Little Island Saltwater Pumping Station

EditDate	2021/05/30

Related Threads: Knotts Island

In 1965, the City of Virginia Beach announced plans to “reintroduce” salt water to Back Bay. In the attached segment, which ran on WTAR (now WTKR, TV 3), Sidney Kellam said “we have studied the means of introducing it in there, and reported today that we think a pump should be installed in the vicinity of the Little Island Coast Guard Station for this purpose.”

Kellam continued by saying that “The council appropriated some $35,000 to do this work,” and gave the authority to proceed with it. “There are some engineering problems as to how we may anchor the offshore line to get the water out of the ocean… but we hope to be pumping sometime in March.”

The pier turned out to be the “anchor” used. Little Island became a notorious “crabbing hole.” According to some first-hand accounts, crabbers would “merely stand at the open end of the pipe and net the crabs as they rush out with the flow of water from the ocean.”

The pumping continued until 1987, when the Little Island pumping project was curtailed. According to the late Marshall Belanga, “The city decided that their little $30,000 that they were spending to keep the pumping program going was too much for the budget. So, they kicked us off it. Within three years, the Bay was dead,” said Belanga.

Ironically, there are now talks of bringing the pumps back to Little Island. However, instead of pumping salt water out of the ocean into Back Bay, pumps would push water out of the Bay into the Atlantic. It is one of the plans currently in place in an attempt to help alleviate flooding which some say was exasperated when the pumping stopped and sea grasses died.

https://dc.lib.odu.edu/digital/collection/wtar/id/438/rec/1

Bay changed pretty drastically after 1987.Web References https://dc.lib.odu.edu/digital/collection/wtar/id/438/rec/1

Interesting. Did this cause the millfoil bloom and when turned off cause the drop in bass.