There’s a stinky surprise waiting for some vacationers in Ocean City, Maryland. Thousands of dead horseshoe crabs have washed into a canal along 94th Street and aren’t washing out.
“Why they’re dying in these numbers this year, we don’t know,” Terry McGean, the city manager of Ocean City, told WTOP. A University of Maryland Eastern Shore professor is looking into it, he said.
Dead crabs have washed into the 94th Street canal in past summers, though “not nearly to this degree,” McGean said.
“It’s been a matter of, you know, a few volunteers in a couple hours, and clean them up and it’s done,” he said.
This year, the city hired a contractor who has cleaned up the canal three times already, and “we’re having now to potentially bring in a much larger contractor out of Baltimore,” McGean said.
The resulting stench is ruining the summer for some residents and vacationers. In one Instagram post Thursday about “living in a horseshoe crab cemetery,” a woman gagged as she walked toward the canal.
Dead crabs are deposited in the 94th Street canal because of its design.
“The canal is a dead end,” Terry McGean, the city manager of Ocean City, said. “It is kind of a different orientation than all our other canals in Ocean City,” which open to the bay on the west end.
“That’s one of the reasons why, really, the crabs float in there, and there’s just not enough flushing to get them out,” he said.
Another issue complicating the matter is jurisdiction.
“This is my 36th year with the town of Ocean City, and every time we try to do something that might have any impact on the bay, we are told in no uncertain terms that that is waters of the state, including working a canal,” he said.
“But now when the waters of the state have a major problem, the state refuses to do a thing about it, and that’s very frustrating to me,” McGean continued.
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