After 40 Years, Shellfishing in Hempstead Harbor

It’s a proud day for Carol DiPaolo and the Coalition to Save Hempstead Harbor, Syosset-based watershed protection includes the , and the Villages of  and .

One of the goals of the group when it was founded in 1986 was to re-permit shellfishing in . On Wednesday, that goal was realized when the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation re-opened a portion of the harbor to shellfishers for the first time in over four decades.
“What a monumental milestone,” said DiPaolo, the Projects Manager of the coalition. “The best way of suggesting that there have been improvements in the harbor is to re-open the shellfish bed.”

The 2,500-square-foot fishing area extends from Prospect Point to Matinecock Point in the north and from the Large Brown House in the Sands Point Preserve to the Rock Jetty in the south.  Two isolated areas along the eastern border (Crescent Beach and Dsorsis Pond) will remain closed to shellfishers.

The approval from the DEC came after years of testing and surveys conducted by the state agency to determine the cleanliness of the harbor. Their approval was a testament to the hours of work by a coalition of nine surrounding municipalities and other community groups titled the Hempstead Harbor Protection Committee. The committee, officially formed in 1995, conducted numerous studies and tests of their own and constructed numerous plans in order to clean up a harbor ravaged by pollution in previous decades.

“It took all of the jurisdictions around Hempstead Harbor to work together and make all of the improvements necessary,” said DiPaolo, whose coalition was part of the committee from its inception. “They could do that easier as a group as opposed to individual municipalities. It’s [been] a tremendous cooperative effort.”

The opening of Hempstead Harbor to shellfishers comes at a time when multiple bays along the north shore of Suffolk County are being closed due to bio-toxins released by seasonal algae blooms. Those algae are not growing in Hempstead Harbor, however, and while the growth of the blooms is unpredictable, they are not expected to threaten the harbor in the near future.

“It really hasn’t had an impact,” DiPaolo said. “We’ve been on alert during certain years, when they’ve been seen close by. But they haven’t seen them at the same levels they’ve seen them out east.”

“Hempstead’s problem was anthropogenic [that is, affected by humans],” said Jim Moriarty, an employee in the Town of Oyster Bay’s Department of Environmental Resources.  The blooms, he added, "never even gets into Oyster Bay. It’s a problem out east.”

While it’s a victory for the HHPC and the coalition, it’s not going to stop efforts to improve the cleanliness of the harbor.

“We don’t feel like we’re done,” DiPaolo said. “We will keep working to make sure that increased areas around the harbor will re-open for shellfish beds as well. People have to remain vigilant.”