Here goes nothin'

On the other side of Hampton Roads, the Elizabeth River Project laid out a bold plan last week to make what is the most polluted river in the state both "fishable and swimmable" by 2020.
The grassroots group was joined at riverside by four southside mayors and state officials who pledged their support for the ambitious goal.
Unlike most creeks and tributaries that mostly suffer from too many nutrients and too much sediment, the Elizabeth remains hobbled by toxic pollutants.
That and the continued heavy industrial presence make the "fishable and swimmable" goal a tough one. But it has one thing going for it: Rather than weighing down the project with weighty terminology and environmental jargon, the Elizabeth River Project boils it all down to two things everyone can understand. Make it fishable. Make it swimmable.
A couple days after the kickoff, reality hit home in the form of Lake Explorer II. The 90-foot ship — an Environmental Protection Agency research vessel, for those interested in irony — spilled about 1,400 gallons of diesel fuel. The cause is being investigated.

How many will make it?

Maryland officials planted a record 485 million seed oysters in the bay this year, thanks to the increased capacity of their hatchery at the University of Maryland's Horn Point facility.

Bay Foundation gets into presidential politics

Not taking any sides, but the Chesapeake Bay Foundation for the first time has laid out a "clean water agenda" for the next president.

The seemingly most important role outlined in the plan would be the president's sway with the Department of Agriculture, and the department's role in helping reduce farm pollution from "hot spots" such as the poultry-farming center of the Shenandoah Valley.

Has anyone seen my drill bits?

And just like that, it was gone

The moratorium on offshore drilling that has blanketed much of the U.S. coastline for 26 years and most of it, including Virginia, since 1990 will, it is now clear, expire in a few days.

House Democrats in Washington passed -- on a mostly party-line vote -- an energy bill last week that would allow for some drilling in addition to pushing alternative energy investment. But that was a non-starter with Republicans, the Senate and the White House.

And now the Democratic leadership will allow the moratorium -- which has been renewed on an annual basis -- to lapse after Sept. 30 rather than force something else through.

David Obey, a Democrat from Wisconsin and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said the presidential election will now be key in deciding the direction of the country's drilling policy because beginning Wednesday of next week, this country will lack any clear direction on offshore drilling policy.

The Minerals Management Service, which oversees offshore exploration and production (and, let's not forget, recently got hammered for its employees having ridiculously inappropriate relationships with oil company reps), has already put Virginia in the queue to open up the coast for leasing in 2011. The decision was largely moot when the moratorium was still in place, but that's not the case anymore.

So, the push to drill more offshore began in Virginia and the whole maze-like process could lead back here soon enough. Check back after Nov. 4.

The Watermen and the Dead Zone

I have two stories in today's newspaper and I think you could draw a connection between them other than the fact that they both concern the Chesapeake. On the front page, Virginia Institute of Marine Science professor Robert Diaz is shining a light on the increase in "dead zones" appearing in coastal waters around the world. Inside the paper, several Virginia watermen's groups are uniting under one umbrella organization in order to project a stronger voice in debates about fishing regulations and the health of the bay. Stick with me for a second and I'll show you how I connect the dots between the two.

The watermen were spurred to action earlier this year when Virginia and Maryland said they were going to severely restrict the blue crab harvest in order to resuscitate the depleted and weakened crab stock. The scientific studies were clear: Crab harvesting had been too heavy the past 15 years, during a time when the crabs were not bouncing back in numbers like they have typically and cyclically done. This is when the watermen began to protest. Everyone from Virginia to New York knows that the Bay has been suffering for decades because of pollution, they said, but all the blame is put on us?

The watermen, or, many of them at least, will also tell you they don't buy the scientists' numbers. They don't buy that the winter dredge survey -- the backbone of all population estimates and any measuring stick for gauging overfishing -- can possibly be accurate. Some will even tell you they think the Virginia Marine Resources Commission is out to rid the bay of every last waterman, not to regulate and promote a healthy fishing industry. But the winter dredge survey, performed by VIMS and Maryland Department of Natural Resources, has proved to be remarkably accurate in predicting each year's harvest for almost two decades now. And does it really make sense that the people charged with looking out for the state's fishing industry are in fact, behind the curtain, scheming to undermine it?

