When I first started working as a riverkeeper, I realized that I needed a way to keep track of all the acronyms that are bandied about in the pursuit of a cleaner Chesapeake Bay.
First, there are the organizations involved; more than 600 by my last count, starting with the CBP, the Chesapeake Bay Program, made up of representatives from Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, and the District of Columbia, and the federal agencies under the aegis of the Environmental Protection Agency.
These key partners work with dozens of other organizations, including federal and state agencies, local governments, nonprofit organizations and academic institutions, including CBF (Chesapeake Bay Foundation), CBT (Chesapeake Bay Trust), ACB (Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay), and on and on, each partner contributing its own unique efforts toward restoring the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem so that it will be relatively sustainable by the year 2025.
I imagined that if I created a version of the periodic table of organizational acronyms and plastered it across the wall of my office, I might begin to get a grasp of the big picture. Then I got into the acronyms for the work being done by these organizations. At my first watershed-wide conference, one speaker concluded his PowerPoint presentation with this statement: “So with all the BMPs in place for the Phase II WIP, we’ll reduce TN, TP, and TSS to achieve TMDL by 2025.”
Translation: “If we install all the best management practices needed for the second level of the watershed implementation plan to succeed, we’ll reduce total nitrogen, phosphorus, and suspended sediment to the point where the water of the Bay won’t get any worse than it is.” TMDL stands for “Total Maximum Daily Load,” or the amount of sediment and nutrients that can be dumped into the Bay without upsetting its ecological balance.
My office was on the campus of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center along the banks of the Rhode River just 10 miles south of Annapolis. SERC’s campus covers 2,660 acres of forests, wetlands, and marshes along 15 miles of protected shoreline that the staff use as a natural laboratory for long-term and cutting-edge ecological research on the issues impacting the confluence of land and water. Many of SERC’s studies on water quality, land use, and global warming have been going on since the center’s founding in 1965.
One of their studies turned into a staple BMP or “best management practice” for the Chesapeake Bay Program. Scientists there proved that a method of reducing the amount of nutrients and sediment in stormwater runoff before it enters the Bay is a method so reliable, it should be adopted throughout the 64,000 square miles of the Chesapeake watershed. This particular best management practice is called a “riparian buffer.”
Basically, if you plant enough trees along the banks of a stream, it will filter the stormwater coming off the surrounding fields so that it doesn’t wind up polluting the Chesapeake Bay. SERC scientists found that existing buffers in the watersheds they studied remove an average of 16 percent of the nitrate that flows from croplands. And if more streams were protected by installing new riparian buffers downhill from croplands, it might reduce nitrate concentrations in these streams by up to 32 percent. They concluded that these buffers could significantly improve water quality in the Chesapeake Bay. And so, that particular BMP, or best management practice, was one of thousands adopted as part of the watershed implementation plans by the Chesapeake Bay Program.
More riparian buffers and other of these best management practices need to be implemented along the tributaries of the Susquehanna River throughout central Pennsylvania and south-central New York in order to solve the problem behind the Conowingo Dam in the long term. But that’s an expensive proposition and those states are lagging in achieving their goals of nutrient and sediment reduction.
In September, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia sued the EPA to force it to enforce Pennsylvania and New York’s pollution management plans. This problem is so serious, the Maryland Watermen’s Association took the rare step of joining with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to launch their own lawsuit against the EPA.
Anne Arundel County joined in that suit. Anne Arundel County has about 533 miles of shoreline on the Chesapeake Bay and its tributary rivers and creeks. According to a statement released by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, tourists pump more than $3.5 billion into the local economy every year, providing support for more than 30,000 workers. The county has invested more than $500 million over the last decade to protect the Bay as an important natural, economic, and cultural resource.
“Anne Arundel County residents have invested far too much in the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort to watch from the sidelines as upstream states and the EPA abandon their obligations,” said Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman. “Since the federal government refuses to lead, placing our local economy, our residents, and our very way of life at risk, I must ask the courts to intervene and make them lead.”
These suits will certainly not be settled any time soon, and by the time this article is published, the 2020 presidential election will have taken place. A new administration could result in new leadership and direction for the Chesapeake Bay Program leading to advancements in the long-term solution to the pollution build-up behind the Conowingo Dam.
The dam is operated by Exelon Power Corporation, which also owns Baltimore Gas & Electric. Exelon representatives have stated flatly that the dam itself has never caused any pollution and that the corporation is not responsible for the pollution that gushes down the river from Pennsylvania and New York. They did, however, come to an agreement with Maryland’s Department of the Environment to qualify for a 50-year extension of the federal license they need to operate the dam.
Ben Grumbles, Secretary of MDE, stated in a recent phone interview that Maryland is still waiting for decision from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) as to their acceptance of the settlement agreement and the issuance of a new license. Once that occurs, Exelon will be required to implement a range of important restoration actions.
