Most watermen were born in the business and it is all they know. We understand the sacrifices our husbands make to help support our families. What we need to do is speak up to the industry leaders and ask them if our men are going to be allowed to work on oyster grounds that are local enough so they don’t have to spend most of the money they make on fuel expenses. Why not open oyster grounds in each river so they don’t have to get up at 3 am and not get home until dark each day?

Why is it illegal to leave the dock more than 1/2 hour before sunrise when you have an hour’s run to get to the oyster rock? You can’t work past 2 pm and you have a bushel limit? Ask why they can only work this area while other areas are silting over and dying. If we don’t speak up, the watermen will also be relegated to silting over and dying.

Our husbands are blamed for a lot of the problems in our waters. Many people don’t realize that since this is their livelihood and their heritage, they are trying to protect it. Get involved, send in those daily reports, contact those in charge, and voice your opinions.

-Tammy Croxton
Wife of a Virginia Waterman

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, SEPTEMBER 9, 2011
PRESS CONTACT, TINA BERGER, 703.842.0740

Atlantic coastal states from Maine through North Carolina have scheduled their hearings to gather public comment on Draft Addendum V to Amendment 1 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic Menhaden.  The dates, times, and locations of the scheduled meetings follow:

Maine Department of Marine Resources
October 3, 2011; 6 – 9 PM
The Yarmouth Log Cabin
196 Main Street
Yarmouth, Maine
Contact: Terry Stockwell at 207.624.6553

New Hampshire Fish and Game
October 4, 2011; 7 PM
Urban Forestry Center
45 Elwyn Road
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
Contact: Doug Grout at 603.868.1095

Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries
September 28, 2011; 7 PM
CoCo Key Hotel & Water Resort-Boston
Newburyport Room
50 Ferncroft Road
Danvers, Massachusetts
Contact: David Pierce at 617.626.1532

Rhode Island Division of Fish and Wildlife
October 5, 2011; 6:00 PM
URI Narragansett Bay Campus, Corless Auditorium
South Ferry Road
Narragansett, Rhode Island
Contact: Jason McNamee at 401.423.1943

Connecticut Dept. of Energy and Environmental Protection
September 28, 2011; 4 – 6 PM
Bridgeport Regional Aquaculture Science &
Technology Center
60 St Stephens Road
Bridgeport, Connecticut
Contact: David Simpson at 860.434.6043

October 5, 2011; 4 – 6 PM
The Sound School
60 South Water St
New Haven, Connecticut
Contact: David Simpson at 860.434.6043

October 12, 2011; 7 PM
CT DEEP Marine Headquarters
333 Ferry Road
Old Lyme, Connecticut
Contact: David Simpson at 860.434.6043

New Jersey Division of Fish & Wildlife
September 29, 2011; 7:00 PM
Township of Toms River
33 Washington Street
L.M. Hirshblond Room
Toms River, New Jersey
Contact: Peter Himchak 609.748.2020

Delaware Dept. of Natural Resources & Environmental Control
September 26, 2011; 7:00 PM
Lewes Field Facility
901 Pilottown Road
Lewes, Delaware
Contact: Jeff Tinsman at 302.739.4782

Maryland Dept. of Natural Resources
October 11, 2011; 6 – 9 PM
Tawes State Office Building, C1 Conference Room
580 Taylor Avenue
Annapolis, Maryland
Contact: Lynn Fegley at 410.260.8285

Virginia Marine Resources Commission
October 17, 2011; 6 PM
North Umberland High School Auditorium
201 Academic Lane
Heathsville, Virginia
Contact: Jack Travelstead at 757.247.2248

Potomac River Fisheries Commission
October 18, 2011; 6:30 PM
John T Parran Hearing room
PRFC Commission Building
222 Taylor St.
Colonial Beach, Virginia
Contact: AC Carpenter at 804.224.7148

North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries
October 13, 2011; 6 PM
Dare County Administration Building, Room 168
954 Marshall C. Collins Drive
Manteo, North Carolina
Contact: Michelle Duval at 252.808.8011

The Draft Addendum proposes establishing a new interim fishing mortality threshold and target (based on maximum spawning potential or MSP) with the goal of increasing abundance, spawning stock biomass, and menhaden availability as a forage species.

