Crushed Styrofoam cups, discarded food wrappers and empty plastic soda bottles, whose labels have been faded by weeks in the sun, dot the rocky hillside.

Wind-tossed plastic grocery bags and faded clothes — shredded by their long journey downstream — hang in the branches of the trees that line this small, fetid stretch of the Gwynns Falls, which rolls along virtually unnoticed under Interstate 95 in Southwest Baltimore City. Its destination? The Patapsco River. Then the Chesapeake Bay.

Drowned out by the roar of trucks passing overhead, the water moves over rocks coated with a thick layer of algae, hinting at nitrogen and phosphorus that can choke the life out of a river. Who knows what lies beneath? Discarded diapers? Bags of pet waste? Rusted shopping carts?

Much of the garbage has traveled a long way, originating high in the streams and rivers that wind deep into Baltimore’s suburbs.

“This looks bad here, but it comes from miles away,” said Sujay Kaushal, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Solomons. “You’re looking at a cumulative problem.”

In an effort to clean up the Bay, officials, scientists and activists have turned to the oft-overlooked small tributaries in an effort to trace the source of pollution that leads to the Bay’s ongoing degradation.

“People have been talking about the Bay for 30 years, [but] it just doesn’t resonate,” said Bill Dennison, a professor and researcher at the Center for Environmental Science, referring to the pollution in its tributaries. “It’s just so distant and abstract.”

Scientists at the center are now studying 15 distinct areas of the Bay and have begun detailed reviews of these areas, starting this year with the Chester and Patuxent rivers.

“That’s where the problem solving is going to begin,” Dennison said.

BAY BARELY PASSING

The Bay’s health has posted dismal grades for nearly 20 years, earning the estuary poor scores on countless report cards and assessments.

In the Center for Environmental Science’s (UMCES) second annual Chesapeake Bay Report Card released this month, the Bay scored a C-minus, only a slight improvement over the previous year.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation also releases an annual report card, the most recent report giving the Bay a D, citing increased pollution, worsening water quality and a depressed crab population.

The UMCES’ report, the most recent Bay assessment, also compared the conditions of 15 regions of the Bay, where scores ranged from B to D-minus.

About 150 rivers and streams flow into the Bay, but two major rivers in the Baltimore region stand out as examples of the conditions and challenges in the watershed: the Patapsco and the Patuxent.

“The health of the Bay is a sum of its contributions,” said Jeff Lape, director of the Chesapeake Bay Program, a partnership between governments and advocates.

“The root causes of the problems of the Bay are the same as the root problems in the streams and rivers.”

PATAPSCO RIVER

The Patapsco River, which runs from Carroll County through Baltimore County, Baltimore City, Howard County and Anne Arundel County, is often crowned the most polluted river but recently has shown minor improvements in the levels of dissolved oxygen, which support supports bottom-dwelling animals.

But the river still suffers from new development in Baltimore and Howard counties, where roads replace trees and Dumpsters overflow next to streams, said Betsy McMillion, who works part time coordinating the stream cleanups for the Friends of the Patapsco Valley and Heritage Greenway.

McMillion and her cleanup teams spend many Saturday mornings picking up plastic bags, food wrappers and beer cans from stream banks mainly in Baltimore County.

In 30 cleanups along 10 waterways of the Patapsco in 2007, McMillion’s groups collected 71,272 pounds of trash, filling 1,721 bags, she said.

“It’s an ongoing issue,” McMillion said, standing on the riverbanks between historic Ellicott City in Howard and the Oella district in Baltimore County where she was conducting a cleanup on a recent afternoon with a group of fourth-graders from Resurrection-St. Paul School in Ellicott City.

“You’ll find bottles on the side of the road, and they end up here in the rivers and streams.”

PATUXENT RIVER

Nearby, the Patuxent River, which runs mainly through Howard and into southern Maryland, hasn’t fared much better and this year scored a D-minus on the UMCES’ report card. A more focused assessment of the river released Monday shows the river is in poor condition, particularly in the lower estuary near Solomons Island, where there are low levels of aquatic grasses and an excess of nutrients that reduce water clarity.

The river has shown a continued downward trend after improving in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said Jennifer Bevan-Dangel, executive director of group Patuxent Riverkeeper.

At that time, the 1987 amendments to the federal Clean Water Act forced states to upgrade wastewater treatment facilities by setting regulations and deadlines for improvements. The upgrades to wastewater treatment plants along the river brought improvements in water quality and growth of underwater grasses, which filter the water and remove nitrogen.

But any gains made through sewage upgrades are being offset by uncontrolled development from Mount Airy in Carroll to Fort Meade in Anne Arundel and down into Charles and St. Mary’s counties, Bevan-Dangel said.

“We are definitely seeing a downward trend,” she said.

CAUSES

The garbage tangled in the trees a few feet above the water line at Gwynns Falls isn’t there because strong wind gusts blew it to the area, Kaushal said.

Violent ebbs and flows caused by unfiltered storm-water runoff causes extreme surges in the water level of these streams, flushing the debris and scouring the bottom of living organisms.

In densely developed areas, water doesn’t have a chance to ease into the streams after being naturally filtered through plants, Kaushal said.

