WASHINGTON – U.S. Senators Barbara A. Mikulski (both D-Md.) Monday announced that the Harris Creek oyster restoration project will be completed in the coming weeks. The Bay’s oyster population was down to 1 percent of its peak due to pollution, disease and historic overfishing when the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began funding the Bay’s largest ever oyster recovery effort.

Senator Mikulski has so far secured $5.12 million in NOAA funding for the project through the Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations process. Harris Creek is the first of five Maryland Chesapeake Bay tributaries to be restored, and more than 2 billion oysters have been planted in Harris Creek since the project began in 2011.

“The Chesapeake Bay is part of who we are as Marylanders – it is part of our heritage and part of our culture – and it’s our greatest natural resource. This restoration is a federal investment in the lives and livelihoods that depend on the Bay,” said Senator Mikulski, vice chairwoman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice and Science, which funds NOAA. “I will keep fighting to make sure the Bay and our Eastern Shore communities are priorities when it comes to the federal checkbook.”

Senator Mikulski also announced that NOAA has awarded an additional $1 million to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to continue the multi-year restoration process of reseeding and monitoring oyster reefs in the remaining Chesapeake tributaries. DNR will continue to work with the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science at Horn Point to produce the oyster seed, or ‘spat on shell,’ and with the Oyster Recovery Partnership and local watermen for on-the-water operations to rebuild reefs.

With NOAA’s continued funding, an additional 1.05 billion oysters will be produced in the Maryland waters of the Chesapeake over three years, and 25,000 bushels of shell will be recycled from restaurants for use in the production of those oysters.

As the Harris Creek project nears completion, restoration is already underway at the second and third Maryland restoration sites in the Tred Avon and Little Choptank tributaries.