The Department of Environmental Protection announced new monitoring requirements for significant sewage and industrial dischargers to help implement its Chesapeake Bay Tributary Strategy.

There are about 190 significant sewage and industrial wastewater plants that discharge nutrients into the Susquehanna and Potomac rivers going to the Chesapeake Bay. They contribute only about 11 percent of the nitrogen and about 18 percent of the phosphorous going to the Bay from Pennsylvania.

89 percent of the nitrogen and 82 percent of the phosphorus comes from nonpoint sources of pollution—septic tanks, agriculture and forest runoff, urban stormwater and development activities. Also newly identified as a major nonpoint source contributor of sediments and nutrients is stream channel erosion.

To meet new water quality goals established by the Chesapeake Bay Agreement, Pennsylvania will need to reduce nitrogen by an additional 37 million pounds per year, phosphorus by an additional 1.1 million pounds per year and sediment by an additional 116,000 tons per year.

To implement the Strategy, DEP has begun to put new limits on wastewater treatment plant discharges, asked county conservation districts to develop plans for controlling nonpoint sources of pollution and is developing a water quality credit trading program that will reduce the cost of complying with the new requirements.

The capital costs to meet the commitments made by DEP are estimated at $8.2 billion. Estimates for annualized costs for capital and operation and maintenance are over $1 billion per year.

More specifically, the capital cost estimates are—

· Stormwater/Land Development - $5.6 billion

· Septic Systems - $1.6 billion

· Agriculture - $592 million

· Point sources - $376 million (or more depending on specific limits)

· Forest- $25 million

These costs are roughly equivalent to twice the entire annual budget for all environmental protection programs in the Commonwealth.

Between 1985 and 2002, the Commonwealth implemented measures to reduce phosphorus going to the Bay by 858,000 pounds per year, cut nitrogen by more than 10.9 million pounds per year and reduce sediment by 130,000 tons per year. Today, all six water quality monitoring stations measuring nutrients in the Susquehanna River show a declining trend in nitrogen loadings.

Pennsylvania was also the first state to meet the goal of the Chesapeake 2000 Agreement to preserve permanently from development 20 percent of the land area in Pennsylvania’s share of the Bay watershed. More than 2.9 million acres have been set aside. In addition, the state has achieved a net gain of some 6,000 acres of wetland resources over the last two decades and restored 1,297 miles of riparian forest buffers-substantially more than the 600 miles that the state initially committed to restoring by 2010.

To learn more, visit the Chesapeake Bay Tributary Strategy webpage.

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8/12/2005