"It's like building a cathedral," O'Malley said in an interview, citing as part of the work several measures he has pushed. "Each of us tries to build our piece of this activity."
But Gerald Winegrad, a former state senator who has pushed for pollution-control reforms, argues that state officials have roundly failed to take forceful action to rescue the bay. "We haven't done the bold things yet," Winegrad said. "How bad does it have to get before we get bold?"
The Severn: septic tanks
Valerie Washington comes to Bonaparte Beach every week looking for litter, pet droppings, pools of muddy runoff - anything that could influence how much bacteria is reaching the Severn River.
Gingerly, she lowers a small glass jar into the river, fills it with greenish-brown water and quickly closes the lid.
The flight-attendant-turned-biology-student will repeat this procedure at different beaches about a dozen times before noon - when the samples must be in a closet-sized lab at Anne Arundel Community College.
There, microbiologist Sally Hornor will analyze the bacteria counts and post the results on the Web. And thousands of people who live along the Severn will know whether it's safe to swim in the river.
Two days after a summer rain, the answer is a definite no. At Bonaparte Beach, the level of enterococci bacteria - sickening germs typically found in human waste - is nearly twice the amount that Anne Arundel County has declared safe. At Riverside Drive Beach, the count is three times higher than the safe threshold.
These bacteria have made the Severn - a bucolic river that was the soul of summer for a generation of Marylanders - off-limits to swimmers during certain times of the year. But they are not the only force hurting the river.
Enterococci is a close cousin of nitrogen, the bay's major polluter. Both are excreted in human waste - which flows into the Severn through the thousands of septic tanks along its banks.
In Anne Arundel County, more than 40,000 homes rely on septics, a waste management method nearly as primitive as the outhouse. The number is higher than in any other county in the state. And nearly a third of Anne Arundel's septics are along the Severn.
"We've been dumping our waste for years in this water," said Thomas H. Miller, a regional director for the University of Maryland's Cooperative Extension Service. "Our hair should be up on our back, and we should be looking at this."
