By Karl Blankenship, Chesapeake Bay Journal

It has taken more than four years, but leaders in the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort say they’ve found a path forward for dealing with the added pollution stemming from Conowingo Dam.

It’s a solution that could soon ramp up pollution controls in the Susquehanna River basin, which drains the Bay’s largest tributary.

And over time, it may involve seeding streams with mussels, dredging sediment from behind the 94-foot-high dam and cleaning up waterways hundreds of miles upstream damaged by acid mine drainage.

The plan is not fully funded and will not achieve its pollution reduction goals by the 2025 Bay cleanup deadline.

Still, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which earlier threatened to scuttle the plan, signed off in July on the “phased approach” to address the problem created as the dam lost its capacity to trap sediment and nutrients flowing downstream.

Under that approach, some work will begin soon. But states in the Bay watershed — Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, New York, West Virginia and Delaware — will have time to find more money and new solutions.

The EPA will evaluate progress in 2026 and decide if the approach is working.

“It’s a challenging issue, not all of our making, but it’s up to us to figure it out,” Adam Ortiz, administrator of the EPA’s Mid-Atlantic region, told officials from Bay states at a recent meeting.

To that end, the Conowingo effort has already been “extraordinary,” said Ann Swanson, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission.

This year, Maryland approved $25 million to help implement nutrient control actions — much of it in Pennsylvania — to help partially offset the dam’s impact.

It was the first time one Bay state approved spending significant money in another, which Swanson, who has led the legislative advisory commission for 34 years, called “a historic action that, at least in my career, I never saw before.”

The money will come with strings attached, such as requiring that projects be completed and functioning before they would get money.

That’s one example of how the Conowingo plan has given impetus for new ideas. Those involved hope it ultimately serves as a testing ground for new thinking about the decades-old Bay cleanup effort.

“It does bring a level of priority to these types of innovative solutions,” said Jill Whitcomb of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and co-chair of a committee overseeing the Conowingo work. “I really am hopeful, and optimistic, that we’re going to see a lot of good things coming out of this.”

A problem, if not a “ticking time bomb”

The Conowingo Dam crosses the Susquehanna River in Maryland, just 10 miles upstream from the Bay. For decades, the dam helped protect Bay water quality by trapping a portion of the nutrients and sediment flowing downstream before they reached the Chesapeake.

It also loomed as a threat. Scientists realized that the reservoir behind the dam would one day fill with sediment, causing more of it to flow past the hydroelectric facility.

Many people called it a “ticking time bomb,” destined to undercut the Bay’s restoration — concerns fueled by dramatic satellite images of murky brown water extending from the river far into the Bay after major storms.

But recent studies have painted a more nuanced picture.

To begin with, they emphasize that most of the sediment and nutrients washing into the Bay from the Susquehanna, even during large storms, originate from the watershed upstream of the dam, not the reservoir behind it.

And while major storms add to that by flushing sediment out of the reservoir, studies show that nutrients bound to the stored sediment are often in forms not easily used by algae.

If flushed into the Bay, many are harmlessly buried rather than fueling the algae blooms that harm aquatic life.

Also, the reservoir isn’t technically filled. It is in a state of “dynamic equilibrium.”

Less sediment is trapped behind the dam as it approaches its capacity, but large storms excavate some of the stored material, clearing space to accumulate more. The amount reaching the Bay varies from year to year.

When all of that is factored together, computer models estimate that under average conditions, the Bay’s water quality is being impacted by an additional 6.25 million pounds of nutrients each year. Nitrogen accounts for 6 million of it and phosphorus the rest.

In all, that’s only about 5% of the river’s annual nutrient load to the Bay. But it’s a slug of nutrients that the region must offset to restore the Chesapeake — and it wasn’t factored into the 2025 cleanup goals.

Show us the money, EPA says

When state and federal partners in the Chesapeake Bay Program set the latest Bay goals in 2010, they thought the reservoir wouldn’t be filled until after the 2025 cleanup deadline. So the Conowingo impact was not accounted for when the EPA assigned nutrient reduction goals to each of the Bay states.

But research in 2012 showed that the Conowingo reservoir was essentially already filled.

That meant the region would not reach its 2025 water quality goals unless the nutrients washing past the dam were directly reduced or offset by pollution reductions in other places.

States were already struggling to meet their existing goals so, rather than charge them with more work, federal and state officials agreed to create a separate plan to address the Conowingo problem.

In 2019, the Bay Program approved nearly $600,000 for the Center for Watershed Protection, Chesapeake Conservancy and Chesapeake Bay Trust to write it.

Their plan, released last year, examined the option of making additional nutrient reductions across the entire Bay watershed.

Ultimately, though, it focused on the Susquehanna basin — primarily on Pennsylvania farmland, where actions would be the most effective and least expensive — with additional work in parts of Maryland and New York.

But the price tag was more than $53 million a year, and there was no money.

Earlier, officials had hoped the plan would be mostly funded by Exelon, the dam’s owner, as part of its new operating license. In the end, an agreement negotiated with Maryland provided $200 million over 50 years, but largely for fish passage and habitat improvements, not the reservoir issue.

As a result, the EPA in January declared it had “no confidence” the plan would be implemented and threatened to scrap it unless states came up with money.

If they didn’t, the EPA said it would instead assign more pollution reductions to each state. That would greatly increase the cost because it would force actions in places where they would be less effective.

The rationale, the EPA said, was that all of the states had benefitted when the dam was trapping nutrients, which lessened the reductions each state was assigned in 2010.

A pledge with conditions

All of the Bay states helped to pay for creating the new plan. But so far, Maryland is the only state to commit funds for enacting it.

Most of the plan’s initial phase focuses on watersheds that cross the Maryland-Pennsylvania state line, with some potential work along the Pennsylvania-New York border.