The Draft Addendum will also initiate the scoping process (comparable to that of a Public Information Document) on the suite of management tools that could be used to implement the new fishing mortality threshold and target levels. As in a PID, it will contain preliminary discussions of biological, environmental, social, and economic information, fishery issues, and potential management options for action through an addendum.

The MSP approach, as recommended by the 2009 peer review panel, identifies the fishing mortality rate necessary to maintain a given level of stock fecundity (number of mature ova) relative to the potential maximum stock fecundity under unfished conditions.  The Draft Addendum presents two options for the new interim fishing mortality threshold (status quo based on an MSP of 8% and an MSP of 15%) and four options for the interim fishing mortality target (status quo and F based on MSPs of 20, 30 and 40%). For illustration purposes, a 15% MSP would equate to a fishing mortality rate threshold required to maintain approximately 15% of virgin stock fecundity. The current MSP level is 8%.

Based on the revised 2009 Atlantic menhaden stock assessment, menhaden was not overfished but had experienced overfishing in 2008.  Given the current overfishing definition, which sets the fishing mortality rate (F) target at 0.96 and the F threshold at 2.2, this is the first time overfishing has occurred since 1998. Over the time series, overfishing had occurred in 32 of the last 54 years. F in 2008 (the latest year in the assessment) is estimated at 2.28.

The Board will meet in November at the Commission’s Annual Meeting to review public comment and consider final action on the Addendum. Having gathered scoping information on management tools to implement Addendum V, the Board may also consider moving forward on a subsequent addendum to establish associated management measures.  The Board’s intent is to finalize these management measures for implementation in 2013.

Fishermen and other interested groups are encouraged to provide input on the Draft Addendum by either attending public hearings or providing written comments. Click here for copies of Draft Addendum V are available at or by contacting the Commission at 703.842.0740.

The public comment deadline has been extended to 5:00 PM (EST) on November 2, 2011 and should be forwarded to Toni Kerns, Senior Fishery Management Plan Coordinator for Management, 1050 N. Highland St., Suite 200 A-N, Arlington, VA 22201; 703.842.0741 (FAX) or at tkerns@asmfc.org (Subject line: Menhaden Draft Addendum V).

Virginia Commonwealth University issued the following news release:

There are edible oysters and pearl-producing oysters, and now, there are environmentally conscious oysters that may play a key role in reducing some of the water quality problems plaguing the Chesapeake Bay.

Excessive nutrient concentration has stimulated an overgrowth of microscopic plants in the bay, and scientists point to nitrogen and phosphorous as the major culprits. This nutrient pollution comes from sources ranging from wastewater treatment plants and septic tanks to fertilizer and manure runoff from farms, and from atmospheric deposition from burning fossil fuels.

Now a team of researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University and Virginia Tech has shown how to directly quantify the nutrient removal capacity of aquacultured oysters as a means to offset those sources.

As they grow, oysters remove nitrogen-containing compounds from the water. These nutrients are then permanently removed from the water-system when the oysters are harvested and sold to the seafood market.

In a study, published online in the January-February issue of the Journal of Environmental Quality, Colleen Higgins, a Ph.D. life sciences candidate, her mentor and corresponding author for the study, Bonnie Brown, Ph.D., professor and associate chair for the VCU Department of Biology, and economist Kurt Stephenson, Ph.D., with the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at Virginia Tech, reported that they could estimate this nutrient removal mechanism with a high degree of confidence by measuring the shell length of aquacultured oysters.

Higgins said that total length is a common market measurement already used by growers, so it would not require a costly or time-consuming effort on the part of growers to verify the amount of nutrient removal. They would just need to verify the quantity of oysters harvested of different size classes, for example cocktail, regular and jumbo.

“Oyster aquaculture can offset inputs and have an impact at the local tributary scale where inputs are measured and targets are set, but this would require a large scale-up of production,” said Higgins.

“Although in the bigger picture of the bay, nutrient loads are so massive that reducing them requires changing the habits of all of the people that live in the watershed, from how we grow our food to how much water we use,” explained Higgins.

“Oyster biomass removal can make a dent, but can only do so much. Now that it has been quantified, bay managers can decide the utility of oyster cultivation as an in situ removal mechanism and if it should be added to the tool box of measures aimed at curbing nutrient pollution in the bay,” she said.