But here's where the watermen have a point, and here's where the two stories from today overlap. Diaz, the VIMS professor, pointed out that the dead zone in the Chesapeake each year snuffs out about 75,000 tons of worms and clams and invertebrates that would serve as food for crabs and fish. That 75,000 tons of food would feed about half the annual blue crab harvest in the Chesapeake, Diaz said. How much is the constant load of pollution simply weighing down the Bay's ability to support life? This is just one example of the constant pressure on the Chesapeake's ecosystem. For all the damage heavy fishing may do to individual species stocks, like the blue crab, the pollution remains the overwhelming problem. The effort to clean up the Bay would be well served by watermen joining the chorus of voices making that argument.

Will Virginia crabbers unite?

Virginia watermen rallied together earlier this year when it became apparent that they would soon be facing strict new crabbing rules. The watermen strongly opposed the Virginia Marine Resources Commission's harvest restrictions, but they also took a step back and agreed that, as a group, they needed to present a more united front in the Chesapeake Bay debate. In short, that united front now says: The impact of a couple thousand Virginia watermen on the health of the bay's fish and crab stocks is nothing in comparison to the wastewater from sewage plants, fertilizer on suburban lawns, nitrogen from air pollution and runoff from poultry and cattle farms from Virginia to New York. Yet the watermen are the easiest group to target, and they argue that they are disproptionately punished.


Take that argument or leave it, the watermen are trying harder to make their voice heard. Once split into about 15 regional watermen's groups, watermen are meeting in Yorktown this Thursday to talk about gathering under one organizational umbrella. I'll be there and report on that for Friday's paper, and for the blog. They're meeting at the Watermen's Museum in Yorktown at 3:30 p.m.

In the meantime, check out this image I found on the Virginia Waterman's Association Web site. That striper doesn't appear to be huge, but he has at least seven crabs in his tummy. Find the post followed by some comments here.

How's the water?

Algae blooms are a fact of Chesapeake Bay summers. And they are arguably the Chesapeake's chief problem. Algae is always present in the water, but the autotrophic buggers take off when they find a little extra nitrogen and phosphorus in the water. They "bloom," though it's not as nice as it sounds, and when they die their decomposing material sucks oxygen from the water, depriving the rest of the fish and crabs and plants of what they need.

But even those of us who live near the water, how often do you see this happening? Here's a great shot from the Baltimore Sun, and reporter Stephen Kiehl's story on a bloom in Baltimore County.

Is the King William needed?

That question will make Newport News and Peninsula government leaders cringe. But it is a question that many continue to ask about the King William Reservoir. The Board of Supervisors in King William County acknowledged the uncertainty surrounding the question last November, when the board voted not to borrow $20 million to keep buying property needed for the reservoir. Before that, the county had been buying and holding land for Newport News since 1990, under an agreement with the city. That's 17 years of moving forward on the reservoir, temporarily halted with one vote.

My story in today's paper explores the argument in two reports released Thursday by the Alliance to Save the Mattaponi. The gist: Previous NN Waterworks projections have not accurately predicted water use up to now, so why should people trust that the projections out to 2040 and beyond will be any closer to the mark?

People are conserving a lot more water. New shower heads and sink faucets and toilets make a real difference, it turns out. Consider that 340,000 people lived in the NN Waterworks service area in 1990, and that population now numbers 400,000. You would expect a similar 18 percent increase in water use? No. Water use has fallen during that time, from about 45 million gallons per day to 43.5 million gallons per day. Could that conservation trend continue? Toilets make up 40 percent of a home's water use, but they don't get replaced often. So it reasonable to assume that older toilets will continue to be replaced, for decades, with more efficient bowls?

This page from the report by York County resident Donald H. Phillips is also pretty astounding. The region's largest industrial water users have clearly found ways to cut use. Smart business for them.

But Dave Morris, of Newport News Waterworks, who has worked on this project for a long time, says the need to plan for the uncertainty of the future outweighs the discrepancy between the predicted and actual water use. He says waterworks is planning for the next 50 to 100 years, and looking at 15 years of data doesn't change the need for the reservoir over that period.

Newport News City Council votes on Tuesday about borrowing another $20 million to buy land in King William, picking up where the King William officials stopped short and wary.