Water Quality

Gov. Parris N. Glendening is seeking a 500 percent increase in the amount of money going to farmers to pay for nutrient-management plans. The request comes shortly after a flurry of last-minute activity among farmers to meet a December 2001 deadline either to have a plan to control farm runoff or to have filed for an extension as they complete their plans. Despite the rush to meet the deadline, the Department of Agriculture reports that it has not heard from 36 percent of the Maryland farms that are covered by regulations stemming from the Water Quality Improvement Act of 1998.

ST. MICHAELS -- Sidney Dickson is sprawled on his belly, hanging over the deck of his neighbor's 26-foot pontoon boat and dipping a computerized, hand-held meter into the flat-as-slate, greenish-gray water of Broad Creek.As he calls out readings measuring everything from pH and salinity levels to water temperature, the boat's owner, Robert Porter, scribbles the data in a logbook the two friends began compiling two months ago.It is a routine that the Chesapeake Bay Foundation hopes will be repeated some day by a small army of volunteers who will paint a detailed portrait of water quality throughout the bay watershed's labyrinth of creeks and rivers.

Right now, it's just a cardboard model. But by spring, advanced engineering students at Perry Hall High School hope to have the real thing -- a solar-powered box outfitted with special sensors -- measuring water quality in Baltimore's Inner Harbor. The students are using a $4,100 grant from the Lemelson-MIT Program -- a joint effort of the Oregon-based Lemelson Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- to develop the device. The students presented the model to their four-person advisory board recently.

OCEAN CITY - Long known for a laissez-faire approach to regulating shoreline development, officials in Worcester County and their northern neighbors in Sussex County, Del. - two of the fastest-growing in the mid-Atlantic - are taking a hard look at water quality in the fragile strip of coastal bays that stretch to the Virginia border. Years after Maryland imposed stringent development rules for the Chesapeake Bay, Worcester officials, environmentalists and developers are struggling to come up with a local version of the state's critical area law for the coastal waters, which are not part of the Chesapeake watershed.

Swimmers should avoid contact with tidal and fresh water for 48 hours after a big rain storm this summer, warns the Chesapeake Bay Foundation . The precaution is suggested by state and county health departments, but foundation officials believe it's not widely known by the public. The foundation says runoff makes the water unsafe, and the large fish kills already seen this year could be a sign that poor water quality is arriving earlier than usual. “I'm amazed how few people know our water can be unhealthy for days after a storm.

In October, Waterfront Partnership's Healthy Harbor Initiative released the State of Baltimore's Harbor Report, an assessment of the current health of Baltimore's Inner Harbor and its surrounding tributaries. According to the study, the water quality received an overall poor score. Anyone walking near the Inner Harbor can see from the bulkhead that the water is littered with trash, debris and pollutants, unfortunately making it unsafe for swimming and fishing. An unsettling contributor to this problem is the fact that of Maryland's 600 marinas, only 25 percent are currently designated as a Maryland Clean Marina by the Department of Natural Resources.

Baltimore County officials say a sewer overflow that discharged an estimated 16,800 gallons of waste into a tributary of White Marsh Run was discovered this past week. County health department officials said the tributary flows to the Bird River, and that said the overflow resulted from a vandalized eight-inch sewer line. County utility crews contained the overflow with a pump, but officials said that due to it occurring in a wooded area, between Gunpowder Crossing Lane and Pulaski Highway, the overflow went undetected for two weeks.

As an avid fan of the Patapsco River and Patapsco Valley State Park, I was disturbed by your article citing a Maryland Center for Environmental Science study that showed the Patapsco and Back rivers had scored an F on water quality for the first time since 1996 ("Chesapeake Bay receives C- grade on UM's report card," April 28). What many people do not realize is that Baltimore's inner and outer harbors are actually part of the Patapsco River before it empties into the Chesapeake Bay. The water quality monitoring stations used for the report were located far downstream from Patapsco Valley State Park, past the Hanover Street bridge near Fort McHenry.

Two articles in The Sun, one appearing May 4 and the other May 12, referred to a decline in water quality during last year's drought. Although the city Public Works Department did receive some complaints in September, a department spokesman pointed out that they involved only a small fraction of the system's consumers and that the problem was corrected within a few days.

The Carroll County Stormwater Management Ad-hoc Committee suggested last week that the county commissioners create a user fee to pay for federal- and state-required water-quality and storm water management programs.Committee members said that other alternatives, such as raising DTC taxes or selling capital improvement bonds, do not keep residents informed about how much the county is spending for those programs."Each consumer's bill will reflect the environmental mandates of the future," said committee member Richard Berich.