The Poisoning of Chesapeake Bay

"Industries . . . will control as much pollution as they can economically or as much as they feel they have to, because if they don't they'll be thrown in jail," said Andrew E. Stevenson, spokesman for the Water Pollution Control Federation, a 30,000-member national group of professions subject to the Clean Water Act.

The officials who run municipal and regional sewage systems that discharge into the bay say that thousands of new sewage plants have been built since the Clean Water Act was passed and that sewage treatment has advanced. The quality of water discharged from the treatment plants has improved as a result, they say.

A Flood of Studies

The Chesapeake has been the subject of nearly 4,000 studies since the early 1970s, according to the Chesapeake Research Consortium Inc. That attention comes in part because it is the nation's largest and most magnificent bay and is extremely important to the economies of the states that surround it.

Catches of oysters, clams and crabs, together with commercial and sport fishing, inject more than $440 million a year into Virginia's economy and about $410 million a year into Maryland's, according to state officials. Most of the catches come from the bay and its tributaries.

Among the many studies was one that cost the EPA $27 million and took seven years to complete. It resulted in the Save the Bay cleanup program, announced in December 1983 by Ruckelshaus, who was then the EPA's administrator, as well as by the governors of Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania and the mayor of the District of Columbia.