No further sign of muck plume in Chesapeake Bay

There were no dead bodies, no tree limbs, no brown mud washing toward the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay on Friday, and that was somewhat surprising.

The massive sediment plume flowing south down the Bay from the flooded Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and New York was a no-show, and scientists now suspect the forecasted wall of storm debris may not hit Virginia.

"I don't think it'll impact Virginia much at all, that's my gut reaction right now," said Michael Ford, ecosystem science manager for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Chesapeake Bay Office, based in Maryland.

Ford made his comments Thursday, a week after he and other scientists predicted the brown curtain of mud, debris and, yes, even carcasses, appeared headed down the Bay on its way out to the Atlantic Ocean. The material stemmed from Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee, which swelled the mighty Susquehanna - the Bay's biggest source of freshwater - to near-historic levels.

Ford and others now are seeing the plume spread out near the Maryland-Virginia border, with the mud and sediments slowing down and settling to the bottom.

John Donat, director of the water quality lab at Old Dominion University, said research crews were out in the Virginia portion of the Bay earlier this week and "didn't see any evidence of the plume."

"It's kind of odd, to be honest," Donat said Thursday. "This was not expected."

Another research team from ODU took water samples Friday on a line crossing near the mouth of the Bay, from Kiptopeke State Park on the Eastern Shore to just off the Chesapeake Bay-Bridge Tunnel in Virginia Beach.

The water was its usual green, with no hint of brown, though scientists did notice that freshwater from the storms had made conditions slightly less salty.

"It's pretty clear out there, not bad at all," said Ryan Morse, a water investigator for the Hampton Roads Sanitation District, who was helping to analyze samples during the ODU research cruise Friday.

"I don't think we'll get the big loads of sediment from the plume," Morse added, "but we'll get a lot of freshwater, probably some nutrients too."

Nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, from fertilizers, storm drains, farms and animal waste, wash off the land and cause algae blooms and dead zones in the Bay. Excessive nutrients are the biggest pollution problem facing the Bay, and governments are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to combat the trend.

Researchers have fanned out across the Bay in the aftermath of the storms and the plume, trying to determine the ecological damage. Samples will undergo chemical tests in labs, a process that can take weeks.

Scientists fear the muddy runoff will choke oyster beds and key underwater grasses under a thick blanket of dirt. Luckily, the storms arrived late enough to not strike when fish and shellfish are spawning, and after most sea grasses had bloomed.

The research cruise Friday was one of many scientists will take in the months ahead, a grueling exercise of lowering collection devices into a rollicking Bay and then carefully retrieving water samples at differing depths.

Two graduate students aboard the Fay Slover, an ODU research vessel, got seasick Friday from churning waves stirred up by thunderstorms that blew across the Bay. Still, they painstakingly separated the samples, freezing some in liquid nitrogen or in refrigerators so they could later study their molecular components and algae growth.

"It's hard work, but it's what we have to do if we want to understand the problem and find solutions," said Ivy Ozmon, a graduate student at ODU.

They stopped at 12 sites on an arc near the mouth of the Bay, spending almost nine hours on the water. And they will come back again before sharing the results with colleagues in Virginia and Maryland and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, all trying to figure out the complex puzzle that is the Chesapeake Bay under extreme stress.

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