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$2.8 Million In Grants Awarded For Bay Cleanup
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CBS
The Chesapeake Bay Program and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation are awarding $2.8 million in grants to help clean streams, creeks and rivers that flow to the Chesapeake Bay.
It's beauty versus the beast. In this case, rain gardens at Heritage Baptist Church in Annapolis, standing guard against runoff. It's the kind that pours off roads and rooftops, carrying pollutants like nitrogen from hard surfaces into streams and eventually the Chesapeake.
"The vast majority of pollution comes from runoff from these lands of perhaps approximating 70 percent of the runoff. And there is no way that we are going to save the Chesapeake Bay unless we can get projects just like this installed throughout the watershed," said Chuck Fox, EPA Bay Advisor.
But this audience was already sold, as community groups from throughout the watershed received nearly $3 million in federal grant money.
"And we received a $100,000 grant to market rain scaping throughout Anne Arundel County," said Zora Lathan, Chesapeake Ecology Center.
For nine years, grants have helped communities do things like shoreline restoration near the edge of the bay, and build buffers near streams, where rocks slow the force of runoff, and plants take up the job of absorbing nitrogen pollution before it finds water.
"We disconnected 97 percent of the size, so almost like 90 percent of the rainwater that used to go into the creek, now settles into the ground," said Anne Guillette, Low Impact Design Studio.
"Until we all become part of the solution, we are not going to make any headway with this issue," said Lathan.
The grants announced Monday will go to 32 environmental projects across the bay watershed.
The funding was awarded through the Chesapeake Bay Small Watershed Grants Program, which provides grants to nonprofit organizations and local governments working to improve the condition of their local watershed.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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