Pennsylvania Pollution Muddies Bay Cleanup

The EPA estimated that Pennsylvania contributes 39 percent of the pollutant nitrogen that flows annually into the bay -- more than Maryland or Virginia, which border the estuary. Pennsylvania also sends down large amounts of phosphorus, another key pollutant that -- like nitrogen -- is found in fertilizer.

Even so, the EPA said Pennsylvania is only 23 percent of the way to its goals, compared with Maryland's 57 percent and Virginia's 35 percent. Pennsylvania also trails Maryland and Virginia in terms of progress on phosphorus.

Once in the bay, nitrogen and phosphorus are food for large algae blooms, which block sunlight needed by underwater plants and consume large amounts of oxygen. The result is water in which fish can't live and crabs leap into the air to avoid suffocation.

Although Pennsylvania acted in the early 1990s to monitor the pollutants coming from its large farms, environmentalists have said the other states now do more.

Maryland has the most elaborate monitoring system, with farmers required to present a fertilizer-use plan to the state. The General Assembly also has addressed the other major source of pollution in the bay: wastewater treatment plants. Last month, lawmakers in Annapolis approved a sewer surcharge that will provide a steady flow of revenue to improve the treatment of wastewater, something without parallel in Pennsylvania or Virginia.

Pennsylvania "got a good early start, but the other states passed [it] in the 1990s," Bill Matuszeski, former head of the EPA's Chesapeake Bay Program, said of the efforts to monitor pollutants.

Now, Matuszeski said, Pennsylvania is "pretty much running third."

Pennsylvania officials have disputed these numbers, saying the EPA's estimates haven't accounted for some of the progress the state has made in cleaning up the Susquehanna.

Environmentalists working in the state said that Pennsylvania has a strong agricultural lobby and that no watermen's groups would reap the bounty of oysters, crabs and rockfish in a cleaned-up bay. In addition, the state's main centers of population -- Pittsburgh and Philadelphia -- are outside the bay's watershed.

Lancaster County contains the watershed for the Conestoga River, which is one of the most polluted in the Chesapeake watershed. In the county, progress has been uneven.

There is an excess of manure because the county's concentrated dairy and beef cattle operations are producing more waste than its crops can absorb as fertilizer. But there is nowhere else to put the waste, activists have said, so on the field it goes.

The county's many Amish farmers present a particular problem because they do not use any commercial fertilizer, Lancaster officials have said.

The result of the animal waste runoff is evident in the west branch of the Little Conestoga, a tributary of the Conestoga River. In a brown, cloudy creek like this one, the muck on the stream bottom can smell like sewage.

Such groups as the Little Conestoga Watershed Alliance have worked with farmers to use fences to keep cows out of streams. They also want farmers to allow a buffer zone of undergrowth near streams, and they encourage the farmers not to spread manure so often.