NEWPORT NEWS – On a gray and drizzly Monday morning, workers fired a water cannon to spray oyster shells off a barge in the James River beside Newport News.
As the weather cleared a few miles upriver, a giant dredge pulled up fossilized oyster shells buried deep in the mud and placed them onto two more barges for a later return to the James.
All of this dredging and replacing of shells was part of the largest oyster replenishment project in Virginia history, a $2 million effort this summer to help oysters by giving them new places to live and grow — bunches of their own shells, to which baby oysters attach.
Chesapeake Bay oysters — great to eat, important for the bay’s health — suffered a disastrous decline in recent decades because of disease, pollution and other issues.
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