Poplar Island

A House appropriations subcommittee in Washington has approved $15 million to begin restoring the Chesapeake Bay's Poplar Island, a highly expensive project that could become a national model for beneficial use of dredge material.The plan to restore Poplar Island is one of several solutions proposed by Maryland officials to deal with the state's dilemma about where to put the mud and silt scooped from its 126 miles of shipping channels.Gov. Parris N. Glendening, hoping to secure federal funds, budgeted $35 million this year to develop the first half of the 1,100-acre project.

The Maryland Port Administration is completing its initial review of a multimillion-dollar proposal that would turn Baltimore harbor shipping channel muck into bucks. The plan might eventually replace time-tested dredge disposal methods of piling sediment along the waterline or using it to plug holes in eroding bay islands with a factory that bakes the goo into concrete aggregate for construction. Baltimore would be the first port to use the process. "We're getting ready to take the next step and it's an important step for Maryland," said port commissioner Ted Venetoulis.

Willem Roosenburg reached into a white bucket and pulled out a terrapin the size of a hamburger. The Ohio University professor waved a scanner over the freshwater turtle, recording the data from the tiny transponder in its leg before handing Lulu back to her handlers, first-graders from Frank Hebron-Harman Elementary School in Hanover. Tuesday was the last time the first-graders saw the turtle after spending nine months nurturing the hatchling in their classroom tank. It was time to release her and her brother, Blue, back into the Chesapeake Bay surrounding Poplar Island.

While most of the Chesapeake Bay's islands are slowly vanishing beneath the waves, one not far from Baltimore is staging a remarkable renaissance. Poplar Island, former hunting retreat, hangout for politicos and black cat farm, had nearly washed away by the late 1990s. But it's since been restored to the size it was when it was still a thriving 19th-century farming and fishing community, using muck dredged from the shipping channels leading to Baltimore just 34 miles to the northwest.

POPLAR ISLAND - Presidents and their Cabinet members once played on Poplar Island. Bootleggers made moonshine there, and a man who raised black cats for their pelts was wiped out when the Chesapeake Bay froze over and thousands of cats scurried to freedom.Those days are long gone. But then, so is most of Poplar Island.There is almost nothing left today of the Talbot County island that covered 1,100 acres in 1847. Erosion has eaten the island away ever since and has broken it into several pieces, only one of which is bigger than an acre.

The Clinton administration has earmarked $22 million in its fiscal 1997 budget to help restore the Chesapeake Bay's Poplar Island using mud and silt scooped from Maryland's extensive shipping channels.With ports across the nation struggling to find dredge disposal sites, Poplar Island would become a national model as the first large-scale project to beneficially use dredged material."The project demonstrates that clean dredge material can be a resource rather than a waste," Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes said yesterday.

State and federal officials plan to start restoring Poplar Island in the Chesapeake Bay next month to serve as a wildlife refuge and dredge deposit site, with final approval expected today from the state Board of Public Works.The board's approval would finalize a private corporation's sale of four remaining fragments of the eroding island to the state. The Maryland Port Administration, with federal assistance, plans to replenish the former resort using mud and silt scooped from the port of Baltimore shipping channels.

State officials yesterday underscored the urgency of finding dredge disposal sites, but they quickly discovered that, among lawmakers, the perennially unpopular subject is still fraught with political, environmental and financial concerns.A key element of the Glendening administration plan for dredge disposal -- the restoration of Poplar Island -- ran into immediate trouble when lawmakers were told the cost ultimately could reach $350 million.But even a far less costly solution, to pump dredge material into the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay, also encountered sharp hostility from environmentalists, watermen and Eastern Shore lawmakers.

POPLAR ISLAND - Two miles out in the bay, 34 miles southeast of Baltimore near Tilghman Island, excavators and dump trucks with tires as tall as a person are sculpting a mountain of muck and sand dredged from the port of Baltimore's shipping channels. If the complex engineering proves correct - if the Maryland Port Administration, the Army Corps of Engineers and federal and state environmental agencies can carry through with a plan to mimic the natural world - this nearly extinct island will emerge over the next decade as an 1,100- acre wildlife preserve.

In Stephen Ailstock's galley-style lab, the grass grows in water-filled test tubes, beakers and Mason jars. Under fluorescent light, tens of thousands of plantings sprout in graceful curves, flowery bunches and straight stalks. In controlled laboratory conditions, the Anne Arundel Community College biology professor has devised a way to grow mass quantities of the ecologically prized but scarce aquatic grasses that provide food, shelter and erosion buffers in the Chesapeake Bay. Now, Ailstock's challenge is to move beyond his cramped lab to Poplar Island, where he and his students will try to restore the underwater meadows that once thrived near the land mass two miles out in the bay near Tilghman Island.