Poplar Island, a project that created new bird and wildlife habitat using material dredged from the ship channel in the main stem of the Chesapeake Bay, offers a viable example of how sediment dredged from behind Conowingo Dam could be used.
The restoration actions Exelon must take under the settlement agreement include spending $200 million over the next 50 years on measures, including:
- Improve downstream flow to make flow more natural, including helping American shad and river herring migrate up the river and past the dam and reducing fish kills downstream while improving habitat for other aquatic species;
- Measures to restore freshwater mussels and oysters that serve as natural filters;
- Measures to improve trash and debris management and increase the responsiveness of Exelon to problems that occur as a result of trash and debris during storm events;
- And measures and funds to improve the resiliency of the river to climate change, such as restoring submerged aquatic vegetation and building living shorelines.
“The really important point to emphasize is that we have a three-prong strategy on the Conowingo,” Grumbles told me in a recent phone interview. In addition to reaching this agreement with Exelon, the other two prongs are to reach agreement with all of the states that are part of the Chesapeake Bay Program to create a strategy to deal with the Conowingo problem. The Conowingo needs its own watershed implementation plan to improve the water temperature and flow regime for the river that has been harmed by the dam. “This watershed implementation plan is to get all of the states to track nutrient and sediment reduction.”
The third final prong, he said, is specifically relating to the sediment behind the dam. “That continues to be the problem,” he said. “We’d like to advance the science of the possible reuse of that sediment and do it in a cost-effective manner. We don’t want a catastrophic release to cause damage.”
Secretary Grumbles noted that Maryland is planning a pilot project to advance the science of the possible reuse of that sediment and do it in a cost-effective manner. “We’re hoping to dredge 1,000 cubic yards of material and take core samples of the sediment to see if there could be a market created by the reuse of that material,” he explained.
“We’re searching for an innovative reuse, like Poplar Island,” the project that created new bird and wildlife habitat using material dredged from the ship channel in the main stem of the Bay. “We hope to create a market for ecosystem restoration. We want to learn more about the quality of the sediment to see how it can be beneficially reused, not just for land cover, but perhaps as a building material” Grumbles explained. “This is not the silver bullet solution to the Chesapeake Bay, but it’s part of the solution.”
The West and Rhode Riverkeeper organization sponsored a team of students from the Department of Systems Engineering & Operations Research at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, who looked into just such creative ways to address the sediment filling up the Conowingo reservoir. They spent six months in 2015 under the aegis of faculty advisor, Churchton resident Dr. George Donohue, studying methods of processing the dredged sediment to convert it into products that can be sold to offset the cost of the operation.
After an exhaustive survey of various techniques, the team focused on two for further evaluation: Plasma Vitrification and Cement-Lock. Plasma Vitrification is a process piloted by Westinghouse Plasma Corp. in which dredged sediment is exposed to plasma torches reaching temperatures of 5,000 degrees Celsius, which destroys nearly all toxic organic and microbiological contaminants. This produces a glass slag product which can be sold as a replacement for glasphalt, a type of asphalt that contains crushed glass, roofing granules, coal slag, or as a recycled glass substitute.
Cement-Lock is a thermo-chemical process developed by the Gas Technology Institute and Unitel Technologies in which dredged sediment is placed through a rotary kiln reaching temperatures between 1,315 and 1,425 degrees Celsius, about the same temperature as a crematory oven. During the combustion process, the contaminated sediment is mixed with certain chemical additives, after which the end product is finely ground to produce EcoMelt, a material that can be added to Portland cement to make concrete stronger and denser.
The team also considered simply depositing the dredged material as landfill, or to fill up abandoned mine shafts. While this option costs less than the processing alternatives, it does nothing to decontaminate the material, which might lead to future problems, like pollution leaching into groundwater.
The team determined that a Cement-Lock processing plant could be the most cost-performance effective application. It would go a long way to offsetting the cost of dredging the reservoir behind the dam. This might not be the ultimate solution to the Conowingo problem, but it shows that if you challenge brilliant minds to apply science, engineering, and technology to a problem, you’ll get viable results.
Another technological advancement shines some hope on the issue.
In September, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) awarded a grant to Chesapeake Conservancy and the Precision Conservation Partnership to fund a major restoration initiative in central Pennsylvania. The funding is provided through the NFWF’s Innovative Nutrient and Sediment Reduction program. Sixteen local organizations comprise the Precision Conservation Partnership.
The three-year project will restore as many as 30 farms in six central Pennsylvania counties in the Susquehanna watershed, resulting in full-farm restoration where the greatest benefits to water quality can be realized, thereby reducing the sediment and nutrient pollutants flowing into the Conowingo reservoir.
“Implementing best management practices upstream is priority number one for a healthy Chesapeake Bay,” stated Chesapeake Conservancy’s President and CEO Joel Dunn. “It’s an enormous task and in previous years may have seemed overwhelming.”
