Cobscook Bay clam diggers want action

WHITING – Heading into their sixth week without work, clam diggers who make their livings from Cobscook Bay called on the state Tuesday evening to open up their closed flats.

About 25 clam diggers from Lubec to Eastport gathered at the Whiting community building to express disappointment that the state Department of Marine Resources is not moving more quickly to announce test results for levels of red tide.

“We are at the end of the state, and they don’t care about us,” clam digger Julie Keene of Trescott said at the meeting.

Clam flats from Calais south to Trescott have been closed by DMR order since June 9, when officials closed the area as a precaution.

The bloom from red tide creates deadly toxins when clams become infected, although no one in Maine has died from eating red tide-infected clams in the last 50 years since monitoring for the toxins began.

Red tide had forced extensive closures on Massachusetts and New Hampshire flats through the central Maine coast in early June, alarming the public who feared clams weren’t safe to consume this summer.

But the fear of red tide contamination didn’t stop there, and the closure of the Cobscook Bay area to digging clams has been in effect for nearly six weeks.

The meeting was called by Albion Goodwin of Pembroke, a state representative for eight years until last November. He had called clam diggers to meetings last summer, when the area’s flats were closed for 13 weeks, also for red tide scares.

“I found out all these people are out of work still and they needed help,” Goodwin said of his reason for calling the meeting as a concerned citizen rather than as an elected official. “They have had six weeks without a paycheck.”

The clam diggers decided they would come together again at 6 p.m. next Wednesday, July 27, at the Whiting community building.

Goodwin will ask representatives from the offices of U.S. Rep. Michael Michaud and Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins to attend the next meeting.

The clam diggers are seeking either state or federal help for the weeks they go without work. Four meetings last summer produced nothing for them, Goodwin said, in spite of Michaud’s staff meeting with federal-level sources of relief.

Last month Gov. John Baldacci had the state declare an emergency because of the red tide, and clam diggers and clam buyers became eligible for 1 percent loans. But a loan application is 20 pages, the clammers say, and they would rather have grants to make up for what they have lost in earnings.

The longer-term problem facing the clammers involves the lack of water monitors for the area. State biologist Jay McGowan is one of only five people who test waters for red tide levels, and his responsibility runs from Boothbay Harbor up to the Canadian border.

Two state representatives attended the meeting, Howard McFadden, R-Dennysville, and Ian Emery, R-Cutler. They told the clam diggers that they would introduce a bill in the next session of the Legislature that would increase the amount of testing taking place in Washington County.

The DMR took three more tests from Cobscook Bay on Friday, Monday and Tuesday, but results have not been shared with local clam diggers.

“We will introduce a bill to increase the effort and the manpower given to testing of clam flats in times of red tide,” Emery said. “They need to concentrate the testing in the hot areas to get these people back to work.”