Bucking a national trend downward, Maryland businesses, factories and power plants released more toxic pollutants into the environment in 2007 than they did the year before, new data show.

According to the Toxics Release Inventory maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency, all disposals and releases of hazardous pollutants in 2007 were about five percent lower than they were in 2006, the agency announced Thursday.  Releases to air declined 7 percent, while water discharges went down 5 percent.

Maryland, however, saw a 27 percent increase in its total releases of toxic substances, from 39.9 million pounds in 2006 to 50.5 million pounds in 2007.   Total air emissions grew by 28 percent, while discharges to water grew by 5 percent in that time.

Dawn Stoltzfus, spokeswoman for the Maryland Department of the Environment, said the state's increase in toxic releases in 2007 came almost completely from Constellation Energy's Brandon Shores and H.A. Wagner power plants in Pasadena.  The plants, pictured above, reported releasing an additional 9.5 million pounds of hydrochloric acid in 2007, she said, which the company attributed to burning coal that year with a higher chloride content.

That acidic release should be reduced by next year, Stoltzfus said, when Constellation finishes building new air pollution "scrubbers" for its Brandon Shores burners.

For whatever reason, the rise in toxic chemical releases this year breaks a downward trend of at least three years for the state.  Nationally, there also are some upticks in toxic pollution amid the overall downward trend - increase reported in "persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic" chemicals like lead, dioxin, mercury and PCBs.

You can read EPA's release on the nationwide toxic release trends here.  If you want to dig into Maryland's situation, the 2007 fact sheet is here, and the 2006 summary here.

(2006 photo by Kim Hairston of the Baltimore Sun)

Posted by Tim Wheeler at 6:43 AM | Permalink
                       

How "public" are public records if all identifying information is stripped out? 

An Anne Arundel County judge has ruled that the Maryland Department of Agriculture must release reports from farmers on how they manage their animals' waste and any chemical fertilizer they use.  But the judge ordered that state officials redact all identifying information from any farmers' reports it does release.

The Waterkeeper Alliance, which had sued the state to see how Eastern Shore  poultry farmers are managing their chicken manure, issued a press release calling the ruling "an important first step towards bringing transparency to industrial agricultural practice."

But the waterkeepers' announcement failed to mention the judge's caveat about deleting identifying information. Indeed, environmental activists say it's unclear how meaningful the reports will be without being able to know which farms they cover. 

Farmers are required to have "nutrient management plans" under a state law meant to protect streams and the Cheapeake Bay from polluted farm runoff.  The law requires farmers to submit summaries of their plans to the state, but stipulates that the state must keep those reports in such a manner that protects the farmers' identities.

The environmental group had reached a tentative deal with the state to get redacted versions of the current nutrient management plan summaries on file with the Department of Agriculture, plus - unredacted - any old plans on file.  The Maryland Farm Bureau, learning of the pending deal, then went to court to block it.  The two sides duked it out in court in December. 

Continue reading "Maryland farm plans public - sort of" »

Posted by Tim Wheeler at 12:13 PM in Agriculture, water pollution | Permalink
                       

Two new reports deliver sobering reminders of how development is slowly strangling our rivers and streams. 

Just out is the Potomac Conservancy's 2nd annual report on the state of the "nation's river," which finds the biggest threat coming from pollution washing off the increasingly hardened landscape of the watershed.

Water quality and fish start to suffer when as little as 10 percent of a watershed gets paved over, researchers have found. In some of the more intensely urbranized stretches of the Potomac - in and around the District of Columbia - 45 percent or more of the land is covered with pavement, roofs and other impervious surfaces that prevent rainfall from soaking into the ground, the conservancy's report notes.  The photo at right, from the Natural Resources Defense Council, gives an aerial view of where the Anacostia and Potomac rivers meet in Washington.

With nowhere else to go, the rain gets funneled by storm drains into streams, turning their gurgling flows into muddy torrents tearing away at streambanks.   Fish, and the bugs on which they feed have a hard time surviving in such conditions. 

While pavement is spreading, tree cover is diminishing, making the river and its tributaries even more inhospitable to fish, the report says.  Trees soak up rainfall and shade streams so fish don't get overheated on hot days.  But in the District, the tree canopy has declined by 16 percent over the past 30 years, while stormwater runoff has increased by 34 percent.

"We're gobbling up more land, and that's in large part why stormwater runoff is the fastest growing source of pollution in the Potomac waterhsed," conservancy president Hedrick Belin said when I reached him to talk about the report.

Nearly half of the Potomac watershed is in Maryland.  A 2002 assessment found that two-thirds of the river's tributaries in the state were impaired.

The other report comes via my colleague Candy Thomson, the Baltimore Sun's outdoors writer, who reported in her column on Sunday about a new Department of Natural Resources study showing that central Maryland is losing its trout streams, despite costly restoration efforts.  Trout are especially vulnerable to loss of tree cover, which warms the water, and to sediment pollution that can smother their eggs on stream bottoms

"Biologists compiled more than three decades of aerial photos and ground surveys to show that brook trout have lost their fin-hold in six streams in the Baltimore area," Candy wrote.  The troutless tally: Baisman Run in Cockeysville, Sawmill Branch near Phoenix, Stillwater Creek near Eldersburg, Timber Run near Reisterstown, Red Run in Owings Mills and Goodwin Run. 

(Goodwin Run, it should be noted, was the focus of a restoration project I wrote about 16 years ago.  At the time, DNR biologists said they thought it was unlikely to succeed longterm, with ongoing development in the headwaters.)

Posted by Tim Wheeler at 11:25 AM in water pollution | Permalink