A Revitalized Chesapeake May Be Decades Away

The multibillion-dollar cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay, which government officials had pledged would succeed by 2010, will likely miss that deadline by a wide margin -- and, at the current pace, might drag on for decades more, an Environmental Protection Agency official acknowledged yesterday.

Rich Batiuk, an associate director of the EPA's Chesapeake Bay Program, made that projection at a meeting of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, an advisory group that includes state officials from Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

His talk was a blunt, and public, admission of something that the EPA had conceded in an agency report last year. A pledge to "save the bay," made six years ago in the so-called Chesapeake 2000 Agreement, is falling drastically short. "If we go at the current rate that we're doing, we're talking about restoring the Chesapeake decades from now, a generation or two," Batiuk said.

from the Washington Post