Oyster aquaculture production is more common in places like the U.S. Pacific coast, Australia, Prince Edward Island in Canada, and in Australia and Europe, where cultivation of oysters and mussels is a much larger portion of the local economy, according to Higgins.

“In the bay, there has been less acceptance of shellfish aquaculture, but that might be changing,” she said.

This work was supported in part by funds from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Targeted Watershed Grant Program and administered by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

Dec. 29, 2010, Captain Sonney Forrest, President of the Solomons Charter Captains Association (SCCA) provided Len Zuza, President of the Southern Maryland Oyster Cultivation Society (SMOSC) a check for $5,000 to restore an oyster reef at Pancake Point in Mill Creek, Solomons Harbor. This grant will enable SMOCS to plant some 500,000 oyster spat on the SCCA Reef next summer. In support of this project, Prince Frederick Ford provided SMOCS $3,000 to pay for the planting of shell from the SMOCS stockpile to prepare this SCCA Reef site. This site will create the optimum habitat for young oysters and habitat for juvenile fish species. The SCCA goal in providing this donation was to improve water quality, natural habitat and increase local fish populations for their customers. These grants will significantly accelerate the SMOCS program to establish a live oyster population of 3.5 million oysters in Solomons Harbor. The oyster spat will significantly improve the local marine habitat by attracting many marine organisms, including small fish and crabs. It will also filter the water in the harbor once a week, thereby reducing algae density and improving chances for the return of underwater plants because of improved water clarity. The Solomons Charter Captains Association and Prince Frederick Ford donations will build on the strong program that SMOCS has established. Over the past 3 years, SMOCS has planted some 400,000 oysters in the harbor and the SCCA Reef will nearly triple the number of oysters that SMOCS will plant in these creeks in 2011 to a total of 750,000 additional oysters.

The plan is “the largest water pollution strategy plan in the nation,” said Shawn M. Garvin, the agency’s regional administrator for the mid-Atlantic region. It is intended to fundamentally change the tenor of the long-failed Chesapeake cleanup. The EPA once preached cooperation with state efforts it was supposed to oversee. Now, it is playing cop, promising legal punishments if the states don’t live up to their pledges to cut pollution.

Some state and local officials warned the plan could be costly and hard to execute, particularly at a time when state budgets are under immense pressure.

The District and six states – Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware and New York – submitted proposals this fall that would cut pollution runoff into the bay over the next 15 years. The final plan issued by the EPA, using its authority under the Clean Water Act, strengthens the antipollution measures of some of the states.

The EPA is prepared to enforce the state plans with what Garvin called “rigorous accountability methods, ranging from challenging operating permits for wastewater treatment plants or farms to prosecuting polluters for violating the Clean Water Act.”

The agency identified three areas that need particular attention over the next decade: wastewater treatment in New York, West Virginia’s agricultural sector and Pennsylvania’s storm-water treatment. In those areas, Garvin said, the EPA may have to “place additional controls on permitted sources of pollution.”
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West Virginia estimates it will have to spend $136 million on upgrades to its sewage treatment plants, said Scott Mandirola, who directs the the Division of Water and Waste Management at West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection.

“We don’t feel that we’re contributing a tremendous amount [of pollution] to the bay,” Mandirola said. And although the federal government has pledged financial assistance, he said, “the honest truth is West Virginia [and] the headwater states are not seeing a lot of that money.”

Glenn Rider, director of the Bureau of Watershed Management at the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, noted his state has already imposed regulations targeting its storm-water runoff, which accounts for 6 percent of the bay’s annual pollution load. A 2006 study indicated it could cost the state $2 billion to make some of the improvements EPA is seeking. He said computer models indicate Pennsylvania is meeting its targets for nitrogen and sediment pollution but not for phosphorus, all of which affect water quality in the Chesapeake.

Rider said he was waiting for details from the EPA. But “it would be difficult” to meet the agency’s pollution targets over the next decade and a half, he said.

The federal government has not calculated what it will cost to implement its overall plan, Garvin said, but is prepared to devote hundreds of millions of dollars to help farmers and affected groups cope with more stringent pollution controls. The Agriculture Department alone plans to spend $700 million over the next five years on bay restoration efforts.

