After decades of neglect, it appears that a lawsuit settlement and new rules from the Obama Administration could actually start the process of reviving America’s greatest inland sea.
On May 11, a lawsuit spearheaded by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and various Virginia and Maryland watermen’s groups and legislators was settled with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. On the next day, the EPA announced a slew of new federal actions that may go far to help resolve pollution issues.
The irony is that the Clean Water Act, a Nixon era law, has been around since 1972 but the EPA has been laggard in enforcing it, especially in the case of the Bay, according to the Bay Foundation. True, point source polluters, such as a Baltimore area steel mill or a Portsmouth chemical plant, have been forced to cut emissions. But the biggest single polluter has so far gone untouched — the big housing subdivision and the storm water runoff it produces. Farms are a problem, especially huge, corporate poultry and hog operations that produce immense amounts of animal waste.
The lawsuit and the new EPA rules will do the following, according to Chuck Epes, a spokesman for the CBF:
- The EPA will take a “Total Maximum Daily Load” snapshot of what pollutants are actually going into the bay.
- New federal guidelines will put in place that will restrict storm water runoff from big housing developments. Some sort of trade off or offset might be used as it is for air polluters. According to Epes, if Charles City County approve a 5,000-home subdivision, it will need to cut a like amount of stormwater runoff from another source.
- New rules for animal waste from farms will be in place by 2014.
The odd thing about the lawsuit and the Obama initiatives is that it basically makes the EPA do the job it is tasked with doing. Despite 38 years of the Clean Water At, the Bay is not discernibly cleaner than before. In fact, new problems have shown up, namely oxygen-starved “dead zones” in the mouths of the York, Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers during the summer not to mention depleted crab, oyster and fish stocks.
To be sure, pollution isn’t the only problem that have reduced tremendously the Bay’s once-rich stocks of oysters. Disease has. Yet programs to introduce new, disease-resistant oyster types haven’t taken off.
Nor have various inter-governmental efforts to do something about the Bay. There have been committees galore among Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia and Pennsylvania to do something to cut Bay pollution, with little result.
The do-nothing approach reached its high (or low) point with President George W. Bush’s administration. Not only did the EPA get very lazy about the Bay, the Bushies ignored the lawsuit filed by the CBF in 2008. Obama, however, has taken it seriously.
The one unknown factor in the clean-up is how much it will cost. Developers and real estate agents might complain about the extra expensive of dealing with the results of their projects, but many of the mega-subdivisions probably need to be rethought anyway since they create more of a car-centric, sedentary life style with cul-de-sacs that discourage efficient traffic flows and hurt emergency workers trying to get to a person or a house fire.
In any event, it is about time for something to be done with the Bay. The Clean Water Act has done a great deal to restore rivers and streams — something a lot of today’s movers and shakers in their 40s are too young to remember.
Maybe it is the Bay’s turn after all.
Peter Galuszka
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