Workers sort crabs at Pontchartrain Blues, a crab meat processing facility in Slidell, La. Owner Gary Bauer says business is down 70 to 80 percent since the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. (Photo by Frankie Gould. Click on photo for downloadable image.)

A crate of crabs waits to be processed on the dock of Pontchartrain Blues in Slidell, La. (Photo by Frankie Gould. Click on photo for downloadable image.)

News Release Distributed 09/08/10

Crates of crabs sit on the bustling dock of Pontchartrain Blues, a crab processing facility in Slidell, La., on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. Last month crabs were just trickling in. But owner Gary Bauer was determined to stay open to keep his customers supplied and his labor force working.

“If I close my doors, those people would have left, and when they re-opened the waters, I wouldn’t have had anybody available to do the processing,” Bauer said. “So I had a lot of motivation to keep the doors open.”

Waters that were closed because of the oil spill recently were reopened to commercial crabbing, but not before Bauer started purchasing crabs from North Carolina to keep his business afloat. The long-distance haul severely cut into his profits.

“Keeps us treading water is what it did,” he said.

Similar scenarios are playing out at docks across the Gulf Coast. Some processors haven’t been as lucky as Bauer and have had to close because of lack of product.

Bauer said his business is down 70 to 80 percent of what it normally is this time of the year. Recovery money is yet to put a dent in damages. LSU AgCenter area fisheries agent Rusty Gaude is working with the fishing community to help them navigate the recovery process.

“Thus far the claims against BP for the docks and processors have been woefully less than the actual losses they incurred,” Gaude said.

With additional waters open, more local seafood is available, but processors and fishers are still up against a negative public perception of seafood from the Gulf. Experts say rigorous testing has shown the oil spill has had little effect on seafood.

“In the seafood samples in open and closed waters where they’re harvested to test, they haven’t found any contamination. The reason why the waters were closed, they were closed as a precaution,” said Jon Bell, an LSU AgCenter food scientist specializing in seafood.

Bell is working with food scientists and seafood experts from universities in other Gulf Coast states to train seafood processors and buyers on sensory testing. The experts provide participants with the scientific background of how sensory evaluation of seafood works while letting them do “sniff tests” of samples of seafood spiked with petroleum and diesel.

The participants are trained “so they can see for themselves what the petroleum or diesel – another contaminant – can do to seafood at very low levels to show them that the sensory evaluation they are doing works,” Bell said.

The training also helps participants understand the criteria for opening and closing fishing waters. Bell said the trainers hope to provide additional evidence that seafood products from Gulf waters are safe.

Bauer attended a training session and now trusts sensory evaluation.

“It is amazing how easy it is for an untrained person like myself to pick up on the tainted product versus the fresh product,” Bauer said. “It was an eye-opener.”

Back at the Pontchartrain Blues dock, local crabs are starting to come in. Despite the challenges and hardships the oil spill caused, Bauer remains optimistic.

“We’re going to come out of this just like we came out of Katrina,” he said.