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BAD WATER: DEAD ZONES, ALGAL BLOOMS, AND FISH KILLS
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At the beginning of the summer, the Environmental Protection Agency predicted that 2007 would be an “average” year for water quality conditions in the Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) spent the summer collecting reports from citizens, government officials and agencies, partner groups, and our own employees’ first-hand experience to determine just what an “average” year looks like. Here’s what we found:
- Blooms of often harmful, toxic algae were reported from Baltimore to Hampton Roads, often accompanied by dangerously low levels of life-sustaining dissolved oxygen.
- In Maryland, from June to early August there were over 45 fish kills due to algae or oxygen-deprived dead zones. Some were small—others were as devastating as 26,000 dead in Marley Creek in northern Anne Arundel County.
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Join CBF Senior Scientist Beth McGee and Senior Naturalist John Page Williams on the Chesapeake Bay as they demonstrate one of the ways scientists measure the Dead Zone—by seeing what's living under the surface. | - Along the Maryland/Virginia border, an algal bloom lasted for more than two months on the Potomac River, eventually killing over 300,000 fish.
- For the second time in three years, young-of-the-year smallmouth bass in the Susquehanna and Juniata river basins exhibited infections due to high levels of the bacteria Flavobacterium.
- Fish kills of smallmouth bass and redbreast sunfish reported for the last four years in the Shenandoah River system have now jumped to another watershed: the upper James and its beautiful Cowpasture and Maury River tributaries.
This is an “average” year?
Resiliency at Risk
Even more alarming is evidence that the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem and many of its rivers and streams are losing their resiliency due to pollution, sprawling growth, and loss of habitat. These Bay ecosystems have become more unbalanced and, in the process, are losing their ability to recover from continued pollution. Despite the relatively static levels of pollutant loads, evidence suggests the dead zone—the areas of the bay where levels of oxygen are too low to support most aquatic life—has increased over time.
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Mainstem Chesapeake Dead Zone Volume: 1950-2007 |
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From 1950 to the present day, the volume of the Bay's waters suffering from severely depleted oxygen has increased. Source: Chesapeake Bay Program and Hagy et al. 2004 |
How does this happen? Several factors and processes have contributed to this loss in resiliency. These include: decreases in water clarity due to algae and sediment overloads; the loss of filtering Bay grasses and marshland; struggling populations of oysters, menhaden, and other water-filtering animals; and sea level rise.
There is a Plan
To protect and reinvigorate the Bay’s ability to heal itself, our leaders, specifically the governors of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania must act today. Well-developed plans offer a blueprint to reduce the nitrogen and phosphorus pollution that are choking the Bay and its rivers and streams. What we need now is the will to get the job done.
Will our elected leaders saddle future generations with the sullied Bay conditions that EPA calls “average”? Or will elected leadership realize a vision of clean, safe, and healthy water for the people, animals, and environment of the Chesapeake Bay?
Is clean water no longer a right? Should we come to accept dead water, beach closures, and dying fish as normal? Is this what our government officials mean when they call conditions like this “average?”
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