Anglers seek clean bay, unlike the Chesapeake
Anglers seek clean bay, unlike the Chesapeake
Collapsing shellfish populations, shrinking sea grass beds and murky water are a story line that link New Jersey's Barnegat Bay to Chesapeake Bay, America's largest estuary.
Now the Chesapeake's accelerating crisis might show what lies in store for Barnegat Bay if cleanup efforts falter.
A steep decline in the storied Chesapeake blue crab fishery has Maryland and Virginia cutting fishermen's catches, in hopes of reducing the take of female crabs by 34 percent and help arrest the crash.
Lawsuits are flying, as fishermen and environmental groups charge the federal Environmental Protection Agency failed to follow up an interstate agreement to clean up nutrient pollution by 2010.
"We're suing the EPA. Now they want to stretch it out 10 more years," said Larry Simns, executive director of the Maryland Watermen's Association.
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, joined by the Maryland and Virginia watermen's groups and others in the region, filed notice in federal court in October of plans to sue the EPA for failing to meet goals set in a 2000 compact — a regional agreement to end pollution that at the time was widely hailed as a model.
"There have now been three agreements and three failures, and while government may be well-intentioned, more delay is unacceptable," said former Maryland state Sen. Bernie Fowler, a longtime activist on bay affairs and now a party to the coming lawsuit.
Federal and state authorities have worked since the 1970s to reduce pollution in the Chesapeake's huge watershed, engaging everyone from industries in Virginia's Tidewater region to Amish farmers far inland along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. But mounting suburban development has been the bay's undoing, as more nitrogen compounds from fertilizer and other sources drizzle into tributary streams with every rainfall. Like fertilizer on a lawn, excess nitrogen in the bay fuels plant life, mainly microscopic phytoplankton that bloom and die, sucking dissolved oxygen out of bay waters as they decay.
Summer 2008 brought the fourth-worst occurrence of "dead zone" oxygen depletion on record, contends the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, citing scientists' reports.
That coincided with grim news from crab assessment experts, who estimate the crab population at 120 million animals, far less than the 200 million thought needed to rebuild the population.
"The pollution has done as much harm to the crab and the watermen alike," said Ken Smith of the Virginia Watermen's Association. "There's a huge misperception there about what overharvesting is. Even with the WM obeying regulations and even with reducing effort, overfishing occurs and it's because of water quality."
As a first step to cutting the catch of female crabs, the Virginia Marine Resources Commission voted to shut down that state's winter crab dredge fishery. The captains of 53 boats idled by the decision are being offered work at $300 a day dredging up lost crab traps and other sunken debris, using Virginia's $10 million share of federal emergency aid for the crab industry, said commission spokesman John Bull.
In New Jersey, the EPA and state Department of Environmental Protection are just coming to grips with Barnegat Bay's nitrogen overload, after monitoring stations this summer detected oxygen depletion in the bay's northern reaches near Brick and Mantoloking.
Low dissolved oxygen is a water quality factor that can trigger regulatory action by the DEP, and one that until this summer had not shown up, despite abundant biological evidence of the bay's decline, including diminished eelgrass beds and a sharp decline in clams.
The EPA-funded Barnegat Bay National Estuary Program and the DEP have hosted discussions on ways to lower nutrient loading in Barnegat Bay, and EPA regional administrator Alan J. Steinberg has urged the Ocean County Board of Freeholders to impose some limits on fertilizer use in the watershed.
That could happen in the form of a county sanitation ordinance that would be enforced by the county Health Department, county Planning Director David McKeon has said.
In October, the estuary program hosted a presentation from officials with Suffolk County on Long Island, which has a law prohibiting most fertilizer applications from November through April, when dissolved nutrients are most likely to build up in surface and ground water.
But environmental groups Save Barnegat Bay and the Sierra Club want Ocean County to go a step further, and allow the sale of only slow-release fertilizer in the watershed. That's a more effective way to limit nitrogen emissions from suburban lawns, contends Willie deCamp, the president of Save Barnegat Bay, who has been showing the groups' model ordinance to municipal and county elected officials.
Ultimately, those advocates and some scientists say, what will be needed are state regulations setting total maximum daily loads, or TMDLs, for nutrients in the bay's tributary streams. Those limits would become the standards for determining when a stream has a pollution problem, and tracing it upstream to sources in the watershed. That would be the legal forcing method to rebuild faulty stormwater drainage systems.
At a Nov. 20 meeting in Washington, the Chesapeake Executive Council said it would set short-term goals with a two-year review period in an effort to spur a cleanup.
Part of that reform, EPA officials said, will be setting a bay-wide TMDL by December 2010 that will establish pollution caps for rivers in the 64,000 square-mile Chesapeake watershed.
