THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, June 25, 1996 TAG: 9606250282
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B7 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: FREDERICKSBURG LENGTH: 58 lines
Efforts to control Chesapeake Bay pollution are doomed by uncontrolled population around the Bay and along its tributaries, a geology professor says.
``I don't see how you can avoid the simple arithmetic,'' said Robert L. McConnell, who teaches at Mary Washington College.
The region has 16 million residents. It includes Baltimore and Annapolis, Md.; Washington, D.C.; and Virginia's ``Golden Crescent,'' which sweeps from the Washington suburbs through Fredericksburg, Richmond and Hampton Roads.
``It's one of the fastest-growing areas in the developed world,'' McConnell said. ``Its population is growing at a rate of 1.3 (percent) to 1.6 percent a year, which means the population doubles every 54 years.
``How can we deal with that? It's unsustainable. It can't happen.''
McConnell has had his students perform this calculation: Take the volume of the Bay and divide it by the amount of effluent running from sewage-treatment plants in Virginia alone.
The amount of treated sewage equals 1.65 percent of the Bay's volume in a year's time. At the current rate of population growth, that volume will double every 50 years, McConnell said.
``In 300 years, at that rate, we'll be putting the total volume of the Chesapeake Bay in treated sewage,'' he said. ``No wonder the Bay has a nitrogen problem.''
Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and the federal government have been working to control pollution in the estuary since 1983. The effort serves as an international model of environmental protection.
McConnell's warnings come at a time when the Bay cleanup can cite major accomplishments.
Water quality improvements and catch restrictions have restored the striped bass. The Potomac and Patuxtent rivers are in better health. The amount of submerged aquatic grass in the Bay - a key indicator of aquatic improvements - is 60 percent greater than in 1984.
But a report ordered by Virginia and its Bay partners put the region on notice seven years ago that growth and development could derail the cleanup.
``Even the most casual review of the state of the Chesapeake Bay region reveals disturbing trends that will slowly overtake the gains being make in improving environmental quality,'' read the report by the 2020 Panel, which examined the consequences of growth and development in the Bay watershed to 2020.
Those words continue to haunt the cleanup, said John Lipman, a staff member of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, through which the three states and the federal government are pursuing the Bay restoration.
Lipman said the long-term solution to Bay pollution problems will be how the three states can refine land-use restrictions, farming and development practices to accommodate extra people.
``The real issue is not so much that we have more population coming into the region, but how we manage that population,'' Lipman said.
Virginia and Maryland have enacted land-use controls designed to reduce the impact of farming and shoreline development on the Bay.
But both states have shied away from centralized population growth and development controls that McConnell said are necessary to restrain growth. by CNB