U.S. Water News Online
BALTIMORE -- States in the Chesapeake Bay watershed arrived
eight years early at their goal of building 2,010 miles of
pollution-filtering vegetation along waterways that feed the bay, an
environmental official said.
Chesapeake Bay Foundation president Will Baker said meeting the
objective set in 1996 was an ``extraordinary accomplishment.''
The vegetative buffers, also called riparian forests, help prevent
polluting nutrients and eroded sediment from entering the bay. The
bay's watershed covers 9 million acres in Maryland, Delaware,
Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and the District of
In its pristine state, Baker said, plant life in the watershed
filtered naturally occurring nutrients and loosened sediment as they
worked through tributaries. Due to human development, the watershed
now behaves more like a funnel.
The problem is exacerbated because humans introduce many
nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, into the environment.
Sources include wastewater and stormwater runoff, factories and
Scientists blame the overabundance of nutrients for algae blooms
that use up the water's oxygen, block sunlight and make the bay
inhospitable to aquatic life.
Bill Matuszeski, former director of the Environmental Protection
Agency's Chesapeake Bay Program, said the states did not set their
goal high enough in 1996.
Al Todd, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service
Watershed Program Leader, said when the goal was set, only about 10
miles of buffers were being reconstructed a year. He said back then,
there were questions about whether rebuilding buffers was the proper
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