“We needed a case study somewhere to start taking a bite out of the apple,” Whitcomb said. “What better way of demonstrating how jurisdictions can work across jurisdictional boundaries than focusing on watersheds that cross those boundaries?”

The workplan calls for a 1.675-million-pound nitrogen reduction by the end of next year, a goal that Matt Rowe, of the Maryland Department of the Environment and the Conowingo committee’s other co-chair, called “ambitious.”

“A lot of it is ramping up the capacity and the infrastructure to do implementation,” Rowe said.

The money from Maryland will flow to the interstate Susquehanna River Basin Commission, which is handling financial transactions related to the plan.

In a unique twist, though, Maryland is requiring that the funds be used on a pay-for-performance basis, said Suzanne Dorsey, MDE deputy secretary.

Most Bay projects are funded up front through grants, contracts or cost-share programs. But those projects don’t always work: Cover crops may not grow, and streamside forest buffers may be eaten by deer.

To obtain the Maryland money, companies and nonprofit organizations can submit proposals for various projects, which will be selected using a ranking formula. They will be paid only when the projects are installed and working.

Dorsey said the pay-for-performance program could spur additional actions at lower cost.

For instance, a company under contract to build a one-mile stream restoration may undertake an even larger project while it has equipment on site because of the promise that the additional work will be reimbursed.

Or farmers enrolled in a traditional one-year cover crop program might commit to multiple years because they would get paid back.

“It’s only guaranteed if they deliver us the nutrient reductions,” Dorsey said. “That’s where the taxpayer benefits. But the investor can benefit because they get that nice, guaranteed contract that says, ‘If you deliver this, we’ll pay you.’”

Still, the one-time $25 million investment is much less than the estimated $53 million needed annually to fully implement the plan. Whitcomb and Rowe said other funding options are being explored, including seeking major grants.

Court Challenge

Funding could be impacted by a case to be heard on Oct. 11 by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia. Environmental groups contend the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission erred when issuing the new operating license to Exelon because the agreement between the company and Maryland failed to fully address all water quality issues associated with the dam’s operation.

If they win, environmental groups say the utility may have to pay more to support cleanup efforts. “That makes everything for the [Conowingo] process easier because there’s much more money on hand,” said Betsy Nicholas, executive director of Waterkeepers Chesapeake.

Exelon has long contended that it is not responsible for the pollution that originates upstream and has said that paying to remove the sediment could cost more money than the dam generates.

A hunt for new approaches

The initial actions being funded will look like those in other state cleanup plans: streamside forest buffers, nutrient-absorbing cover crops and nutrient management plans for farms. But officials working on the issue say they hope the plan promotes experimentation with new approaches to meeting Bay cleanup goals.

For Conowingo, one much-touted idea is to dredge sediment from the reservoir to improve trapping capacity. Maryland is spending $6 million to continue the exploration of dredging and potential reuse of the sediment.

Studies so far have shown elevated levels of arsenic, magnesium and other materials in the sediment, Rowe said, but not high enough to preclude their reuse for certain purposes.

While the reuse of dredged material often means creating products like cement or bricks, Dorsey said it could also be used for projects that protect shorelines or provide other ecosystem benefits. “It’s all on the table,” she said.

The Bay Program is expected to appoint a panel of experts soon to determine how much nutrient reduction could be achieved through dredging.

But officials are looking at other approaches as well — ones that meet both the Conowingo goals and help to build healthier ecosystems.

Freshwater Mussels

Maryland is using $4.5 million from its Exelon settlement to support mussel reintroduction on the Susquehanna, including upgrades at its Joseph Manning Hatchery.

Restoring freshwater mussels is not part of the current Bay cleanup strategy, but there’s been growing interest in their potential. Like oysters in the Chesapeake, mussels in rivers and streams filter water, but their populations are a fraction of historic levels.

A report from the Bay Program Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee earlier this year, using rough estimates, said that the Susquehanna’s historic mussel population might have been able to remove as much as 8% of today’s nitrogen loads. The present-day depleted population would remove only a fraction of that, the report said.

“There are opportunities for other water quality benefits and potential nutrient reductions through these organisms,” Pennsylvania’s Whitcomb said.

Mine Drainage

Many streams in the Susquehanna basin are essentially dead because of acidic runoff from long-abandoned coal mines but bringing them back to life may also help the Bay.

Under the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act approved earlier this year, Pennsylvania will get about $250 million annually for the next 15 years to clean up abandoned mine lands and restore streams contaminated by acidic runoff.

Some research suggests that as those streams return to health and their aquatic communities recover, they will consume nutrients that otherwise flow downstream.

At Pennsylvania’s request, the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee later this year is expected to review research about whether cleaning mine drainage might also help meet goals for Conowingo and the Bay.

While most states are expected to miss their 2025 goals, those involved with the Conowingo plan are hoping that any successes it reaps will provide valuable lessons. “If we can bring some innovations, other practices, then that’s going to benefit everyone,” Whitcomb said.

[Visit DEP’s Chesapeake Bay Watershed webpage to learn more about cleaning up rivers and streams in Pennsylvania's portion of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.  Click Here to sign up for regular updates on Pennsylvania’s progress.

[How Clean Is Your Stream?

[Check DEP’s 2022 Water Quality Report to find out how clean streams are near you.]

(Reprinted from the Chesapeake Bay Journal.)

More Chesapeake Bay News:

Latest From The Chesapeake Bay Journal

Click Here to subscribe to the free Chesapeake Bay Journal

Related Article:

-- DEP Submits Final Pennsylvania Chesapeake Bay Watershed Plan To EPA With New State Funds Supporting Partners’ Progress

[Posted: September 6, 2022]

9/12/2022