Baltimore County, MD Hello Baltimore County, 1 Apr 2016

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From YouTube: Clean Green Streams and Waterways

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Learn about the County’s efforts on the front lines of protecting water quality and the Bay.

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Welcome to hello, baltimore county., I'm ellen kobler. april is earth month and baltimore county and is in the forefront.

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Of protecting our environment and the chesapeake bay.

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Here to tell us all about, it is vince gardina,, director of the baltimore county department of environmental protection and sustainability..

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Thank you so much for joining us.

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Thank you, ellen.. It's a pleasure to be here.

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So, restoration of the chesapeake bay is obviously a major goal for the whole region..

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How is baltimore county involved in this effort?.

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Well, baltimore county plays a very crucial role..

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One of the key responsibilities of baltimore county is to address what we call surface run-off or storm water. Run-Off.

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So when you have a snow storm that melts or a rainstorm,.

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All of that rainwater and storm water goes into a drain,.

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Goes into a stream, and eventually winds up in the rivers.

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That go to the chesapeake bay.

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So it's not a filter.! It just like-- the storm drains that we see on the street, the rain just flushes in and goes straight to a stream.

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Right., a lot of people think the inlets that are in streets.

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Go to a waste water treatment plant.

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Like the backriver waste water treatment plant, but they don't in baltimore county. they go to a local stream and they take with it. Everything.

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That's on that street,, including microscopic organisms to big trash items.

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Oh, my goodness!.

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So, explain how that storm water affects the water quality.

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In our streams, as well as in the bay.

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Well, there's a number of different pollutants and primarily they're nutrients and nitrogen compounds.

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As well as phosphorus compounds and sediment.

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Are the primary ones we're looking at right now., so they get into the storm water from lawns and roads and sidewalks.

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And off of people's houses, parking lots and so forth,.

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And it takes that pollutant with it to the local streams.

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It causes problems..

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The other big problem is that when you urbanize --, when you start to develop an area that was once forested or once a meadow or maybe a grass area,,.

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You take now a heavy flow,. Very energetic, has a lot of power to it--.

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From a really heavy rain. from a really heavy rain.

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It goes down these storm drains and goes to a stream., has so much force that you get a very degraded stream.

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So a lot of people are used to seeing streams, they're used to seeing these very vertical banks, deep channels,.

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Sort of a rectangular shape.

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streams should never look like that.. It should be a meandering, gentle flow.

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That does not carry a lot of sediment and a lot of pollutants with it.

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Okay, and one area of pollution- that's very visible to people is litter and trash.

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Tell us about the --: let's see if I get this right, -- the team bcps clean, green 15, litter challenge.

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Well, this is a great program that the county executive put together.

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And it really is designed to get people and groups.

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To just volunteer their time. just 15 minutes at any time., it doesn't have to be a very well-organized, effort.

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But to donate 15 minutes of their time to pick up trash in their neighborhood or their school or their workplace, and then report it to baltimore county..

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We have what's called a trash tmdl,, which is basically a trash diet, --.

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A reduction in trash that goes into the streams,.

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And this is a helpful component of that.

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And you've just recently announced that this year's challenge.

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For the litter challenge goes until the end of april.

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And it can be any group, like a scout troop or a bridge club.

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Or a family, just taking a walk can just do it,.

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Report it to the website, and then they choose their favorite school.

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And that school, the schools compete.

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tell us about that.

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Yeah, the schools compete and whoever gets the greatest weight of trash --.

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And we base that on the reporting, --.

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Gets recognized by the county executive and the superintendent of schools.

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And they get some money, too, right?.

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They do get money., they do get money.

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Yeah,, I think it's money that goes towards environmental grants.

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For projects at the school- and I hear there's some ipads up for grabs too.

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I think there are. I'm not real familiar with all of the good things. This year,, but yeah.

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All right,, so people can participate and it goes through the end of april.

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Now, let's get back to the science here.

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tell us a little bit more about the stream restoration projects.

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That the county does to protect the streams.

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Well, we have various capital projects where we invest.

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A significant amount of money to improve infrastructure,.

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To reduce pollutants that flow to the tributaries.

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That flow to the chesapeake bay., we have what are called tmdls, total maximum daily loads.