The pollution limits, known as the total maximum daily load, identify how much nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment can flow into the Chesapeake each day from farms, sewage treatment plants, urban and suburban streets, parking lots and lawns. It calls for a 25 percent reduction in nitrogen, 24 percent reduction in phosphorus and 20 percent reduction in sediment by 2025. That translates into 185.9 million pounds of nitrogen, 12.5 million pounds of phosphorus and 6.45 billion pounds of sediment per year. Sixty percent of the pollution cuts are to be made by 2017, Garvin said.

This is a very historic moment in the history of the Bay and the future of the Chesapeake Bay oyster.

The goal of a clean Chesapeake was first promised by the year 2000, then by 2010. Now the tactics have changed, but also the deadline, pushed back to 2025.

Some states, especially those closest to the bay, expressed confidence they could deliver what they had promised to do in their federal submissions, known as Watershed Implementation Plans.

Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) issued a statement Wednesday saying his state, which has committed to finalizing a new storm-water rule and a bay-wide limit on applying fertilizer to urban lands, could “achieve significant cost-effective reductions in pollution to the bay.”

“We feel it is a stringent but workable plan that demonstrates Virginia’s commitment to cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay while providing for continued economic growth in the commonwealth,” McDonnell said. “After much discussion with the EPA, the approved plan balances the important environmental protection concerns with the need to protect jobs in agriculture and farming. While we maintain our concern about aspects of the EPA watershed model and enforcement authority, as well as the significant additional public and private-sector costs associated with plan implementation, we believe Virginia’s plan will make a significant contribution to improving water quality in the bay.”

And Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), who has pledged to explore steps such as requiring cover crops on farmland vulnerable to runoff and a potential statewide fee system to improve storm-water utilities, said it made economic sense to invest in the restoration effort.

“A healthy Bay will benefit Maryland’s tourism, recreation, agriculture, and fisheries industries; it will improve the value of our homes, farms, and businesses; and it will create green jobs – all while protecting our drinking water and improving waterways across the state,” O’Malley said in a statement.

Tom Farasy, past president of the Maryland State Builders Association, predicted battles over environmental goals will shift to individual states. “Maryland is going to have to find the funding to meet its obligations, and this is going to be a challenge in this current economy,” he said.

Garvin emphasized that even if the entire mid-Atlantic region meets the pollution targets, “we’re not saying the bay will be fully restored by 2025.” The final recovery date, he said, will be determined by “Mother Nature” rather than federal and state authorities.

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The Altoona Water Authority is considering a cumulative 58 percent increase in sewer rates over the next four years, mainly to pay for $70 million in mandated sewer plant upgrades to protect Chesapeake Bay.

The authority is also considering a 4.5 percent increase in water rates for next year.

Based on a budget proposed Thursday, a user of 10,000 gallons a month – average for the U.S. – would pay $93 for sewer service in 2014.

That’s $34 more than now.

A minimum user would pay $18.79 for sewer, $6.92 more than today. A large user – 2.2 million gallons a month – would pay $19,000, $7,000 more than now.

It could be worse, according to consulting engineer Mark Glenn, who pointed out that Williamsport is paying $180 million to comply with bay cleanup requirements.

“It’s the classic case of an unfunded mandate,” Glenn said.

The authority began renovations on Westerly Sewer Treatment Plant in late 2009 and recently opened bids for its Easterly plant.

Failure to comply would lead to daily fines and eventually an order from a federal judge, Glenn said.

“If there was a way to avoid it, other municipalities would be doing it,” authority member Patrick Dumm said.

Having committed to the projects, the authority has no choice but to raise rates based on loan covenants to ensure payback, Controller Gina DeRubeis said.

The authority is paying about $30 million for Westerly, but payback on the necessary loans didn’t cause rates to go up, because they merely offset recently retired debt obligations.

It’s going to be different for the up-to-$40-million Easterly plant upgrade.

Last week, the authority floated about $15 million in bonds at an effective interest rate of 4.43 percent to pay some of the bill. The authority issued the bonds under the subsidized Build America Bonds program, which is expiring at the end of the year.

The authority is hoping to get a low-interest loan from Pennvest in the spring to pay for the rest. If unsuccessful, it will need to borrow the balance through bonds, further driving the cost up.

