This summer, the most recent survey estimated that about 35 percent of the Chesapeake's water had oxygen levels low enough to be stressful to some bay life.
Seeking to improve the situation, states in the bay watershed -- including Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania -- set goals in the late 1980s for reducing pollution to the bay by 2000. They missed them.
"That's what Chesapeake Bay is now, a big septic tank," says waterman Elmer Evans of Smith Island, working in his crab shanty.
(Robert A. Reeder -- The Washington Post)
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_____Chesapeake Bay_____
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Md. Watermen Mull Suing Over Bay (The Washington Post, Jul 28, 2004)
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EPA Proposal Would Limit Sewage Plant Pollutants (The Washington Post, Jul 26, 2004)
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Bay Group Toughens Its Stance On Cleanup (The Washington Post, Jul 25, 2004)
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Oxygen Levels In Bay Disputed (The Washington Post, Jul 23, 2004)
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Bay Pollution Progress Overstated (The Washington Post, Jul 18, 2004)
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Recent News
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They then set new goals for 2010. But even now, the states have not finished their blueprints for how it will be done.
"At the end of 2010, we're going to have to answer some questions," said Donald F. Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
Aug. 3: Potomac River
Fishing guide Steve Chaconas has hundreds of lures designed to tempt largemouth bass. He also has about 30 or 45 minutes' worth of good jokes, for entertaining clients when the fish aren't biting.
This year, he's needed both of them -- lures and jokes.
"The areas where I used to fish, there's no grass there, so there's no easy fishing," he said.
The problem is blue-green algae, which have infested the river this year in the highest concentrations in 20 years, according to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.
Unlike the algae that trouble the saltier Chesapeake Bay, these freshwater algae tend to float on the surface of the Potomac, forming a scum that resembles bright-green paint.
"It just looks like a golf course out there, it's so green," Ken Penrod, another longtime Potomac bass guide, said in a telephone interview.
The algae can be toxic. Any concentration of algae exceeding 10,000 cells per milliliter can be harmful to some aquatic life, scientists said. This year, the Potomac has had concentrations as high as 80 million cells per milliliter.
Earlier this summer, Maryland officials warned against drinking or swimming in algae-filled water, and the river town of Colonial Beach, Va., had to shut its beaches when a large bloom appeared there.
In the 1980s, a series of large algae blooms on the Potomac were blamed in part on runoff from the Blue Plains sewage plant in the District.
But Blue Plains was upgraded with state-of-the-art technology, so it could not have played a major role in causing this year's blooms, said Bruce Michael, a scientist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.
