Bay Cleanup

I have an article request for your writing team: the threat of water contamination, including to the Chesapeake Bay, resulting from the process of hydraulic fracturing used by natural gas companies, and their arrival to Maryland. Hydraulic fracturing is a process where natural gas companies drill 5,000-plus feet beneath the surface of the earth into shale deposits, or rocks that contain natural gas. In order to extract the gas, they use a mixture of sand, hundreds of thousands of gallons of fresh water, and toxic chemicals to break the gas away from the shale and bring it to the surface.

Supporters and critics of legislation that would grant farmers a 10-year reprieve from new environmental regulations squared off before a House committee Tuesday, with much of the debate focused on provisions in the bill barring any public disclosure of those granted the deferral. Farm group representatives, O'Malley administration officials and others told members of the House Environmental Matters Committee that offering state farmers a shield from new environmental cleanup requirements could boost efforts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay.  Farmers would voluntarily agree to reduce polluted runoff of soil and fertilizer from their farms beyond what they're now required to do, proponents say. Sen. Thomas M. Middleton, the bill's chief sponsor, said many farmers are having to invest in new equipment and facilities now to comply with recently adopted state regulations on how, when and where fertilizer can be spread on the ground.

Your article, "Military urged to boost bay cleanup" (Aug. 26), is just another photo op for Gov. Martin O'Malley to continue to blow smoke. I tried to participate in the nitrogen reducing septic system program last year. I submitted all the forms and heard nothing. When I called back they said the process for filing had changed. I resubmitted and heard nothing. I called back and they were out of money. The funding stopped, because Mr. O'Malley took the money from the fund to use in the general fund.

As she prepares to step down as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa P. Jackson says one of the "prouder moments" of her tenure was President Obama's agreement to have the federal government take the lead in trying to ramp up the lagging Chesapeake Bay restoration effort. Jackson, whose agency's work to address climate change and reduce air pollution have drawn much more attention and controversy, recalled with pride her role in helping to renew a cleanup effort that had repeatedly failed to reach its goals in the decades before Obama took office.

The Chesapeake Bay at its deepest is about 174 feet. The rhetoric about cleaning up the bay runs to much more impressive depths. Every politician, of every partisan stripe, has spun the same campaign tale about saving the Chesapeake. For decades, Maryland politicians have been saying all of the right things about cleaning up the bay, yet still here we are, with nothing but speeches. In an executive order from the spring of 2009, President Obama fell in at the back of an august line of chattering Chesapeake politicos.

Now I know how those White House party crashers felt. I received an e-mail Wednesday addressed to "Dear Chesapeake Bay colleague," inviting me to listen in on a "special briefing for the watermen and recreational fishing communities on a new federal strategy for protecting and restoring the Chesapeake Bay watershed." Earlier in the day, the Obama administration announced a "we really mean it this time" plan to restore the bay that involves tons of federal tough love and forces the six states in the watershed to break a sweat on enacting and enforcing stricter pollution and development laws.

Maryland's counties and cities say they will need to spend billions of dollars to take the extra steps needed to restore the Chesapeake Bay to health by 2020, the deadline the state gave them for action. In cash-strapped Baltimore, for example, officials estimate added cleanup measures will cost more than $250 million over the next six years. They say they'll seek City Council approval next month to levy a fee on all property owners to help pay for controlling polluted runoff from streets, alleys and parking lots.

The Obama administration warned Tuesday that Maryland and other states that drain into the Chesapeake Bay face federal sanctions, including roadblocks to growth, if they fail to meet new cleanup goals - though federal officials said they're counting on not having to wield the rod. Environmental activists, in turn, questioned the administration's resolve to do what is needed to restore the bay in the wake of the states having repeatedly failed to...

Steep projected costs for cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay could be trimmed by billions of dollars, a new study suggests, by allowing polluters to buy "credits" for less-expensive reductions made by others. The study, presented Thursday to the Chesapeake Bay Commission, an advisory panel of legislators from Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, estimates that nutrient pollution trading could trim projected costs for upgrading sewage treatment plants and controlling urban and suburban storm water pollution by $1 billion or more a year baywide.

As she prepares to step down as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa P. Jackson says one of the "prouder moments" of her tenure was President Obama's agreement to have the federal government take the lead in trying to ramp up the lagging Chesapeake Bay restoration effort. Jackson, whose agency's work to address climate change and reduce air pollution have drawn much more attention and controversy, recalled with pride her role in helping to renew a cleanup effort that had repeatedly failed to reach its goals in the decades before Obama took office.

