Spill Shuts Down Nation's Oldest Oyster Shuckers: P&J Oyster Company in New Orleans

(June 10) -- This morning, the oyster shuckers at the country's oldest oyster house shucked what could well be their last batch.

P&J Oyster Company on North Rampart Street in New Orleans' French Quarter has been a city staple for 134 years -- it was P&J bivalves that were used in the first oysters Rockefeller. Now, after the oyster house has weathered two world wars, the Great Depression and Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill may have dealt the business a killing blow.

While half of Louisiana's oyster beds are free from contamination and open to harvesting -- indeed, despite the spill, for the most part gulf seafood is safe and plentiful -- the fields that P&J built its business on are off-limits. Co-owner Al Sunseri is worried that his operation will have to close indefinitely.

"This is our last day. I don't have any prospects to get any oysters -- they closed one of the main areas where we get our oysters from," he told WRNO News in New Orleans. "Barataria Basin is where P&J has made its name over the years, and that whole basin is now closed."

Sunseri will buy pre-shucked oysters from Alabama for the time being, but he doesn't know how long that will sustain him.

In an oil spill, oysters suffer from their immobility and because as filter feeders they end up directly processing both oil and dispersants. Since the gulf oil spill hit during their spawning season, they were even further compromised.

Oysters are an important foundation in the gulf ecosystem, and so P&J oysters could be among the first top-level predators to begin feeling the sting of a compromised bivalve population.

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Sunseri has laid off his employees, whom he hopes will be cared for by BP, which said today it will speed up its processing of loss-of-business claims.

Last week, New Orleans held its first-ever oyster festival. It was a celebration of one of the city's favorite little creatures, but it had the undertone of an elegy.

"It's almost that Last Supper mentality," Lucien Gunter of Acme Oyster House told The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.

"I'm trying to eat as many oysters as I can before they're all gone," another New Orleans man said.