Chesapeake Bay cleanup - it’s now or never
TILGHMAN ISLAND, Md. - If
they could get the Bay back the
way it was when Russell Dize was
young and started following the
water, you could wade out chin
deep and still see your feet.
Then, you could even see 10 feet
down on a clear spring day. You
could watch the bay grasses grow
ing on the bottom. You could sight
out oysters just by looking down
and tonging down to the bottom.
That was the Chesapeake-" crown
jewel” of America’s estuanes-25
years ago.
Now you can seldom see down
more than a couple of feet. Now
most of the grasses and oysters
have disappeared. In a 42-year-old
waterman’s lifetime, the pollution
line “has been moving down the
Bay like a cloud,” south toward the
Virginia waters.
Low Oxygen Levels
“My father dredged oysters at
Swan Point m the upper Bay. Now
we have to take small seed oysters
from down here up there,” says
Dize, who like his father is captain
of a stately skipjack, traditional
workboat of the Maryland bay
oyster dredger and part of the last
commercial fleet still under sail in
the country.
“Waterman may not have the
scientific knowledge, but we can
tell ‘bad water.’ When it comes in,
the crabs and finfish move away
from it. But the oysters and clams
can’t. We can see that below 20 feet
in our area of the Bay, nothing’s
alive.”
In the mam part of the Bay, the
amount of water with very low or
no dissolved oxygen has increased
about 15-fold between 1950 and
1980.
“When you’ve lost the grasses
(which provide a vital habitat for
many bay creatures), you’ve
started losing everything, from
striped bass to diving ducks. And
CHESAPEAKE BAY
fIWNSTLVANIA C».\
excessive nutrients flowing front
the Bay’s huge watershed are
feeding undesirable algae that
rob the water of vital oxygen.
SCALE OF MILES
Low Dissolved Oxygen
■ LOW LEVELS IN 1950
(INCLUDES BLACK AREAS)
I!" LOW LEVELS IN 1980
WATER WITH NO DISSOLVED OXYGEN IN 1980
Tiny fishing village of Tylerton, Md. clings to the shore of
Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay. Smith and nearby
Virginia's Tangier Island are the last of the Bay’s inhabited
when you lose everything, the
watermen will be gone.”
Three generations of Dizes were
on board when the 52-foot Kathryn
-a gilded eaglehead on her bow and
a gold ball atop her single tall
mast-took first prize in the skip
jack race at the 1983 Chesapeake
Appreciation Days.
As one of about 15,000 watermen
who follow the water year round,
Russell Dize spends from sunup to
sundown on his boat in the winter
oystering season. “In good years,
you could catch your quota and
quit by noon.” In the summer, he’s
out clamming in the morning, and
buying and selling the Bay’s
famous Atlantic blue crabs in the
afternoon for his seafood company,
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which operates from this tiny
fishing community.
“When I was a kid, one of the big
gest finfish operations on the Bay
was right here. Today you can’t
buy a fish on this island,” Dize
said. Even oysters, which started
the boom in the Bay’s seafood
business in the late 19th century
and still are its most valuable
resource, have declined from a
high of 15 million bushels a year to
fewer than 2.5 million.
Up the Bay at Rock Hall, one of
the first places hit by the effects of
pollution, waterman Larry Simns
used to make a living from white
shad in the 19605. “I’ve seen it go
from a lucrative business to
Deteriorating wati
killing more and.
underwater grasses
to much of bay life.
Baltn
Baltimoi
Harbin
' V -,S wa
jmpton
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(€) 1984 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY
SCALE or MILES
Underwater Grasses
□ EXTENT OF GRASSES IN 1965
(INCLUDES 1980 AREASi
£ REMAINING GRASSES IN 1980
DATA FROM THE ENVIRONMENTAL
PROTECTION AGENCY 1983
Shad and Striped Bass
offshore islands. For 300 years, inhabitants have lived off the
bounty of the Bay. Erosion and pollution now threaten that
existence.
nothing. We can’t even catch them,
they’re so scarce. The same
thing’s happening to the striped I
bass.” Known locally as rockfish,
striped bass is the most prized and
valued of the Bay’s finfish. It
hasn’t had a good spawning year
since 1970. This year Maryland
imposed harvesting restrictions on
rockfish.