Restoring the Chesapeake Bay to better health, or at least slowing the pace of pollution into it, is neither easy nor inexpensive. Yet it's worth pursuing and ultimately is a smart investment, so important is the estuary's future to Maryland's economy and quality of life. But as useful and broadly popular as that effort may be, there are always bound to be some who will oppose it, if only because it requires some degree of personal sacrifice. Over the years, there have been farmers, developers, manufacturers and various others who pollute the Chesapeake Bay who have balked at the cost and inconvenience of changing their ways.

While Chesapeake Bay pollution from sewage plants and industries has declined overall in recent years, illegal discharges from those sources are still dumping significant amounts of water-fouling nutrients into the troubled estuary, says a Washington-based environmental group. In a new report, the Environmental Integrity Project finds significant gaps persist in Maryland and the other bay watershed states in enforcement of municipal and industrial water pollution, including lax permitting and infrequent inspections.

On good days, the Tiber Hudson tributary of the Patapsco is a pleasant part of the scenery in Historic Ellicott City as it flows through a stone channel by Tonge Row, beneath Tiber Alley alongside Main Street and past the B&O Railroad Museum before it spills into the river. It's a troubled waterway nonetheless, not considered able to support life, paved over in spots and surrounded by lots of asphalt. The urban and suburban surroundings that drain into the Tiber Hudson - its "watershed" - will be inspected early in December by teams of consultants and volunteers as part of a continuing private, county and state effort to improve the streams and rivers that ultimately flow into the Chesapeake Bay. Focusing on areas some distance from its channel, the crew of about 15 will spend four days driving around, looking for possible pollution sources and ways to better protect the Tiber Hudson.

— In a challenge to the Obama administration's efforts to jump-start the lagging restoration of the Chesapeake Bay, lawyers for farmers and homebuilders argued in federal court here Thursday that the Environmental Protection Agency overstepped its legal authority and relied on a flawed computer model in setting a pollution "diet" for the ailing estuary. Lawyers for the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Association of Home Builders, poultry and pork producers, and other farming groups argued that states in the Chesapeake watershed, not the federal government, should be in charge of deciding how and where to reduce pollution fouling the bay. They also complained that the far-reaching "diet" was rushed into place despite gaps and errors and without giving the public enough time to review and comment on it. "It will affect urban growth; it affects how agriculture land will be used," said Richard E. Schwartz, one of the industry groups' lawyers.

The Chesapeake Bay cleanup got a shot in the arm today (Tuesday, 8/28), as federal and nonprofit officials announced grants totaling $9.2 million for planting trees, restoring wetlands, installing rain gardens and other projects across the watershed. The announcement was made at the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore's Inner Harbor, where one of the grants will help replace an existing parking lot with rain-absorbing "pervious concrete," intended to reduce polluted storm-water runoff.  The press conference was planned to highlight such urban water-quality efforts, with more than $800,000 in grants being handed out for projects in the Baltimore area alone.

At a recent supper party in the foothills West Virginia's Eastern Panhandle, a fisherman had just returned from Kent Narrows with a bushel of Maryland Blue Crabs. The crabs, rest their souls, made wonderful emissaries. The light conversation that punctuated the picking would have fit right in around tables in Salisbury or Solomons Island: The size of the crabs, their habits, their tastes in bait and, more generally, the overall health of the Chesapeake Bay. A hundred or more miles from its sparkling, reedy inlets, the bay is still very much in the psyche of people throughout its watershed.

For anyone who cares about Chesapeake Bay there's awarning in the Environmental Protection Agency's threat to cut off cleanup funds for Virginia. Once again we are reminded how many jurisdictions control the water that flows down the bay. If one fails to meet its responsibility, the whole watershed suffers. There is also the reminder that political commitments need to be renewed with each change of local administration.While none of the four jurisdictions in the bay's watershed -- Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia -- managed to meet a deadline for plans to reduce the amount of nutrients flowing into its waters from their tributaries, Virginia has done virtually nothing for two years.

The multistate effort to restore the Chesapeake Bay is on track to meet its latest timetable for cleaning up the ailing estuary, even though states failed to achieve all the short-term pollution reduction goals they set for themselves three years ago, officials said Monday. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said Maryland and the other five states that drain into the bay, as well as the District of Columbia and the federal government, have all made "extraordinary progress" the past two years in accelerating their cleanup efforts.

As a young man in the 1960s, Bernie Fowler recalls he could wade chest deep into the Patuxent River and still see his toes as he netted crabs.  But the clarity of his beloved river plummeted over the years, along with the vitality of the rest of the Cheaspeake Bay. In 1988, frustrated with what seemed to him then as the slow pace of efforts to restore the river, Fowler, a state senator representing Calvert County, staged a wade-in to demonstrate graphically...