EPA rules for Chesapeake Bay watershed are tougher than expected

The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed tougher-than-expected pollution limits for Chesapeake Bay that would force the six states in the watershed, below, to "double the pace at which they've been removing nitrogen, one of the two nutrients fouling the bay," Timothy Wheeler of The Baltimore Sun reports, calling it "a regimen likely to require costly upgrades to sewage treatment plants, expensive retrofits of storm drains in urban and suburban areas, and major new curbs on runoff of fertilizer and chicken manure."

EPA Regional Administrator Shawn Garvin said the target of a 15 percent nitrogen reduction over seven years "would not be easy for the states to achieve, but they represent federal scientists' best estimates of what's needed to restore fish-sustaining oxygen to the waters of North America's largest estuary," Wheeler writes. "Dead zones form every summer in the Chesapeake from algae blooms that are fed by sewage plants, farm and urban and suburban runoff and air pollution."

Wheeler reports, "The limits represent the first major step toward putting the Bay states on a "pollution diet" aimed at restoring the Chesapeake's water quality by 2025. Maryland and other states must tell the EPA by Sept. 1 how they intend to curb nutrients and sediment enough to reach their goals." (Read more)