November 21, 2018 — After Hurricane Florence, bags of dead oysters hung in the trees near Jimmy Morris’ oyster farm and hatchery.
Florence ransacked his Morris Family Shellfish Farms in Sealevel, north of Beaufort and Morehead City. Pummeling winds, historic flooding and power outages killed a year’s worth of shellfish seed, the early stage for 10 million oysters and 5 million clams, plus the better part of 1,000 cages of market oysters.
“There were oysters everywhere,” Morris said after the storm.
Florence hit North Carolina in September as a Category 1 hurricane, then stopped and stalled for days on the coast as it dumped trillions of gallons of rain. The rush of freshwater chased off fish, killed millions of oysters and crippled an industry still taking stock of its losses.
Read the full story at the Raleigh News and Observer