In May of this year, Colonel Richard Jordan of the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, testified before a Senate subcommittee on the preliminary findings of his team’s three-year assessment of the Conowingo Dam and the lower Susquehanna River watershed damage to the Chesapeake Bay during catastrophic weather events. While Col. Jordan’s statement received scant attention in Maryland’s mainstream media at the time, it was a particularly unique moment of clarity in the ongoing debate about the role and accountability for the Conowingo.
In his Spy interview, Col. Jordan outlines the purpose and process of this multi-layered, scientifically driven, study on the water system, and offers some surprising conclusions about sediment and nutrient activity during major storms. He also highlights his team’s most remarkable finding that only 20% of the sediment that flows into the Bay when bad weather hits actually comes from the Conowingo section of the Lower Susquehanna. For the rest of the 80%, the report suggests one needs to look North.
This video is approximately ten minutes in length
Carol Voyles says
THANK YOU!
Barry E. Warren says
“It is My believe that if it wasn’t for the Dams along the Susquehanna River. There wouldn’t be a upper Bay at all. There wouldn’t be a Susquehanna flats ether. They would have been all filled in by know with sediment and everything else that floats down. Plus it produces Clean Energy from the natural source of water.” And maybe also say that people should make decisions based on the science and the science say that only 20% of the sediment during storm events comes from behind Conowingo and the other 80% comes from upstream sources and we should focus on a regional solution to clean up the bay. We should not be scapegoating conowingo.