U.S. Water News Online
BALTIMORE -- States in the Chesapeake Bay watershed arrived eight years early at their goal of building 2,010 miles of pollution-filtering vegetation along waterways that feed the bay, an environmental official said.
Chesapeake Bay Foundation president Will Baker said meeting the objective set in 1996 was an ``extraordinary accomplishment.''
The vegetative buffers, also called riparian forests, help prevent polluting nutrients and eroded sediment from entering the bay. The bay's watershed covers 9 million acres in Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and the District of Columbia.
In its pristine state, Baker said, plant life in the watershed filtered naturally occurring nutrients and loosened sediment as they worked through tributaries. Due to human development, the watershed now behaves more like a funnel.
The problem is exacerbated because humans introduce many nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, into the environment. Sources include wastewater and stormwater runoff, factories and fertilizers.
Scientists blame the overabundance of nutrients for algae blooms that use up the water's oxygen, block sunlight and make the bay inhospitable to aquatic life.
Bill Matuszeski, former director of the Environmental Protection Agency's Chesapeake Bay Program, said the states did not set their goal high enough in 1996.
Al Todd, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service Watershed Program Leader, said when the goal was set, only about 10 miles of buffers were being reconstructed a year. He said back then, there were questions about whether rebuilding buffers was the proper approach.
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