Two major nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus, are the main causes of poor water quality. These nutrients, mainly washed off the roads from cars and fertilizers, cause more algae to grow, blocking out light and oxygen for fish and other underwater animals.

Discharged water from the area’s wastewater treatment facilities also carries nitrogen and phosphorus into the Bay tributaries, according to the Chesapeake Bay Program.

In 2005, the Bay Restoration Fund, financed by a monthly user fee, was established to pay for further upgrades to wastewater treatment plants. Many of the 66 major plants are being upgraded or are in line for upgrades.

“That takes time,” said Bruce Michael, director of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ Resource Assessment Service.

Urban storm-water runoff is a major culprit of the Bay’s degradation, and the amount of impervious surfaces — roads and roofs — in the watershed has increased at a pace five times faster than the population increase, according to the Chesapeake Bay Program.

“We really don’t have a general awareness that the storm water is not treated. It simply is a pipe that goes from the street to the tributaries,” Dennison said.

Bevan-Dangel paints a common picture in the suburbs: a newly graded construction site for town houses or offices, with trees cut down and sediment washing into the streams.

“It’s where we grow and how we grow,” she said. For example, the choice shouldn’t be to build new houses on 5 acres of former forested land near a stream.

Rather than build single-family houses on several acres of rural land, development should be concentrated in areas with existing water and sewer infrastructure, she said.

Environmentalists have criticized Anne Arundel government for granting variances to allow construction along the shoreline, in violation of the state’s Critical Area laws intended to limit development along the Bay.

Most notable is the construction of a 6,000-square-foot house on Little Dobbins Island in the Magothy River.

However, like other county officials in the watershed, Anne Arundel County Executive John R. Leopold has vowed to enforce stringent regulations to preserve land and push for a storm-water management program.

“I have taken a proactive stance against environmental law violations,” he said, adding he has increased the number of inspectors to help ensure “fiascoes” like Dobbins Island don’t happen again.

Anne Arundel is also revising the development plan to better guide growth, keeping south Anne Arundel rural, he said.

Howard has a strict growth limit of 1,850 homes a year, with boundaries of how many homes can be built in each part of the county, focusing most of the growth in the more densely developed east.

In Harford, 80 percent of the residential growth has occurred in a defined area around existing infrastructure, Planning Director Pete Gutwald said.

The county also requires a 150-foot buffer along the Susquehanna River, which flows into the Chesapeake at Havre de Grace, and 75-foot buffers along all minor streams and wetlands, he said.

FUTURE FUNDING AS A FIX

Despite the garbage and nutrients choking the river he adores, Kaushal was optimistic about the Bay’s future. Maryland has become intensely focused on restoration and preservation, he said.

“We are at a tipping point,” he said. “The next 20 years are critical.”

Kaushal points to stream restoration efforts such as the one at Minebank Run in Baltimore County. Runoff from the heavily developed area was eroding the banks, but in a two-phase project completed in 2005, county officials stabilized the streambed and removed a concrete channel.

Many environmentalists were encouraged by the creation of the Chesapeake Bay 2010 Trust Fund, a $50 million pot directed to tackling agriculture and urban storm-water runoff.

Amid tight budget times, the General Assembly cut the fund in half its first year but also passed legislation directing how the money would be spent. The bill requires BayStat, Gov. Martin O’Malley’s initiative that monitor’s Bay restoration efforts, be used to assess which programs are most cost-effective.

The money, allotted through grants, would be spent on reducing diffused, or nonpoint, pollution sources, such as agriculture and urban and suburban storm-water runoff.

“That’s a fantastic opportunity, but how do we use those funds? That’s where we involve local solutions,” Dennison said.

Changes must also be made in individual behavior, and that will happen with more attention focused on the streams and rivers feeding into the Bay, Lape said. Governments and organizations should support the local watershed groups, he said.

There also must be a stronger connection to the 17 million people living in in the watershed. The motto “Save the Bay” is meaningless to many people who don’t realize the stream behind their homes runs into the Bay, Lape said.

“Residents don’t identify with the Bay, but they do identify with their local water resources,” he said.

AT A GLANCE

The Chesapeake Bay is about 200 miles long stretching from Havre de Grace in Harford to Virginia Beach, Va.

The Bay and its tributaries have about 11,684 miles of shoreline.

Nearly 17 million people live in the 64,000-square-mile watershed.

About 150 major rivers and streams are in the Bay watershed.

?Between 1985 and 2005, the population of the watershed grew by about 3 million, from 13.5 million to 16.6 million. It is estimated to be growing by about 170,000 people per year, and experts predict the population will increase to nearly 20 million by 2030.

Between 1970 and 2000, the average household population decreased, but the lot size increased by 60 percent and the average house increased from 1,500 square feet to 2,265 square feet.

Between 1990 and 2000, the size of impervious area increased by nearly 250,000 acres, or about 41 percent, but the Bay watershed’s population increased by just 8 percent.

Wastewater treatment plants annually deliver about 3.1 pounds of nitrogen per person to the Bay and its rivers.

Septic systems annually deliver about 9.5 pounds of nitrogen per person.

Source: The Chesapeake Bay Program

smichael@baltimoreexaminer.com