Chesapeake Bay

Over the past decade, Maryland's commercial watermen, our families and communities have slowly but steadily been reaching a turning point in our lives. With a polluted Chesapeake Bay, uncertain seafood stocks, rising costs of doing business and unpredictable fisheries management, commercial watermen around the state are facing a critical choice about the future. We can choose to follow the path we are on, filled with instability and insecurity, or we can choose a road of sustainability and promise.

Heavy spring rains, a hot summer and two major storms caused the Chesapeake Bay's overall health to worsen last year, scientists said Tuesday, though there apparently was a slight improvement in the Baltimore area's Patapsco and Back rivers, long considered among the bay's most degraded tributaries. The beleaguered bay saw its ecological grade slip from a C- in 2010 to D+ last year in an annual report card drawn up by the University of Maryland and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Years of attempts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay have fallen short and there is continuing opposition to tougher regulation, but a panel of environmental activists that included the Obama administration's point man for bay cleanup said Saturday there is still reason to hope that anti-pollution efforts will succeed. The group gathered at the Museum of Industry in Baltimore, once the site of an oyster-packing plant, to discuss ways that community groups and individuals could improve water quality in the nation's largest estuary - which sustains not only thousands of wildlife species, but recreational opportunities and a slice of Maryland's economy.

It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This very bay shall yet bear me into freedom. - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass H e had always loved the Chesapeake Bay and enjoyed history, but for the longest time, when Vince Leggett tried to blend his twin passions, he was left with some haunting questions. "I'd read of all the shipbuilders, boat captains and shipping magnates who supposedly made bay history, most of them members of the majority community," says Leggett, a public historian and former schools administrator who lives in Annapolis.

Larry Simns, who founded and led the Maryland Watermen's Association for four decades and was a key influence on efforts to reduce pollution in the Chesapeake Bay, died Thursday. He was 75. Mr. Simns, who grew up in the Eastern Shore fishing village of Rock Hall, was the public face of watermen, who saw their once-heavy catches of blue crabs and oysters becoming ever lighter as pollution crept into the bay. In the 1970s, he met with then-Sen. Charles McC. Mathias of Maryland, who was on a mission to examine the bay's environmental condition.

The Chesapeake Bay's health appears to be slowly rebounding, but still has a long way to go to be considered fully recovered, according to the region's largest environmental group. The Annapolis-based Chesapeake Bay Foundation rated the estuary's overall condition last year slightly better than it was two years ago, when the group took its last comprehensive look.  CBF gave the bay a score of 32 out of 70 for 2012, a one-point gain from two years ago and up four points since 2008.

After a spate of bad news about the Chesapeake Bay's health, here's an uptick: the "dead zone" that forms every spring is smaller than average so far this year. Water sampling done in early June by the Department of Natural Resources found dissolved oxygen levels too low to be suitable for fish, crabs and shellfish in just 12 percent of the bay, according to the department's " Eyes on the Bay " web site. That's well below the long-term average since 1985 of 17.1 percent of the Chesapeake experiencing low oxygen levels.  It's also a dramatic improvement over last year, when fully a third of the bay's waters were starved of the oxygen that fish, crabs and shellfish need to breathe.

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.

A new study shows some Chesapeake Bay rivers have gotten cleaner over the past three decades, while others are getting worse. The analysis, released Wednesday by the U.S. Geological Survey, suggests costly upgrades of sewage plants have helped, scientists say, but it raises questions about the effectiveness of efforts to date to curb polluted runoff, particularly from farms on Maryland's Eastern Shore. "We're going in the wrong direction in some places, and the right direction in others," said William Dennison, vice president for science applications of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

Farmland across the Chesapeake Bay region is overloaded with phosphorus, a new study by an environmental group finds, indicating that the bay's waters are being polluted by excessive use of animal manure and sewage sludge as crop fertilizers. In a report released Tuesday, the Environmental Working Group says soil data on file at universities show that in one of five counties in the six-state watershed, more than half of all soil samples tested are overloaded with phosphorus, a nutrient blamed for fouling the bay's waters.