Patuxent River

When Nora O'Brien hosts guests at the secluded Victorian farmhouse she has painstakingly restored, friends have been known to carp about the deafening chorus of summertime tree frogs. "I've had dinner parties where people say, 'Can't you make them shut up?' " said the 49-year-old landscape company owner and mother of three. But she and dozens of other families across the state are willing to put up with such inconveniences. For them, living rent-free inside a Maryland state park outweighs getting chased by skunks, startled by snakes or clearing horse droppings from unpaved driveways that double as public riding trails.

A three-year, $100 million effort to cut levels of nutrients coming from Howard County's wastewater treatment plant in Savage got under way Thursday with a ceremonial groundbreaking. More than five years in the planning, the project will use waste from a nearby ice cream plant to help produce enough bacteria to sharply reduce the nitrogen being emitted with wastewater from 3,900 pounds a day now, to 830 pounds per day in 2012, when the work is completed. Reuse of some treated water will also help by diverting it from the Patuxent River.

A three-year, $100 million effort to cut levels of nutrients coming from Howard County's wastewater treatment plant in Savage got under way Thursday with a ceremonial groundbreaking. More than five years in the planning, the project will use waste from a nearby ice cream plant to help produce enough bacteria to sharply reduce the nitrogen being emitted with wastewater from 3,900 pounds a day now, to 830 pounds per day in 2012, when the work is completed. Reuse of some treated water will also help by diverting it from the Patuxent River.

Howard County announced yesterday that it has received a $35.5 million state grant to help pay for a $100 million county project to upgrade the county's Little Patuxent Water Reclamation Plant in Savage. The goal of the project is to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus runoff into the Patuxent River and ultimately the Chesapeake Bay, officials said. James M. Irvin, the county public works director, said the grant from the state Department of the Environment is double the anticipated amount and will enable the county to free up more local funding for other water and sewer projects.

A waterman with a long list of convictions on the Eastern Shore for poaching fish, crabs and oysters from the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries is scheduled to stand trial tomorrow in St. Mary's County on charges that he harvested undersized oysters from the Patuxent River. The charges against Joseph Janda Jr. in October touched off a flurry of protests from recreational anglers to the prosecutor and calls by a Baltimore County lawmaker for tougher penalties on repeat offenders. Natural Resources Police say Janda, 22, of Wittman, was oystering without a commercial license when they stopped his boat on the Patuxent River across from Solomons to check his catch.

BENEDICT - Walter Boynton knows all there is to know about the Patuxent River - how to find its guts and marshes, where it shifts from suburban stream into bay-like vastness, when the tide is slack and when it rises. But you don't need to be a University of Maryland biologist to see that the river is in trouble. As Boynton steers his boat underneath the Route 231 bridge near this Charles County town, a thin white film covers the water - part of a miles-long algae bloom. He lifts a dredge from the water to examine a sample of the bottom.

A St. Mary's County man has been charged in connection with illegal fireworks that police seized June 28 from a barge anchored in the Patuxent River off the Calvert County community of Patuxent View, the state fire marshal's office said yesterday. Jack R. Beckwith, 58, of the 28000 block of Three Notch Road, Mechanicsville, was charged Friday with possession of fireworks without a permit and possession of fireworks with intent to discharge. Both charges are misdemeanors and are punishable by fines of up to $250.

Environmentalists are questioning Howard County's management of its sewage system and plans to add a $66 million sewer pipe, both crucial to the proposed redevelopment of central Columbia. "We have suspicions about this leaky, stinky pipeline," said Fred Tutman, who represents the nonprofit advocacy group Riverkeepers on Maryland's Patuxent River Commission. County officials strongly defend their stewardship of the system and their efforts to preserve water quality, noting plans to spend $85 million to reduce nutrient runoff from the Little Patuxent Wastewater Reclamation Plant in Savage and the new 10.5-mile pipeline that is to run from Savage through Columbia north to Route 108. Construction is to begin next year.

BROOMES ISLAND - Bernie Fowler never gave up on the river he calls his "beautiful lady." He believed in the Patuxent all through the 1960s, when effluent from sewage treatment plants began fouling the water, killing the crabs and the grasses that nurtured them. He fought for her in the 1970s, when a judge ruled that the state of Maryland and the federal government weren't doing enough to protect the river. And he was indefatigable throughout the 1980s and 1990s, when, as a state senator representing Calvert County, he introduced law after law aimed at curbing river pollution.

To such well-known threats to the health of the Chesapeake Bay as nitrogen from farm fertilizers and runoff brought on by suburban sprawl, add a less-obvious danger: bacon grease. Homeowners who dump fat down the kitchen drain account for a growing share of sewage system overflows throughout Maryland. Most are minor, but grease buildup in a sewer line was blamed for a spill of more than a half-million gallons into woods next to the Patuxent River in Howard County this year. Yesterday, officials gathered on the banks of the Little Patuxent in Ellicott City's Centennial Park to call on cooks to be more careful.