The authority is proposing to phase in the sewer increases with annual hikes of 10 percent, 13 percent, 19 percent and 7 percent.

The distribution of the increases could change.

Some authority members favor starting with 10 percent, then equalizing the hikes over the remaining three years.

Alternatively, the authority could do it all at once, imposing a 50 percent hike now, Dumm suggested.

“I’m staying down here if we do that,” said Chairman Maury Lawruk, who was participating by speakerphone from Florida.

The water hike would bring a 10,000-gallon user from $87 to $91.

Other factors contributing to the need to raise rates include the $6.5 million cost of the authority’s new administration building, a 14 percent increase in health insurance to $1.4 million and a pension contribution that will rise for next year to $300,000.

To help cut costs, the authority has minimized overtime in all areas, asked the union to consider foregoing the 65-cents-an-hour raise in its contract and proposed an administrative wage freeze.

The authority will adopt the budgets and rate increases at its regular meeting later this month.

The storms blew through Hampton Roads on a Thursday in August, and after the storms came runoff, lots of it, shooting off roofs and pavement into storm drains, and a week after the runoff came the red tide.

At Ocean View in Norfolk, the waves were mahogany with pale-red caps, stained by a sudden growth spurt of algae.

“How long have you seen it there?” Chris Moore, a science advocate for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, asked the lifeguard on duty. “It came up, like, yesterday,” the lifeguard said.

On average days, there is a little algae in the water. After a storm, there may be 100 times more, because so much nitrogen and phosphorus – the basics of fertilizer – is flushed into the Chesapeake Bay.

Fertilizer makes grass thick and plentiful; it does the same for algae. But while a lush green lawn is taken as a sign of health, a thick algae bloom indicates sickness in the Bay and death by suffocation for much of what lives there.

Where the red waves broke on Ocean View beach, a family played, between two enormous drain pipes.

“They’re stormwater pipes,” Moore said. “Our stormwater runs untreated right into the Bay.”

Algae blooms are becoming more common as nitrogen pours into the Bay, coming not only from construction sites and farm fields, but from lawns and car exhausts and pet feces and more – in other words, from you.

Parts of six states – Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia and, amazingly enough, New York – along with the entire District of Columbia drain into the Chesapeake Bay, a watershed of about 64,000 square miles. Parts of Virginia Beach, Chesapeake and Suffolk do not, in fact, drain into the Bay; they drain south, into Currituck and Albemarle sounds.

When it rains – even when it doesn’t rain – what pours into the Bay from most of Hampton Roads is our garbage, carried by the generically called “stormwater,” which includes liquid from clouds or sprinklers or buckets, as well as drainage from farm fields, construction sites and parking lots.

While Bay cleanup efforts over the years have reduced pollution coming from sewage treatment plants and industry, runoff from urban and suburban areas has gotten worse. It is, in fact, the only source of pollution to the Bay that still is increasing, and it’s all perfectly legal.

“It’s invisible,” said Mike Gerel, staff scientist for the foundation’s Virginia office, who advocates for stronger regulation of stormwater. “If stormwater was dark and gross and measured in barrels, you wouldn’t have to do this. Usually it just looks like fast water with bubbles in it.”

The problem with stormwater is twofold: it moves fast, so it erodes the ground as it goes, picking up dirt and sediment that cloud Bay water, and it carries nitrogen and phosphorus that fuel algae blooms. Once the blooms die, the decomposition process pulls oxygen out of the water.

“When the oxygen runs out, the crabs and fish that people care about die,” said Deborah Bronk, a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences and a nitrogen researcher.

For many years, the watershed states and the federal government have limited the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus – together called “nutrients,” because they feed plants – that goes into the Bay from sewage treatment and other facilities.

Even so, Bronk said, one of the frustrating questions is why the Bay isn’t getting better faster.

“I mean, it still pretty much sucks out there,” she said, “and there have been billions of dollars spent to clean up the Bay.”

For starters, the ingredients of fertilizer have changed. Nitrogen comes in two forms. Inorganic includes ammonium, nitrate and nitrite. Everything else is organic nitrogen, which includes urea, amino acids and proteins.

The Fertilizer Institute, a trade association for the industry, says use of urea fertilizers has climbed since the 1970s. “One of the things we’ve learned about urea is that a lot of the harmful algal species love it,” Bronk said. “I mean, really love it.”

