By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 29, 2007
To deliver on the pledge to save the Chesapeake Bay in three short years, you could start by digging up a million lawns to fix septic tanks that pollute too much.
Then ask 80,000 farmers to make expensive changes in the way their farms work. Overhaul hundreds of sewage plants, each project with a price tag that could run into the millions.
And find about $28 billion -- enough for six aircraft carriers -- to pay for it all. Right now, authorities are at least $14 billion short.
This month, the Environmental Protection Agency said efforts to restore the bay's health need to be accelerated to meet a 2010 deadline. It turns out that "accelerated" might be understating it: Experts say meeting the goal would require widespread sacrifices from individuals and unprecedented funding from government sources. And even then, it might not be enough.
For now, no such shock-therapy campaign has been proposed. But environmentalists say the bay project's many shortfalls are a lesson: After 19 years, the Chesapeake cleanup is struggling to produce results on par with its promises.
"We have done a truly tremendous job of defining the problem, and we have done a truly tremendous job of defining the solution," said J. Charles Fox, a former head of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. "But we have not yet succeeded in actually implementing the solution."
The bay cleanup, in its current form, began in 1987 with an agreement between state and federal governments. They promised that the bay, troubled by dirt, algae blooms and toxic chemicals, would be clean by 2000.
"We thought it was going to be Bethlehem Steel. We thought we were going to be able to point to big polluters," said Jack Greer, an official at the Sea Grant program at the University of Maryland.
Instead, they found that some of the bay's worst pollutants came from such things as manure, lawn fertilizer and human waste. Its troubles began on every street, in every sewer, at the back end of every cow.
"I remember politicians just going pale," Greer said.
When the 2000 deadline was missed, an even more sweeping agreement took its place. The leaders of Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, the District and the EPA pledged to fix the bay's water, its oyster population, its beds of underwater grass and other environmental indicators by 2010.
There have been significant successes since then. Maryland passed a "flush tax," a surcharge on water bills to pay for cleaning up the state's sewage plants and farm fields. The bay's rockfish population has continued its remarkable comeback, which began in the 1980s. Small strips of forest, designed to filter runoff, have been planted alongside 5,000 miles of streams.
But all of that hasn't been nearly enough, officials say.
Thousands of farms still need to implement measures to prevent soil, manure and fertilizer from washing downstream -- from putting up fences to setting aside areas to regrow as forest. In Virginia, the total is near 1.5 million acres -- an area larger than Delaware.
States have said they will need at least $2 billion for these agricultural measures, which often include sending employees out to custom design a plan for each farm and reimbursing farmers for changes. Farmers have said they can't afford the changes themselves.
"If we can't absorb those costs, the only alternative is to get out," said Earl Hance, president of the Maryland Farm Bureau.
Another shortfall: Older septic systems -- including some installed as late as 2005 -- need to be replaced, or at least updated, so they release less nitrogen into groundwater. In Maryland, the most recent documents say 11,000 of 360,000 systems have been fixed so far.
If homeowners pay, each fix costs hundreds or thousands of dollars. Maryland has money to help homeowners pay for septic upgrades -- but not enough to do all of them before 2010. At current funding levels, it would take 580 years.
Also, to make the 2010 deadline, hundreds of sewage plants would need upgrades, so they release less pollution. The cost is estimated at $6 billion.
But money isn't the only problem with reaching the 2010 goal. The upgrades are so complicated, officials say, that they will take years to plan and carry out.
"If I had all the money in the world today, I would guarantee you I could not get it done by 2010," said John T. Dunn, chief engineer of the District's Water and Sewer Authority, whose Blue Plains sewage plant needs such an overhaul. He said that 2014 might be more realistic.
And even if all this effort were expended, experts say some 2010 goals might be impossible. One goal promises that the Chesapeake's oyster population will grow tenfold. But years of restoration efforts have produced no breakthroughs.
"If we're not well on the way by now, it's just not going to happen," said Standish K. Allen Jr., a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.
Blame should be spread across the watershed, environmentalists say, since all governments failed to act as boldly as the 2010 goals demanded and did little to contain sprawl. But the EPA's Chesapeake Bay Program, which oversees the cleanup, has come in for special blame. Last year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the bay program was not doing enough to coordinate environmental efforts or provide updates.
Critics say the program lost valuable time by calling for elaborate plans instead of plunging straight into pollution reductions. And at the end of all this planning, they say, the cleanup had the paralyzing price tag: $28 billion.
"What that number tended to do is make people say, 'Well, it's impossible. We can't do it,' " said William C. Baker, president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental group.
In response to questions about the management of the Chesapeake cleanup, bay program Director Rebecca Hanmer released a two-paragraph statement. It said the EPA was committed to "continue accelerating our progress toward a cleaner, healthier Chesapeake."
For now, the consensus among environmentalists is that the costs of meeting the 2010 goals are prohibitively high. Instead, they have begun pushing for agricultural and sewer-plant funds to aim at 80 percent of the desired pollution reductions.
Even these revised plans would require wrangling an estimated $3 billion more than state and federal governments have allocated.
Nineteen years into the bay cleanup -- intended as a model for environmental movements all over the world -- even the easy fixes are hard.
"It's not like you can find a place elsewhere that did it better," said Ann Pesiri Swanson, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, an advisory body to the cleanup. "That's the tragedy."
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