Originally Posted by
skinner
Anglers seek clean bay, unlike the Chesapeake
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.
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.
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.
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