It was with a little chagrin, but no surprise whatsoever, that I read recently of the Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts failing to meet the program’s ambitious goals by the 2025 deadline. While this might be true, there are hopeful signs of recovery.
For instance, you can now swim in Baltimore Harbor, which just 10 years ago would have been cause for your life insurance company to cancel your double-indemnity policy.
Over the past 30 years, all the environmental groups involved in the bay’s restoration have been applying the method of adaptive management as they evolutionarily discovered which strategies work and which ones don’t work so well, and how they could be made to work better. This has been a trial-and-error effort out of necessity. Nobody had tried to clean up America’s largest estuary before.
During that same period, the population in the Mid-Atlantic region has grown by 15% from 37 million to 42 million, meaning there are that many more people living near the bay, each person flushing toilets six times a day. That’s 30 million additional toilet flushes a day.
That’s a lot of pollution (or: insert your favorite euphemism here) to counteract. And that’s just one impact of population growth on the environment. No wonder the program has fallen short of its goals. Still, as I say, there are signs that not all the work has been in vain.
Two years ago, I gave a tour of Franklin Point State Park to Maryland state Sen. Sarah Elfreth along with my rescue retriever, Millie. At that time, we walked along the bayside portion of the park. A true champion of Maryland’s environment, the senator was alarmed by the severe erosion there, which had eaten up acres of shoreline and left a vast cluster of toppled trees.
This section of the park is on Franklin Point proper, just south of the Columbia Beach neighborhood on the Shady Side Peninsula in southern Anne Arundel County. The severity of the erosion was because it faces more or less southeast, and there’s nothing but open bay for 103 miles in that direction. An osprey flying that way that far in a perfectly straight line would wind up on the Virginia bit of the lower Eastern Shore not far from the village of Machipongo.
That means the northwesterly wind and current have 103 miles to build up force. Such lengthy buildup is referred to as “fetch.” I told the senator that the Maryland Dept. of Natural Resources (DNR) had a project in the works to repair the damage, but it had been dormant nearly a decade. In the ensuing years since that tour, the project suddenly came back to life and a new living shoreline was completed this past May.
If you want to see what progress has been made over time in the shoreline protection department, you only need to look at an aerial photograph of this site. Decades ago, the Columbia Beach shoreline was encapsulated in a solid wall of rock. Two saltwater ponds got sealed off from the bay, causing them to stagnate. This is an early example of how not to do it.
The Franklin Point project connects with the southern tip of the Columbia Beach bulkhead, but instead of a solid wall of rock, there are judiciously placed breakwaters separated by gaps of sandy beach. This “living shoreline” strategy allows essential access in and out of the water for terrapins, horseshoe crabs and other wildlife. In this case, the project has created a fairly large crescent-shaped beach, and quite a pleasant one at that.
Millie and I stopped by to inspect the project on one of those cool, breezy days this past week. It was at low tide, and sure enough, Millie discovered with alarm a horseshoe crab up near the damp high tide mark, struggling to inch its way through the sand toward the receding water. Horseshoe crabs, like terrapins, need such a beach to lay their eggs, as they’ve been doing for the past 445 million years.
When Millie was through with her investigation, I gently picked the critter up by its shell and waded out into the water to let it wiggle away. If you see one stranded up on a beach, don’t pick it up by the tail, or “telson.” It can snap off easily and the crab needs it for navigation. The presence of this particular horseshoe crab meant that the new beach has the seal of approval from Maryland’s oldest living fossil.
The water in the cove between the stone breakwaters was shallow and still clear. Millie frolicked in the gentle waves. The view from there is impressive. On a clear day like this, you can see the pine tree fringe of Jefferson Island nearly nine miles across the bay. Just offshore, you can see a line of stakes that comprise a pound net, replete with a regiment of cormorants perched on the tops of the posts, waiting for a free meal at the waterman’s expense.
Millie and I had the whole beach to ourselves, outside of the ospreys circling overhead. The habitat has quite a coastal feel, with a forest of windblown loblolly pines, hollies and sweet gum trees.
Volunteers had planted native grasses that looked green and vibrant even with the drought we’ve been experiencing. The planted areas have been roped off until the plants get established. Their roots will help hold the new sand in place and they’ll help absorb excess stormwater runoff before it washes into the bay.
We walked along the high breakwater and saw where it connects with the original stone bulkhead that runs to the end of the point, about 300 yards farther south. I’d be thrilled if volunteers were to cut a new trail running through the forest to the tip of the point, and then create a pedestrian ferry across the back channel to connect with the main section of Franklin Point State Park on the mainland of the Shady Side Peninsula.
I was pleased with the results of the new living shoreline, and pleased the DNR had created a new parking area next to the bus turn-around at the end of Columbia Beach Road. The stroll down a lane lined with pine trees leads a short dist
ance to the beach.
Most of all, I was pleased the horseshoe crabs have a new beach where they can crawl up and lay their eggs in the sand, just as they’ve done for so many millennia. Build it and they will come. See? There are hopeful signs.
Franklin Point State Park
- Columbia Beach, Maryland
- Directions: From Edgewater, head east on Central Avenue, then turn south onto Muddy Creek Road, which becomes West Shady Side Road. Important: you need to pass by the first entrance to Franklin Point State Park on Dent Road and turn right onto Columbia Beach Road. Follow that to the end and park just past the school bus turn-around.
- Free admission.
- No facilities.
- Open dawn to dusk.
- Take home trash and doggy bags.
- Happy dogs on leashes are welcome.