Chesapeake Conservancy is a nonprofit organization based in Annapolis. They started out working with the National Park Service on the Chesapeake Bay Gateways Network and the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, helping to create 153 new public access sites and permanently protect some of the Bay’s special places like Werowocomoco, Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park, and Fort Monroe National Monument.
“Today, thanks to the power of technology, and together with our partners, we can practice precision conservation—getting the right practices in the right places at the right scale”
—Joel Dunn, Chesapeake Conservancy
Since then, they’ve been working with the National Park Service, the Chesapeake Bay Program, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and other federal, state and local agencies, private foundations, and corporations to advance conservation through applied technology.
Last November, Chesapeake Conservancy was instrumental in Anne Arundel County’s adoption of a new Forest Conservation Act that requires developers to conserve more trees, replant more trees, or pay more in lieu of replanting.
“Good data results in better policy,” Dunn told me in a recent phone interview. “There was a debate—are we losing trees or not? We examined detailed satellite photos that gave us data on every tree we lost in the past 10 years, showing 5,500 acres of tree loss.” The data showed that the county led the state in forest loss and lost more acres of forest than Prince George’s, Calvert, Howard, and Baltimore counties combined from 2010 to 2017. “That changed the debate entirely,” Dunn noted, “from are we losing trees to how can we change these policies to protect our trees?”
Anne Arundel County Council passed the bill unanimously to applause during a mid-November session at the Arundel Center.
Dunn and his staff have developed a new way to map the watershed that’s ten times more powerful than satellite imagery alone. Using LiDAR (or Light Detection and Ranging technology), enhanced satellite imagery, geospacial graphic software, geographic information systems, artificial intelligence, and on-the-ground monitoring, they can map watersheds with pinpoint accuracy.
LiDAR works in like Radar and Sonar except it uses light waves from a laser instead of radio or sound waves. LiDAR relies on laser sensors that are mounted on airplanes. As lasers shine on the area to be mapped, they emit brief pulses of light. The amount of time it takes for those pulses to reflect back to the sensor is measured, and each measurement is plotted using the Global Positioning System, or GPS. Computers then use that data to construct a 3-D map of the area.
The first LiDAR prototype was built in 1961 by Hughes Aircraft Company, which had built the first laser a year earlier. One of the earliest beneficiaries of LiDAR was the United States’ space program, where the technology was used to map the moon during the 1971 Apollo 15 mission.
Dunn and his staff showed me some examples of how the technology can best be harnessed in a recent on-line meeting. They showed me a map of a farm field in Pennsylvania created with the new system. If this were just a satellite map, it would show a stream running through the open field, making it a candidate for that riparian buffer BMP I talked about earlier.
Planting a lot of trees can be expensive, so in order to make the most of a limited budget, you need to target the planting to where it will filter the most pollutants. The map using the new technology was so detailed, it showed the networks of tiny creeks and even ditches that flowed across the field on both sides of the stream, looking like blue veins against the green pasture.
The higher resolution image clearly showed that the drainage area south of the creek was 12 times larger than the area north of the creek. Planting trees along the south bank would therefore provide 12 times the filtering power of the same number of trees planted on the north bank.
Dunn calls this advancement “precision conservation.”
The bucolic farms of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, are contributors to the nitrogen and phosphorus pollution seeping into the Susquehanna River watershed and, ultimately, the Chesapeake Bay.
“Today, thanks to the power of technology, and together with our partners, we can practice precision conservation—getting the right practices in the right places at the right scale,” Dunn told me. “Precision conservation allows partners to be results-oriented and restore the places that will have the most impact on the health of the local streams, rivers, and ultimately the Chesapeake Bay.
“This work is an important element of the future of the conservation movement,” he continued. “In the past we were celebrated for planting 1,000 trees. Now we say we planted 1,000 trees in the right place to address the highest flows of nutrients coming from a particular field.”
Dunn is optimistic about the future of the Bay’s restoration. “Our work will generate the justifications needed at the federal, state, and local level to maintain and increase funding for restoration programs as well as leverage other people’s money and other people’s time to restore the Chesapeake Bay,” he said. “Our approach is complimentary but different, providing the data, intelligence and tools to help us get them to where we want them to be.”
Aerial view of Conowingo Dam spanning the width of the Susquehanna River.
The ideal long-term resolution to the Conowingo Dam issue, Dunn explained, is to apply these new technologies in Pennsylvania and New York so we get more out of the money that’s being spent there and the efforts, so we can achieve our clean-up goals faster and at a lower cost.
“In order to achieve the big picture goals, it’s going to take leveraging the resources and partnerships we have and getting more people involved and knowledgeable to get it done,” he said. “We need the government to be in the lead, but we all need to participate and contribute in important ways.”
