, who studies the river constantly in his role as the Apalachicola Riverkeeper, point man for a nonprofit environmental group. "The oystermen are saying 80 percent of the beds are already gone and now with the reduced flow it's only going to get worse."

Mindful that 900 people hold licenses to harvest oysters, the Franklin County Board of Commissioners declared a local state of emergency on Nov. 20, four days after the water holdback started. They told Florida Gov. Charlie Crist in a letter that it appeared only a matter of time before they would seek a disaster declaration.

Joseph "Smoky" Parrish, 46, is on the board, a third-generation waterman who coaches Little League and worries a lot when he has time to sit at his desk at Buddy Ward and Sons Seafood. Seafood accounts for $134 million in direct economic output, and if the seafood disappears, so do most of the county's jobs.

Over the past few years, Parrish and other commissioners resisted intense pressure from developers who wanted to buy up some of the ramshackle shucking houses on the waterfront and replace them with upscale condos that not many locals could afford.

Most locals don't want condos, or fancy shopping centers, or golf courses and expensive restaurants that cater to outsiders with lots of money. They want the hard work and the waterman's way of life that supported the generations that came before them.

They want to keep their forgotten corner of Florida the way it's always been.

But now they feel like David taking on a Goliath named Atlanta.

"Acre for acre this is the most productive estuary in the entire United States," Parrish said. "We don't have manufacturing jobs here. It's always been seafood. We know Atlanta needs electricity and drinking water, but we're trying to protect a national resource. And we want to preserve our heritage and culture. It's a way of life."