I am glad to see our local Eastern Shore politicians taking a proactive stance on the Chesapeake Bay clean up effort. Commissioner Fithian is correct when saying “the people overseeing the (cleanup) have been doing all kinds of nitpicky things,” and spending a lot of taxpayer money in the process, while imposing a lot of questionable regulations that are causing financial hardship, wasted energy, etc.
And yet the Conowingo Dam looms, like a dark cloud over the Chesapeake Bay. Common sense would tell you to scrap all these wasteful “feel good” expensive programs like rebuilding every residential septic in the bay waters area, as well as water barrels, rain gardens, living shorelines, cover crops, bio this and bio that as the list goes on.
I have been a sailor my whole life and every sailor knows that to reach your destination you must plot a proper course, when compared to the bay clean up, no proper course has been plotted. A perpetual industry has been created that will never clean up the Bay, they have started at the wrong end of a problem. Focusing on the small sources of the problem while ignoring the pollution sources that will have a high positive impact on Bay water quality. The Susquehanna River, which carries more than half the fresh water that enters the Bay, has about 2 dozen dams. The main ones are in the lower part of the river, Safe Harbor Dam, Holtwood Dam and Conowingo Dam, all were built early in the 20 century and all are 100% silted in except the Conowingo Dam which is about 95% silted in.
According to the USGS web site, if this system were operating at optimum, has the potential to remove 70% of the sediment, 40% of the phosphorus and 2% of the nitrogen from the fresh water entering the Chesapeake Bay, in its present state it is barley functioning at all. Environmentalists are unwilling to “grab the bull by the horns” and deal with this problem that would truly have a high impact on bay water quality. We need to have people involved in the process who are truly interested in cleaning up the Bay and not just keeping the process going indefinitely.
For starters this could be accomplished by designing a water shed wide strategy that prevents as much stormwater from entering the Bay as possible, after all “the pollution is in the stormwater.”
Sam Owings
Chestertown Md
Mr. Owings is a Queen Anne’s County grain farmer and president, founder of High Impact Environmental.
Gary Nylander says
Sam Owings brings up a good point, but…. if he is talking about the center of the Bay, he is right. When a satellite view of the bay after a Conowingo release showed a muddy trail starting at the top of the Bay and flowing nearly to the Bay Bridge, it pretty well proved that the dam is a source of pollution.
The ‘but’ problem is what is making so many of the tributaries which flow into the Bay so polluted? Does he actually believe that the Conowingo pollution is flowing up the Chester, or Miles or Choptank? That (from another sailor) does not make any sense at all. And, why are the parts of the tributaries which are furthest from the Bay proper the most polluted. Could it possibly be from runoff from his and other farms? One could make that argument.