WYPR News in Maryland
(2009-09-24)
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With every thunderstorm, millions of gallons of water course down urban and suburban streets, sweeping everything in its path into storm drains; oil, grease and metal shavings that autos left behind, fertilizer from lawns and potato chip bags and fast food wrappers. And all of it cascades into a Chesapeake Bay tributary near you.
So much trash washes off Baltimore streets that the city has stretched booms across storm drain outfalls to keep the unsightly mess from reaching the Inner Harbor. And it has deployed a fleet of ungainly blue skimmers to scoop up what the booms have missed.
"I would say there's about a hundred storm drains that empty out into the Inner Harbor."
Kim Dimick is a supervisor in the Bureau of Solid Waste, which operates the skimmers.
"So we patrol, after we get the contain areas, then we go around and get the trash that comes out of the storm drains and, you know, congregates in different corners and areas and stuff like that."
Often, her crews tell her it's a postcard out there. But shortly after a storm rips through or one of those trash-catching booms breaks, they are busy for days, maybe longer.
"Once we clean it up, you think, okay, well there's not going to be no trash coming down when it rains again. But it's like it's never ending, never ending trash. It could rain five days in a row and trash could come out five days in a row."
So much trash pours into the harbor and the Patapsco River that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency EPA has added it to the usual list of pollution suspects, along with sediments, metals, bacteria and nutrients.
"It just has the dubious distinction of being one of the few systems in the country that the trash problem has gotten to be so dramatic that it actually has been listed as impaired.
Jen Aiosa is a senior scientist at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. On a sunny afternoon, she and senior naturalist John Page Williams poked a small Boston Whaler into a wide storm water outfall that once was a creek. City crews had strung booms to funnel trash into a floating shed where a conveyor belt carries it to a large metal trash bin.
"And unfortunately I have seen this area, before they put this interesting solution in place, where there was just so much trash back in there, you know, I'm sure one of these birds could have walked along it. It was just ridiculous."
But there are times when some drains get so clogged with trash that storm water backs up into the streets, which is where Laquanda Johnson and her crew come in. Johnson operates one of those trucks with a huge vacuum cleaner mounted on it. She spends her days cris-crossing the city to clean out stopped up storm drains.
Johnson says the city will always have trash problems in the storm drains because people don't care where they put their trash.
"They have a tendency to just walking and throwing it on the ground. And they don't realize that that trash they throw on the ground, when it rains it falls down into the inlets and causes these inlets clogged up."
Bill Stack is the acting chief of the division responsible for Baltimore's 1,000 miles of storm drain pipes and thirty three thousand storm drain inlets. He says controlling storm water run-off is the last major hurdle in cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay.
And he complains that while state and local governments are pouring money into improving sewer lines and upgrading sewage treatment plants, they are giving short shrift to storm water control.
"It's the forgotten infrastructure, the under funded infrastructure. And because it's so poorly funded and forgotten, more or less swept under the rug, there really hasn't been progress in terms of restoring these surface waters.
Stack is on the banks of Stony Run, one example of a successful stream restoration effort.
"Where we're standing now, if you took a step closer towards the stream, you would fall 15 feet."
Rushing storm water had so eroded the banks that it created a cliff. And the stream shot downhill in almost a straight line. Contractors created a flood plain around the stream and restored its natural meanders. Now, during a heavy rain, the water spreads out over the flood plain instead of eroding banks and carrying sediment toward the Inner Harbor.
And there have been tangential benefits, he adds.
"There were anecdotal reports of all sorts of rare wildlife appearing; frogs, turtles, birds that have never appeared in this stream. It's amazing."
But those kinds of improvements are expensive. And Stack says his department needs a dependable, dedicated source of funds.
Maryland authorized local jurisdictions to create those kinds of funds in the 1980s. But Shari Wilson, state Secretary of the Environment, says the results have been spotty.
"While we've had the authority to do that for some time and only a couple of jurisdictions have moved forward with that, I do think that there is much greater awareness now, today, that there was, say, 15 years ago, about storm water and what the impact on the bay is."
The tiny city of Takoma Park in Montgomery County instituted a storm water utility fee in the 1990s. Public Works Director Darryl Braithwaite says it spread the burden of paying for storm water improvements more evenly. If the money comes out of the general fund, it can only come from people who pay into the general fund. And that leaves out government entities and non profits.
"If you change your fee rate from tax revenue generated and take it into a fee system, you can assess a fee on some of those areas that wouldn't be paying taxes. And then as our system does, we actually base that fee on the amount of imperviousness itself."
That means a hospital or a shopping center with a big parking lot would be paying far more than your average homeowner.
Councilman Josh Cohen helped sponsor a bill to create a similar fund in Anne Arundel County two years ago. He said it would have raised a million dollars in the first year and allowed the county to float bonds to retrofit aging systems.
It went down to defeat.
"Some of my colleagues just were adamant about not imposing any tax or any fee of any sort; even if it was a dedicated fee that varied based on how much property you had and was allocated specifically for a purpose that people supported."
But even if public works departments throughout Maryland miraculously found all the money they need to retro-fit aging storm drain systems, they need some cooperation from people who, as vactor operator Laquanda Johnson said, "don't care where they put their trash."
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