Chesapeake Cleanup Degenerating Into "Bureaucratic Farce" - WP [View All]

Halfway through a 10-year program to save the Chesapeake Bay, political leaders are acknowledging that the vaunted cleanup is faltering and are calling for major changes midstream. Once touted as a national model, the cleanup effort has unraveled into what some environmentalists call a bureaucratic farce. Five years of planning, they say, have left the bay no cleaner than it was when the "Chesapeake 2000" pact was signed.

An Eastern Shore congressman is contemplating legislation that would replace the voluntary cleanup strategy with strict regulatory requirements. Governors are pledging to walk the halls of Congress lobbying for $12 billion in needed support. And scientists are exploring the mass introduction of a Chinese oyster to replace the vanishing native breed. "Business as usual won't work," said former Virginia governor Gerald L. Baliles, who led a committee that studied the bay cleanup last year. "More of the same is asking for trouble."

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But large reductions in pollution have not come; at the current rate, the nitrogen goal won't be met until 2038. And the problems with oxygen-poor areas haven't changed. In fact, the summer of 2003 was one of the worst times on record, as nearly 40 percent of the Chesapeake became a suffocating expanse that environmentalists dubbed the "dead zone."

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Douglas F. Jenkins Sr., 70, of Virginia's Northern Neck said he's seen the signs both on land -- where the number of waterman has dropped because of low oyster harvests -- and in the water. For instance, boat anchors used to come up with a menagerie of tiny bottom-dwelling animals crawling on them: sand fleas, worms, snails. Now, Jenkins said, those animals are gone, and probably dead. "The little shells or carcasses are about all you see," Jenkins said."

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31198-2005Jan23.html