Wastewater treatment plants are quite good, she said, at removing inorganic nitrogen from the water they discharge into the Bay, but not so good at removing the organic.

“Can organisms use it?” Bronk asked. “The answer is a big ‘Yes.’ ”

Nutrients also can enter groundwater, which slowly leaches into the Bay. The U.S. Geological Survey says that even if no more nitrogen were applied to the land starting today, it would take until 2040 to get it out of the groundwater.

In addition, an enormous amount of nitrogen and phosphorus is attached to dirt particles in the bottom of the Bay, Bronk said.

“Even if we were to stop it all from coming in, you probably still would have a problem for many years to come because there’s so much of this stuff tied up in the sediments,” she said. “That kind of stuff accumulates on land, too, and a big storm gives a big slug of it into the Bay. It’s not just a day’s worth of rain. It’s a day’s worth of rain washing in a month of accumulated gunk.”

The gunk comes from everywhere.

About one-third of all nitrogen going into the Bay comes from the air: from vehicles, gas-powered lawn tools, dry cleaners, factories, power plants, gas stations and more, according to the state/federal Chesapeake Bay Program. They release nitrogen into the air and it falls directly into the Bay or it settles on rooftops and streets and land, where stormwater flushes it into streams and drains that carry it to the Bay.

“That makes the problem even bigger,” Bronk said. “An airshed for the Chesapeake Bay? God, it’s like half the U.S.”

It is, in fact, 570,000 square miles, about nine times the size of the watershed, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

And then there are the other sources, which can seem so insignificant in a single yard. Grass clippings and pet feces that wash down storm drains are decomposed by bacteria. But that process requires oxygen, pulled from the water.

About 7 million pounds of pet feces are left on the streets of Washington, D.C., alone each year, and they wash into the Potomac River, and that empties into the Bay, according to the book “Turning the Tide.”

So how to stop it? Tougher regulations are coming; new federal limits on stormwater runoff will go into effect in 2012. Virginia’s proposal to the EPA focuses on sewage treatment plants, golf courses and municipal lands, farm stream buffers and nutrient trading.

Homeowners can do their part, too. First of all, cut back on fertilizer use and pick up after your pet. Then remember that fertilizer feeds plants. More plants on the shore and in shallow water mean more nitrogen is removed from stormwater before it can feed the algae.

For that reason, John Stewart and Mike O’Hearn of the Lafayette Wetlands Partnership took an afternoon in the fall to visit Shenandoah Avenue in Norfolk, where Roy Allan Dudley lives.

They stood in Dudley’s back yard, looking out on Wayne Creek, which leads into the Lafayette River, and at a muddy cove that has been, over the years, filling with sediment. Dudley wondered whether planting marsh grasses in the cove would filter the runoff coming from his yard.

With the help of Norfolk’s Bureau of Environmental Services, the partnership has created nutrient-absorbing wetlands in various spots throughout the city, working with the Highland Park Civic League, Larchmont Elementary School and the Episcopal Diocese of Eastern Virginia. Dudley’s yard was its first venture in working with a single homeowner.

At 46th Street and Colley Avenue, the partnership replaced soil along an eroded stream bank and planted it with 1,500 square feet of marsh grass and shrubs that became a thick, green wetland full of flowers and birds and animals. The partnership wants to restore wetlands like that all along the Lafayette River, where much of the shoreline has been replaced by bulkheads or otherwise developed.

Even people who don’t live near water add nutrients to the Bay, said Christy Everett, director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Hampton Roads office, because of stormwater runoff. Their choice, she said, is whether the runoff goes through a green filter or a gray funnel: through grass and wetlands and forests or through storm drains.

Dudley led the partnership men down the street to show them a wetland behind another house. The plants were beautiful, Stewart said, but he pointed to a gully cutting through the marsh and to a ledge where erosion was eating away the soil.

“It’s like the Grand Canyon,” he said. “You can see where the water runs off. I’m sure there’s nitrogen from lawn fertilizer. All those things could be stopped if we could stop the stormwater runoff up high.”

They saw, across the river, a family with children coming down to the shore.

“This is what I like to see,” Dudley said. “A little person who wants to go down and stick their hand or foot in the water.”

