Once-toxic stretch of Elizabeth River teeming again

CHESAPEAKE

Can nature really recover from decades of toxic pollution?

Joe Rieger, a senior scientist with the Elizabeth River Project, answered that question last week while sampling for aquatic life near a newly constructed marsh atop an old waste site in Money Point.

Wearing hip-waders freckled with mud, Rieger looked up from a mass of squirming fish, grass shrimp and baby crabs in a bucket and smiled.

"Tell them the Elizabeth River is not dead," he said. "I mean, just look at this!"

It has been one year since the Elizabeth River Project, a local environmental group, completed its largest cleanup effort to date - removing tons of black, toxic sediment from a section of the Southern Branch of the river, then planting marshes and wetlands along its shore.

In the short time since this $1.3 million green patch was plugged into the abused ecosystem, Rieger and partners from various government agencies and universities have been pleasantly surprised at the turnabout.

Where hardly any life had existed, now there are at least 17 species of fish and shellfish milling about - eels, flounder, oysters, speckled trout, shad, spot, croaker, among others.

"I put it this way: If you build it, they will come," said Walter Priest, a wetlands specialist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who helped design the new marshes at Money Point, a haven for heavy industries in Chesapeake for more than a century.

Priest noted a similar reaction across the Southern Branch in Portsmouth, at a former waste pit near the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, on Paradise Creek.

There, shoreline wetlands were restored and artificial oyster reefs built within the creek shallows, providing habitat and shelter for marine life. Within months, Priest said, his sampling nets were teeming with fish where hardly any could be found before.

Scientists are discovering other curious things when it comes to replacing intensely polluted systems.

Duke University researchers are studying the Money Point area to confirm an earlier finding at a contaminated site in the Pacific Northwest - that fish will alter their genetic code to give themselves additional life-saving protections against toxic pollution.

The fish studied in Washington state were able to stave off heavy contamination, but there was a trade-off - they were more susceptible to low-oxygen conditions, basically switching one safeguard for the other.

Duke wants to determine whether fish off Money Point experienced the same genetic trading, and whether they will switch back now that the contamination has been removed.

Researchers from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science also are studying whether cancer rates will drop in Money Point fish after the gooey toxics are gone. In some spots, 90 percent of resident fish developed cancerous tumors.

Results from both experiments are expected soon, Rieger said.

Not everything went according to plan at Money Point. The summer heat killed off about half of the wetland grasses near the new marshes. But those will be replanted this fall, he said.

The next phase should begin next year, when more toxic sediments are to be scooped out and replaced with clean sand. Oyster reefs also will be built.

The entire Money Point work should be finished in 2013, Rieger said.

The site, like many of the toxic hot spots on the Southern Branch, suffered from creosote contamination. Creosote is a tar-like wood preservative with links to cancer, and there were several wood-treatment plants along the river beginning in the early part of the 20th century.

In many cases, creosote wastes were either dumped into the river or buried in shoreline pits. These practices occurred before environmental laws existed. Today, such disposal techniques would be illegal.

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com