Bay Restoration

THIS COLUMN recently featured the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's new State of the Bay report, which ranked the estuary's health at 27 on a scale of 100.That was progress, up about five points from the early 1980s, CBF said. But it is far from what it thinks is attainable -- about 70.(A score of 100, the bay's pre-Colonial health, simply isn't realistic).The report raises a concern: It has taken about 15 years to improve the bay's health by only five points. That represents one point every three years.

Maryland's latest plan for restoring the Chesapeake Bay is under fire from the Environmental Protection Agency, which doubts that enough of the state's farmers will voluntarily curb pollution from their fields and feedlots.In a letter written earlier this month, the EPA's Chesapeake Bay office in Annapolis contends that farmers must be compelled to participate in what are now mostly voluntary conservation programs if the state hopes to clean up the bay's rivers and streams.That assertion was quickly rejected by Maryland officials, who say farmers will respond better to appeals for their cooperation than to government regulations.

Maryland's oyster harvest for the season that ends Sunday is expected to be only 120,000 bushels - about one-third of last year's catch and the second-worst since recordkeeping began in 1870, state fishery managers say. A state scientist blamed two oyster parasites, MSX and Dermo, which thrive when Chesapeake Bay waters become super-salty. "Both of them are worse when we get higher salinity, and we've now had two, going on three years of drought," said Stephen Jordan, director of the state's Cooperative Oxford Laboratory.

The Patuxent River, the largest Chesapeake Bay tributary entirely within Maryland, is showing its first signs of new life after more than a decade of costly efforts to reverse its decline, state officials say.Nutrient pollution fouling the river has been curtailed significantly in the past two years, thanks largely to more than $190 million spent upgrading eight major wastewater-treatment plants in Anne Arundel, Howard, Prince George's and Montgomery counties.And...

The Susquehanna River and its big dams have been in the news lately. A handful of Maryland county officials would like you to believe the dams are the primary ill of the Chesapeake Bay. They claim that because sediment reservoirs behind the Conowingo Dam are at capacity, instead of trapping pollutants during storms, the dam now allows two pollutants - phosphorus and sediment - to flow downstream at alarming rates. They argue that years of restoration progress have been erased and that current bay restoration efforts do not address these issues.

The latest round of state budget cuts is taking a couple of bites out of Maryland's efforts to restore the Chesapeake Bay, trimming plans to tackle polluted runoff from city and suburban streets and curtailing monitoring of the bay's health. State officials are cutting $2 million from the Bay Trust Fund, a special pot of money lawmakers had agreed on three years ago to earmark for curbing polluted runoff - a growing and particularly difficult problem for the bay. Originally meant to accelerate the pace of bay cleanup, the fund has been shrinking since its inception.

A new study suggests it may be impossible to restore Chesapeake Bay unless mid-Atlantic air pollution is sharply curtailed and New York, Delaware and West Virginia can be drawn into the cleanup campaign.The bay could make at least a partial recovery from decades of pollution if Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia stick to their 1987 goal of cleaning up sewage discharges and curbing runoff from farmland and development, the study concludes.A preliminary draft of the study, compiled by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and based on a sophisticated computer "model" of the bay, is to be presented Thursday to a panel of federal and state officials.

What a difference a decade and a half makes. In 1977, at the first Maryland-Virginia conference on the Chesapeake Bay, a top environmental official concluded this about pollution washing into the estuary from farms and developments:"There is more alarm than necessary. . . . [It] can be controlled with just good housekeeping, old-fashioned general sanitation."This week at the latest bay summit conference, the governors of Maryland and Virginia were flanked by the EPA administrator, the mayor of Washington and the governor of Pennsylvania, whose state has millions of acres of farmland draining pollutants to the Chesapeake.

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration wants to spend more than $56 billion to conserve farmland over the next decade, prompting an unprecedented push by Chesapeake Bay advocates to carve out a slice of the money for the imperiled estuary. Lawmakers and environmentalists say that negotiations on this year's wide-ranging farm bill - better known for the subsidies historically provided to corn and sugar growers, among others - offer the best chance yet to protect the threatened waterway from contaminants flushed in from fertilizer and manure.

Scientists, watermen and recreational users of the Chesapeake Bay are monitoring the now-brown water coursing down the Susquehanna River, hoping that history doesn't repeat itself. Since Tropical Storm Agnes dumped millions of tons of sediment and pollution into the bay in June 1972, devastating bay grasses and aquatic life, flood- waters in 1996, 2003 and 2004 also have made their mark. But while this week's deluge will not come close to matching Agnes in terms of water volume, it shares one ominous characteristic that could set it apart from more recent storms: timing.