Willem Roosenburg reached into a white bucket and pulled out a terrapin the size of a hamburger. The Ohio University professor waved a scanner over the freshwater turtle, recording the data from the tiny transponder in its leg before handing Lulu back to her handlers, first-graders from Frank Hebron-Harman Elementary School in Hanover. Tuesday was the last time the first-graders saw the turtle after spending nine months nurturing the hatchling in their classroom tank. It was time to release her and her brother, Blue, back into the Chesapeake Bay surrounding Poplar Island.

WASHINGTON -- As a freshman congressman, he introduced the first article of impeachment against President Richard M. Nixon. As a veteran senator, he responded to corporate scandals by guiding a landmark reform package to passage. But as he reflects on 36 years in Washington, Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes becomes most animated as he recalls a dredging project in the Chesapeake Bay. It was the mid-1990s. The port of Baltimore required regular dredging to keep channels clear for commercial shipping.

The Maryland Port Administration and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are proposing to spend more than $1 billion to rebuild two islands in the Chesapeake Bay -- the government's latest plan to use dredge spoil from shipping channels to enhance the environment. The two agencies propose to remove tons of silt and sediment from the state's waters, then haul it down the bay to create a 2,000-acre wildlife preserve at James Island, a spit of land off the coast of Dorchester County that is quickly vanishing.

TILGHMAN -- The old man tended the five gravestones for years, mowing the grass, occasionally kneeling to pray - as if the bodies were really buried here. As if the Chesapeake Bay had not devoured their Poplar Island sod, as if the old man had moved quickly enough to save the earthly remains of his father, his father's wife, his brother, his half-brother and his grandfather. At least he had the family stones and stories. Willie Roe heard the stories and helped haul the stones here to Tilghman Island for the old man, Harvey C. Howarth, who asked his friend and fellow waterman for a hand in a race with time.

Philip Merrill, the newspaper publisher and former diplomat whose June 10 disappearance during a lone sailing trip on the Chesapeake Bay prompted an intensive search, apparently committed suicide, the family said in a statement last night. "During the course of the [Department of Natural Resources] investigation into the disappearance of Phil, we have come to learn that the events that occurred on June 10 were in all likelihood the result of his own efforts to take his life," the family said in the statement, which was released in response to media inquiries.

As a staff oceanographer for the Johns Hopkins University's Chesapeake Bay Institute, and captain of its research vessels, Lydia Louise I and II, William B. Cronin spent 30 years roaming the Chesapeake Bay gathering scientific data. Throughout his life, Cronin, 90, has been fascinated by the many islands that litter the bay's 200-mile length from Havre de Grace to Norfolk, Va., and to reach them, he carefully guided his 25-foot sailboat, the Ginger, to their sandy shores. Many of these "ragged bits of land," as he described them, are now abandoned or remain occupied by a hardy band of tenacious watermen and farmers who refuse to cede their island homes to rising bay waters.

FORGET THAT waterfront with million-dollar views. It's for pikers. Let's talk about the bay's new third-of-a-billion-dollar view. It's from Poplar Island, rebuilt over the past few years at a cost of about $327,000 per acre. The good news is that we taxpayers already own it, and tours are available to groups of eight or more (see below for details). I recently made the one-hour paddle in my kayak from the Talbot County mainland to check on the resurrection of Poplar Island, where the needs of commerce and wildlife are happily intersecting as they seldom do. A huge federal-state project to rebuild the eroded island with silt dredged from Baltimore's ship channels has created the only place in Maryland's mid-Chesapeake where one can enjoy 20 feet of elevation.

Congress has agreed to set aside $18.4 million to pay for maintenance dredging of Baltimore Harbor, in addition to $14.1 million to continue the Poplar Island project. The Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for maintaining shipping channels, will use the money to remove about 2.5 million cubic yards of material from the harbor, according to the office of Democratic Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland. In the Poplar Island project, the engineers aim to turn dredge spoil into a wildlife preserve.

POPLAR ISLAND - On the wettest March day since 1871, with winds howling at 35 knots, Jason Miller is decorating a sodden mound of dirt with plastic decoys. He pounds a metal stake into glop that just days ago was beneath the waters of the Chesapeake Bay and attaches a $20 plastic snowy egret to it. He repeats this process 35 times. If nature follows the script, real egrets will join the plastic colony, looking to carve out a small slice of prime waterfront real estate to build a nest and a family.

Two federal agencies are considering a mammoth wetlands restoration project that would use mud dredged from Chesapeake Bay shipping channels to undo 60 years of erosion at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge - a task that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Army Corps of Engineers say they would like to rebuild 8,000 acres of marsh at the 24,000-acre refuge on the Eastern Shore. The proposal is included in a 20-year management plan that outlines how the corps would handle the more than 3 million cubic tons of dredge spoils that must be removed each year to keep the port of Baltimore operating.