Deadline to Clean Chesapeake By 2010 Probably Won't Be Met

But understanding the problems has always proved easier than fixing them.

In 2000, officials signed the Chesapeake 2000 Agreement, promising a return to health by 2010. But cleanup officials say that the first few years were spent on scientific studies and elaborate planning processes. It took years to craft "tributary strategies" showing what should be done along the rivers.

"Talking through the solutions took much longer than we thought," said Ann Pesiri Swanson, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission. The commission is an advisory group of state legislators from across the watershed. "The result is, yeah, we didn't take enough action fast enough," she said.

Officials now concede that the 2010 deadline will be missed. So, they have turned their attention to the new daily load plan.

In one sense, the shift comes from necessity: An old court ruling mandates such a plan if the 2010 deadline is missed. But EPA leaders and environmentalists say it could also provide a new environmental hammer: Once a sewage plant's pollution limit is set, for instance, the plant's operators could be cited for violating it.

But the problem, as before, is time.

EPA officials say they have calculated similar plans for smaller bodies of water, such as the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, but never anything on this scale in the mid-Atlantic. They will have to compute pollution needs, negotiate with each state in the watershed over its share of the load and listen to public comments along the way.

It can't be rushed, they said.

Capacasa could not provide a new date by which the bay would be restored to health. "I really can't address that," he said.

"If that's what the idea is, to take another three years, then it's politics as usual for the bay, which is: Do little, delay and study," said Howard R. Ernst, a professor of political science at the U.S. Naval Academy who wrote a book, "Chesapeake Bay Blues," about the politics of the cleanup.

On the Eastern Shore yesterday, seafood processor Jack Brooks said he had concerns about the new plan. Brooks, whose Cambridge, Md., company picks the meat from blue crabs, said he got a good look at the bay's pollution problems last weekend, driving over the Bay Bridge after a rainstorm.

"It looked like a chocolate milkshake out there" because of mud swept from upstream, Brooks said. "It's just, just awful."

If it took three years to finish a plan for these problems, "that's an awful long time," Brooks said.