The Washington Post | By Darryl Fears | July 4 at 10:18 AM:
The $19 billion bid to clean the Chesapeake Bay and restore its health rests on a simple plan: cut the amount of nutrient waste — involving nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment — that causes most of the bay’s pollution.
For nearly seven years since the cleanup started, the federal government and six states in the bay’s watershed have reduced municipal sewer overflows that pour nitrogen and phosphorus into rivers that feed into the bay, and cut the fertilizers and other nutrients that run off from hundreds of farms. They also counted on the Conowingo Dam to block massive amounts of sediment in the Susquehanna River from smothering bay grasses that nurture marine life.
But that part of the plan has gone very wrong.
According to a report being prepared by scientists who work for the Environmental Protection Agency program that manages the bay cleanup, the reservoir behind the hydroelectric dam, which sits at the top of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, near the Pennsylvania border, has filled with sediment far sooner than the agency had predicted.
Using technology that didn’t exist when the original calculation was made, the scientists said they have determined that the original estimate of when the reservoir would fill was off by more than 15 years. Rather than reaching capacity in 2030 to 2035, it is already 95 percent full and could cease protecting the bay from sediment within the next three years. As Johns Hopkins University professor William P. Ball said, “It’s like the dam is not even there.”
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Image Credit – Conowingo Dam – Flickr – Creative Commons.