“That’s the whole impetus behind the Lafayette Wetlands Partnership,” Stewart said. “Let’s have a river where we can actually stick our foot in and feel good about it.”

“And,” O’Hearn added, “it’s not going to fall off.”

Some algae blooms are poisonous. Others can cause skin irritation and others nothing except aesthetic problems – they’re not very pretty.

Algae in normal numbers are natural residents of the water. Small animals eat them, and larger animals eat the small animals and, as Bronk says, pretty soon you’ve got a striped bass.

The Bay is worth an estimated $1 trillion in seafood harvests, hunting and ecotourism, recreation and property value, according to a 2004 report. Another study, looking at a watershed on the western shore of Maryland and published in the Ecological Economics journal, said a change in the amount of dissolved inorganic nitrogen of just 1 milligram in a liter of water – imagine your Big Gulp divided into 1 million equal parts, then separate out one part – can drop average housing prices in the watershed by $17,642.

“You have a much better chance of changing people’s behavior if you can clearly show them what they’re going to lose,” Bronk said. “What are you willing to do without? Water you can swim in? Fish that you can catch? Oysters on the half shell? Think not in terms of what the Bay gives you, but what you will lose if the Bay doesn’t get better. And you’ll lose a lot – blue crabs, pretty seaside restaurants. I mean, who wants to smell hydrogen sulfide as you’re having your imported lobster?”

The bacteria that decompose all the dead things in the water also create hydrogen sulfide, known to high school chemistry students as “rotten-egg gas.”

In a normal system, bacteria decompose dead plants and animals, creating nitrate, a form of nitrogen. Plants use nitrate to grow. Animals eat the plants and convert them into protein. When they die or defecate, bacteria convert the remains back into nitrate, and the cycle begins again.

But when too much nitrogen comes into the system, it causes too much algae to grow, and the algae block sunlight that underwater grasses need to make food, grasses that are nurseries for blue crabs and sea turtles and many kinds of fish, and the grass dies. That’s one problem. A second problem is that algae don’t live long. When they die, they decompose, a process that pulls oxygen from the water.

When too much algae leads to too much decomposition, which leads to too much oxygen removed from the water, animals suffocate. The animals that can’t leave, such as oysters and mud worms and clams, die. Animals that can leave will try to do so, sometimes scrambling out of the dead zone onto piers or crab pots or shorelines in a frantic effort to breathe.

When blue crabs rush out of the water like this, it’s called a crab jubilee. A jubilee occurred near the Hague in Norfolk about two years ago, on the pilings next to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dock.

It’s a sad affair when aquatic animals find the water so inhospitable that they leave it en masse. It happens more and more because humans are doing just the opposite.

Close to 17 million people live in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and about 165,000 join them each year. By 2030, the population is expected to be nearly 20 million.

Between 1970 and 2000, the average number of people in a household in the Bay watershed shrank, but lot sizes increased by 60 percent, and the average house grew from 1,500 to 2,265 square feet.

Each house has a roof, a driveway and streets to make it accessible, plus lawns that often are treated with fertilizer. The people who live there travel to stores, which also have roofs, plus parking lots and sidewalks. Commuters drive to work on highways, each car spewing exhaust into the air and dripping bits of oil.

All those roofs and paved areas are called impervious surface, meaning that water can’t penetrate it. Rain, runoff from lawn sprinklers, water from car washing – it all becomes stormwater, which the cities of Hampton Roads collect with a vast system of pipes and ditches, and then dispose of as quickly as possible by dumping it straight into the Bay.

A 1-acre parking lot produces 16 times more runoff than a meadow of similar size, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. As little as 5 percent impervious surface can harm the animals and plants living in or along natural streams because the runoff moves faster and carries more sediment. Hampton Roads is about 60 percent impervious surface.

One local family, again on Norfolk’s Shenandoah Avenue, decided to do something about it.

Ruth McElroy Amundsen and her family live in a house with a paved driveway and a small back yard that abuts Wayne Creek. It also has a green roof, solar panels, native drought-resistant plants and a rain garden. There’s a little grass, so her kids can play outside, but when they leave for college, the lawn will go, too, to be replaced by shrubs and trees and ground cover and a food garden.

“The problem with this area is that you have so much impervious surface,” she said. “We’re basically capturing all our impervious surface runoff.”

