The Poisoning of Chesapeake Bay

Those permits are being routinely violated in the Chesapeake region, according to a Washington Post study of two years' worth of environmental records. An examination of the discharge permits issued to the 124 major industrial companies and community sewage systems in Maryland and Virginia that dump into the bay or its tributaries shows that every one has exceeded its legal levels of discharge in one or more pollutants.

The records also show that during that period -- July 1983 through June 1985 -- Maryland and Virginia officials rarely punished the violators, except for occasionally issuing fines, often in amounts far less than the law allows. Regulators have done only slightly better in the past year, the records indicate.

The Post examined the discharge permits for businesses and public sewage plants in Maryland and Virginia because most of the pollutants in the bay come from those states. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that each year, industries and sewage plants along the shores of the Chesapeake in Maryland and Virginia discharge nearly 4 trillion gallons of wastewater into the bay, or about one-fifth the amount of water in the bay at any given time. That discharge includes nearly 5 million tons of four common pollutants -- enough to fill 10 supertankers -- according to NOAA.

The same pattern of violations shows up in the permits of the military facilities surrounding the bay, and environmental officials in charge of regulating those facilities have done even less than their civilian counterparts to force the military to abide by the law, the records show.

Illegal discharges have gone largely unnoticed by the public and by some public officials, many of whom believe the bay's overall quality is improving because they no longer see the floating debris and dirty foam of a decade ago. The much-touted Save the Bay Campaign, announced in 1983 by the federal and bay-state governments, has contributed to such rosy assumptions.

But what the public does not see -- and what most of the money appropriated for Save the Bay does not address -- are the toxic pollutants from industries and sewage treatment plants, including ammonia, cyanide and chlorine, that are largely invisible and that make the bay deadlier as they accumulate.