Have you ever seen the Chesapeake Bay? If not, you need to. It is the largest of the several major salt water estuaries on the east coast of the United States. Others include Narraganset Bay in Rhode Island, and the Pamlico Sound in North Carolina. If you take out a map of the United Sates and look at the east coast, these estuaries look like large lakes attached to the Atlantic Ocean. This is of course what makes an estuary an estuary. There is a continual water exchange between the ocean and the bay or sound. The lower reaches of the bay or sound are tidal as is the ocean. And the upper reaches of these bodies of water may show some tidal rise and fall, but the rise and fall of water on the shoreline is just as often due to wind. However, looking at these waters on such a large-scale map is not the best to way to view them. You need to get up close.
When you look at the Pamlico sound closely you can see that it is fed by rivers that flow from the inland areas of North Carolina and Virginia. The Trent River, the Neuse River, the Tar River, the Pamlico River originate far up-state and pass through towns and farms as the deliver water to the Sound. This is an important aspect of all estuaries. Even though they are salty and brackish from their exchange of water with the Atlantic Ocean, and even though they support fishes that travel back and forth from the ocean in their life-cycle, their sources of water are the streams, and creeks, and rivers that flow down from areas deep inland. The streams that flow into each of these rivers, together with the land they drain, are the river’s watershed. The Chesapeake Bay is fed by several major rivers. They include the Potomac flowing through Virginia and Maryland, the Susquehanna whose watershed is in Pennsylvania and New York and Maryland, the Patuxent in Maryland, the Choptank through Delaware and Maryland, and the Rappahannock River and the James River in Virginia. Again, these rivers flow through towns and farms and in the case of the Chesapeake though major urban and industrial areas.
These watersheds not only carry water to their estuary from the land, but they also carry pollutants. The land that is drained by the streams and rivers of the watershed is the source of the pollution. The pollution, whether debris from erosion or chemical pollutants, degrade the productivity of the estuary. The estuaries have a major role in the success of the fishing industries that depend on their waters for the fish and crabs they harvest. The estuaries provide a habitat for the life-cycle of some of our favorite sea-foods. But don’t look at the center of the bay or sound for this, look at the edges. Get up close to the seagrass beds and the marshes that line the banks of the estuaries – or use to line the banks of the estuaries. In these shallow waters that you can wade into, tiny crabs and fish hide and grow until they are ready to move out into deeper waters of the estuary.
It’s the clarity of the water that is important. The clarity allows for the development and success of seagrass beds. These seagrasses which use to thrive in vast meadows in the Chesapeake Bay collapsed in the 1950s through the 1970s. These fields of underwater grasses which grew near the shore were the home to many of the creatures on the lower end of the food chain and the nursery for the important recreational and cash fisheries that the Bay supported at one time. The much loved Chesapeake Blue Crab and the famed striped bass (rock fish) started their lives here. Without these beds of seagrass the fisheries were disappearing. What caused the grasses to disappear? Uncontrolled development. Development on the share of the Chesapeake but also and more importantly development throughout the watersheds that fed the Chesapeake. From the lawns and farms that were fertilized and on which weed killer was sprayed came the pollutants that were leading to the failure of the seagrass. Weed killers worked against the seagrass, and so did the fertilizers that washed off the lawns which encouraged the growth of algae in the water. The algae blocked the light that the seagrass needed to grow, causing the seagrass meadows to disappear.
Individuals and communities, as well as the states that border the Chesapeake Bay, began to take actions to clean up the problem. One of the actions that was taken was the imposition by the State of Maryland of a stormwater fee, also called the “rain tax”. This was in response to an action by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) through the Clean Water Act to develop methods and funding to clean up the Chesapeake Bay and to protect the Bay from further damage. The law required the states that have watersheds that drain into the Bay to develop local measures to protect the Bay. This included Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York, Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. Only Maryland established a stormwater fee program. Under the program land owners were assessed a fee based on the impervious, i.e., paved, hard surfaces, that did not allow water to seep into the ground. Rather the rain ran off the hard surfaces and into the streams of watersheds that fed the Bay.
The basic question is does the Bay still need protection. The basic answer is yes.
The Bay showed improvements based on an annual rating. The water quality had improved. Clarity improved and seagrass beds were improving. Other important factors had also been showing improvement over the last decade. However, in 2018 the Bay fell to a grade of D-plus. This was the first decline in quality in the last several years. The decline was blamed on the amounts of heavy rain that had fallen on the east coast watersheds that year. More pollutants including particulates (soil and debris) had been washed from the watersheds into the Bay. There the pollutants will again effect the clarity and productivity of the Bay.
So – again – does the Bay still need protection? Yes!
For more information on the Chesapeake Bay and the Stormwater fee please visit the Chesapeake Bay Foundation at http://www.cbf.org/about-cbf/locations/maryland/issues/stormwater-fees.html#taxes
The 2018 State of the Bay report may be found at http://www.cbf.org/about-the-bay/state-of-the-bay-report/
The picture of the Blue Crab is derived from a photograph taken from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation website. Credit for the photograph is Jay Fleming/iLCP.