This Week on Chesapeake Summer...Examining the Future of the Bay ANNAPOLIS, MD (wypr) - Throughout the summer, WYPR's Joel McCord has profiled people and events that give the Chesapeake Bay its character. In this final edition of Chesapeake Summer he reminds us that the bay still faces serious problems.

Smith Island crab scraper Mark Kitching may not see it this way, but many of us sense a certain romance in making your living on the Bay.

Most of the crabs we were catching then have shedded off or gone through their cycle

We see the beauty in the remaining log canoes that race on summer weekends on the Eastern Shore and enjoy the whimsy in Oxford's cardboard boat races.

Ruffled Duck comes in second place and Margaritaville has come in for a soda.

They're all part of the fabric of life on Chesapeake Bay. But as we've often heard, that fabric is unraveling.

Beth McGee is the senior water quality scientist at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Outside the non-profit's headquarters in Annapolis, she says that over the last three years, oxygen levels have been high enough to sustain life in only 12 percent of the bay.

What we've seen this year and last year and we'll see into the foreseeable future unless we start to reverse the trend on this is that the sections of the bay that are unacceptable in terms of dissolved oxygen are not getting better. 01:41

In fact, EPA's Chesapeake Bay Program regularly predicts summer dead zones. It's just a question of whether it's larger or smaller than last year. Bay program scientist Rich Batiuk says the problem is simply put: too much nitrogen and phosphorous in the water.

From our back yards, from farm fields across the Chesapeake, from every time we flush our own toilets through our waste water treatment plants as well.

Nitrogen and phosphorous create algae that blocks the sunlight from the grasses and, when it dies, sucks up the oxygen that otherwise would sustain fish, crabs, clams and oysters.

Annual report cards on the health of America's largest estuary reach the same conclusion: the bay isn't getting any better, despite all the money and effort that has gone into restoration programs.

Some would say just holding the line could be a success, given the increasing pressure caused by an exploding population in the bay's 64,000 square mile watershed. But Bay Foundation President Will Baker calls it a miserable failure.

The science tells us precisely what needs to be done to save the Chesapeake Bay, we know how much it will cost in round numbers, we know how to get it done, but we have not had the political will to do it.

Bill Dennison, vice president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, sees danger in delay.

In many ways the bay is teetering on a very fine knife edge.

The center has studied water quality data for 25 years and found the slightest changes in climate conditions can cause dramatic changes in the bay.

It really doesn't take much. It's lost the resilience that it used to have because it doesn't take much to throw it out of kilter.

Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in sewage treatment plant upgrades, but that takes care of only about one quarter of the problem. There's still the issue of run-off from farm fields and lawns.

The recently adopted federal farm bill contains $188 million over ten years to help farmers control run-off.

But in tight fiscal times the price tag for all of this seems extremely high. The Bay Foundation's Baker acknowledges the costs, but says the decision is an easy one.

Either we pay to have the bay saved now, or we pay two or three times that in the next 20 years. And that's the decision.

In 1608, Captain John Smith said heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation than Chesapeake Bay. Today, Baker says the richest nation in the world can't afford to let that be destroyed.

I'm Joel McCord, reporting in Annapolis for 88.1, WYPR.


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