Part of the roof is covered with low-growing flowering plants called sedum. They absorb runoff, filter out the nitrogen, attract birds and butterflies, and insulate the house, reducing heating and cooling costs. Another part of the roof drains into a 3,000-gallon cistern, which is used to irrigate the sedum and yard plants, and to flush a toilet.

“The great thing about this is it’s filtering all the water that falls on it,” Amundsen said, looking over the green roof from her home office. Depending on the intensity of a rainstorm, the roof decreases runoff by 30 to 80 percent, she said.

Her neighbor has a green roof. An office building in downtown Norfolk has one. A few schools have them. Norfolk Botanical Garden’s education building has one. And Amundsen helped persuade her employer, NASA, to put one on its new construction at Langley Research Center.

The family was inspired in part by algae blooms in the Lafayette River.

“I take my kids out to water ski, and it’s just a mess,” Amundsen said. “We have to look where we drop people because of red algae blooms. I don’t want my kids in it.”

On a blustery day in August, a week after ferocious rainstorms, when Chris Moore of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation drove around Hampton Roads, he found algae blooms in the Nansemond River, by the West Norfolk Bridge, across the broad expanse of the James River at the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-T unnel, at Ocean View beach, and on Mill Creek by Fort Monroe.

“We’re seeing the nitrogen pollution,” Moore said, gazing across the red water that lapped by the fort.

“Do you think that people really understand?” asked another foundation staffer. “Or do they just say, ‘Oh, that’s a red tide.’ ”

“I don’t know,” Moore replied. “I hope they understand it’s a bad thing.”

Date published: 12/5/2010                           From Free Lance Star           Fredericksburg, VA

CONVENIENTLY for those who seek a clearer understanding of the opposing forces behind a Chesapeake Bay cleanup, the Virginia Farm Bureau happened to convene on the same day the states in the Bay watershed were to submit their restoration plans to the EPA.

These state plans are crucial, because while Washington has established the pollution alleviation goals to be met by 2025, it has left to the states decisions on how to achieve compliance.

Without a doubt, cleanup is an expensive proposition at a time when the economy is ailing and government spending of every sort is under harsh review. The mission has been there in front of us, however, through good times and bad for the past 25 years, and the best anyone can say is that the Bay’s health hasn’t gotten worse.

The take on Virginia’s submitted plan so far is that it’s a vast improvement over a previous draft, but that it still relies too heavily on voluntary commitments from farmers. Many Virginia farmers are already cooperating and doing their bit to help the Bay. Too bad their state organization chooses not to encourage or endorse their efforts.

No matter how hard they lobby, how loudly they complain, how reflexively they shift the blame, agriculture leaders cannot change the facts. The EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program calculates that agricultural fertilizers, livestock waste, and topsoil account for an estimated 39 percent of the nitrogen, 45 percent of the phosphorus, and 60 percent of the sediment pollution now harming the Bay. That impact is unacceptable.

As the Farm Bureau sees it, implementing established “best management practices” to prevent runoff pollution is too expensive. Those BMPs include building fences to prevent livestock from defecating in creeks, creating buffers along waterways to capture chemical and manure runoff, and covering, carefully spreading, or removing chicken droppings to prevent them from running off into the public waterways every time it rains.

Rather than accept the challenge and expense, for which the feds will supply significant training and funding, the Farm Bureau condones inaction, no matter that this would mean job losses and economic decay for the seafood, tourism, and recreation industries, and direct damage to the Bay ecosystem.

At the bureau convention at The Homestead in Hot Springs, state Agriculture Secretary Todd Haymore took an us-against-them position vis-à-vis the EPA. “We’re dealing with the hand that we’ve been dealt,” he said, failing to note that Virginia, under its Constitution and laws, is required to provide Virginians with clean water, and that in a recent poll 80 percent of state voters expressed confidence that the state can protect water quality and have a strong economy with good jobs.

State Natural Resources Secretary Doug Domenech presented the plan to the EPA as “the most ambitious Virginia ever has devised for the Chesapeake Bay and Virginia’s rivers.” He could not, however, resist references to the “fiscal stress,” “regulatory burdens,” and “unfunded mandates” Virginia will face in meeting EPA objectives. He should redirect his energy toward getting the job done as efficiently as possible.