The EPA, following the new executive order put forth by President Obama, is going to be taking a much stronger stance on cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay by using the full power of the Clean Water Act. EPA is working with the watershed states (Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, New York, West Virginia) and the District of Columbia to develop a TMDL (see previous posting for explanation) for the entire Chesapeake Bay watershed, which will be the largest and most complex TMDL developed. To make it a more manageable, the overall bay TMDL will be broken down into 92 smaller TMDLs for individual bay segments. Each segment will be assigned pollution loads, or how much nitrogen, phosphorus, sediment, etc. can be in the waterways, and these loads will be further broken down to how much can come from non-point source (farm and hard-surface runoff) and point-source (sewage treatment plants, and urban stormwater discharge) discharge. Unlike previous bay clean-up efforts, there will be 2-year milestones that must be met or there will be financial consequences to the offending state(s). The goals are to have the TMDL written by December 2010, and have all the practices in place by 2025 that will result in the reduction of nitrogen loads by 174 million pounds and phosphorus by 14 million pounds. Previously, environmental groups have complained that the federal government was not taking the lead in cleaning up of the Chesapeake Bay, but with this new executive order EPA is putting the Chesapeake Bay front and center. It is still not entirely clear how this order will impact agriculture, but, needless to say, ag will need to keep up the good work and go even further to reduce nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment losses from farms.
http://www.epa.gov/reg3wapd/pdf/pdf_chesbay/BayTMDLFactSheet8_6.pdf
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