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They're part of a recipe to clean up the chesapeake bay and its tributaries.

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They're part of the u.s. clean water act and in that act the tmdls require that we reduce the pollutants.

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That are flowing to these waterways.

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stream. Restoration is one way of doing that, and, as I mentioned earlier, as you develop an area.

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And take it from a forest or from some what we call pervious area,, a natural area,.

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To a developed area where you have roads and roofs and impervious surfaces,.

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You definitely change the structure,, the appearance of that stream.

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Because of the flashiness, and because of the energy within that flowing water.

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And it takes with it the sediment and all of the nutrients that are within that sediment, downstream to a local river and eventually into the bay.

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The nutrients themselves cause problems in the waterways.

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It's like adding fertilizer to your lawn --. It makes it grow.

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Well, just like it makes your lawn grow or it makes a crop grow,.

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It makes algae grow in the waterways.

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And algae is a good thing when it's limited,, but when it gets too populous,.

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It causes a major problem..

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It grows to the point where it chokes the water, as it dies.

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The bacteria that decomposes, it takes the oxygen out of the water.

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And that's why you have these dead zones that you hear so much about in the chesapeake bay., so we want to reduce nutrients,. So we've reduce the growth of algae.

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The other big thing is sediment. sediment, chokes, sea grasses.

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It chokes the nursery areas for fish and crabs and oysters.

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It makes the sunlight no longer capable of reaching the bottom of the waterways.

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And so these submerged aquatic vegetation, known as savs.

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No longer grow and die, and these nurseries for fish and crabs.

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And other marine organisms are no longer available.

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So we want to stop all that by restoring our streams.

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And we invested a significant amount of science and engineering into that.

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Now, you're talking about the bay.

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baltimore county, has 200 miles of waterfront.

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talk a little bit about what you're doing to restore the shoreline.

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Well, the shorelines are very important.

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as you mentioned,, we have a lot of them.. A lot of communities are along the waterfront in baltimore county.

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We have a lot of parks along those areas., but the wave action caused by storms, caused by normal,.

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Everyday currents and everyday tides impact the ability.

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Of those shorelines to stay intact, and over time, they'll erode away.

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We have a general threshold right now.

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Because we can't restore every stream.

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if it erodes six feet or more per year,.

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It's a target for a shoreline enhancement, project--.

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What a minute -- six feet: a year?, that's huge,, right?.

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It's gigantic. yeah.

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So, heavy wave, action, storms,, rising tides, --.

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All of that can cause that amount of erosion in a year.

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It's not unusual.

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So what do you do to try to make-- to correct that?.

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Well, there's a couple of things.. One thing we will do is approach it in a marine engineering, way.

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We primarily design break waters.

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break waters are designed to reduce the energy of the water coming against that particular shoreline..

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And then, behind the break, waters, we'll build natural areas.

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That have vegetation, that's acclimated to that type of habitat, area.

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Kind of marshy?, like a marshy area or just off of a marshy area,.

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So it sort of changes as you go from water habitat to dry land.

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But we develop a vegetated shoreline to stabilize the soils.

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So it creates a habitat for various types of species,.

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Cleans the water, secures the shoreline from erosion,.

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And prevents the nutrients, and again the sediments from getting into the chesapeake bay.

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Okay, and in the quick minute that we have left,, tell us also about tree planting as well.

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Well, one of the quickest and easiest and most inexpensive ways of removing pollutants from storm water is to plant a tree.

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And what we do is not only plant street trees in neighborhoods.

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For aesthetic purposes but for cleaning the water.

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And we actually are--, we have a goal of restoring forest in baltimore county.

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A forest is basically defined as a hundred trees per acre.

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We have a lot of targeted areas where we'll go back in and do that. Planting.

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And there we get the benefits of improving the storm water.

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As well as creating the habitat for wildlife.,.

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Okay, and everybody likes trees.

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Yes. all right, well, thank you so much for joining us for earth month and thanks for everything that you do year-round to try to protect our environment. thank you. sure,, and thank you for watching hello, baltimore county., don't forget,! You can connect with baltimore county government on facebook and twitter..

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We'll see you next time on hello, baltimore, county.,.

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