Now when Simns takes out his 46-
foot workboat, Dawn, he goes
clamming. “Clams are about the
only thing we have left around
here. Me, I’d rather be fishing,” he
complains.
Watermen and marine scientists
agree that murky water, vanishing
grasses, and declining fish stocks
are true signals of what’s gone
wrong.
“I’ve been to a lot of meetings,
the town meetings when Walter
Cronkite came down to the Eastern
Shore. They say the population
may double by the year 2020. I
don’t think the Bay can stand it,”
observed Dize. “It’s so easy to say
we can clean it up. Everybody’s
Chesapeake conscious today. But
how can you stop what’s coming?”
The Bay is riding the crest of the
biggest cleanup wave in its history.
The goal is to restore it to a
generation ago, the mid-19505. The
dealine set is the end of the cen
tury; the cost, billions.
“If we miss this chance, we’ll
never do it. The next 10 years are
the most critical in the last 10,000,”
said William C. Baker, president of
the Chesapeake Bay Foundation,
set up in the mid-1960s when
pollution problems first became a
major concern.
Special Resource
The U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency last year
completed a $27 million, seven
year study of the Bay that will
serve as the framework for action.
The data EPA amassed on the
Chesapeake forms one of the
largest informational banks on an
estuary in the world.
Calling the Bay “a special
national resource,” President
Reagan committed $lO million to it
next fiscal year. It was the first
time the Chesapeake cleanup had
been mentioned in a State of the
Union address.
In the most comprehensive bay
program in Maryland history,
Gov. Harry Hughes got the
legislature to approve an ad
ditional $36.3 million this year,
including creation of a con
troversial state commission that
would oversee all future
development along the Bay’s
immediate shoreline.
Acknowledging that Maryland
puts the greatest stress on the
Chesapeake, Hughes said the state
should take the lead in the cleanup.
Virginia, the only other state
with bay shoreline, this year for
the first time specifically ear
marked money for the Chesapeake
- $10.4 million primarily for control
of harmful agricultural runoff and
sewage discharge.
So complex is the cleanup
problem that Maryland is con
sidering turning over its share of
the $lO million in federal funds to
Pennsylvania, whose Susquehanna
River carries much of the far
mland runoff into the Bay.
The question is whether all this
effort will be enough to “catch up
for past pollution and at the same
time sustain the Bay against a
rising tide of new pressures,”
observed L. Eugene Cronin,
director of the Chesapeake
Research Consortium.
“This is one of the most difficult
areas of the country for an estuary
like the Bay to be located and
expect to survive,” Baker said.
People put incredible demands on
it - for homes on its shorefront,
marinas at water’s edge, and
pleasure boats on its waters. The
Bay is one of the largest
recreational marine spots on the
East Coast and one of the biggest
commercial port areas. About
3,000 ships a year sail up the
Chesapeake to the port of
Baltimore, and another 3,000 pass
through its southern entrance to
the port at Hampton Roads, Va.
Too Many Nutrients
Population in the Chesapeake
region increased nearly 50 percent
between 1950 and 1980 to 12.7
million. There was a 182 percent
rise in the amount of land con
verted to urban, suburban, and
residential uses, although this still
totals less than 15 percent of the
land in the region. More than 5,000
permits for discharging into bay
waters are now issued to industrial
and municipal facilities. Another
two million people are expected to
move in by the year 2000. Both
ports plan major expansions,
dredging deeper channels to bring
in bigger ships.
As a result of what’s going on on
shore, the Bay is not only taking in
toxic substances and sediments,
but too many nutrients as well.
Nitrogen flows in primarily from
farmland runoff; phosphorus,
from sewage treatment plants,
which flush about 1.5 billion
gallons of treated sewage a day
into the Bay.
The combination is too much of a
good thing. Excessive nitrogen and
phosphorus stimulate the growth
of large, undesirable blooms of
algae, wluch in turn decay and use
up the oxygen that other bay
creatures need.
EPA also detected more than 300
organic compounds in bay waters
Most were toxic. Baker, whose m-
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