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Megan Garrett, tour coordinator of the Maryland Environmental Service talks about the project.[/caption]
It used to be that anything good for commerce always came at the expense of the natural environment or public opinion. Poplar Island, rising out of the shallows hard by Tilghman Island on Maryland’s Eastern Shore with Bay channel dredge material, is emerging as a clear win for all and gaining global recognition as an international model of doing it right.
Competing Interests
The Port of Baltimore is enjoying unprecedented resurgence, and business is booming with record numbers, ranking in 2013 14th in volume and ninth in value and first in RO/RO (roll on/roll off) of cars, light trucks, and machinery. Officials are confident that the port will be ready for deep-draft, post-Panamax ships that will start to arrive after the expanded Panama Canal opens in 2016. New cranes are in place and operational. Rail investments ashore are in the works, and a new ship pier just opened in Fairfield to handle yet more RO/RO cargo.
But the shipping business is fickle and portable, as we learned recently w hen Carnival Cruise Lines decided to abandon Baltimore for Ft. Lauderdale. (Carnival will return in April 2015 under new environmental regulations). Deep-draft ships need deep-draft channels, or they will go somewhere else. Baltimore competes with other ports up and down the East Coast, from Halifax and Boston to Savannah and Jacksonville.
Other factors, such as convenient truck and rail access and adequate shoreside infrastructure play into it, but simply put, the Maryland Port Administration needs to keep shipping channels dredged to 50 feet in order to stay in the game while other ports scramble to catch up. Powerboat-averse Bay sailors already know how big an average container ship is (965 feet LOA, 106 foot beam, and 39 foot draft), but the new ships are enormous: They will be 1200 feet long with 160 feet of beam, and eleven more feet of draft.
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A finished "cell" in the upland area of Poplar Island.[/caption]
Dredge material has to be put somewhere. In the old days, it was merely dumped beside the new channel, much as you do when shoveling snow from a sidewalk. As technology improved, the dredge was deposited in underwater spoil areas throughout the Bay, a process called open water placement. Some of these are still found on the charts as Discontinued Spoil Areas. You wonder about some of the more colorfully noted underwater features on fishing charts such as Dolly’s Lumps. The term “spoil,” by the way, is abhorred by the dredge industry, favoring the less toxic (pun intended) “dredge material” label instead.
Dredging is a constant priority for the Port and has been since Maryland’s beginnings. About 130 miles of numerous navigation channels require it, and in recent memory, much of it went to Hart Miller Island, that low, brush-cut-shaped shelf of land around the corner from the Patapsco River on the western shore above Baltimore.
What happened with Hart Miller starting in 1970 directly relates to Poplar Island today. The Port Authority didn’t think it necessary to seek public input for the project until late in the process, just when it was time to issue permits. Public opinion from nearby residential southeastern Baltimore County wasn’t kindly in favor, and suspicions about the origin and toxicity of some of the dredge material only served to heighten opposition. As a result, the project dragged on for years in the courts and the Legislature. The costs associated with building the island grew ever higher with each delay and subsequent mitigation order. This was the Waterloo moment for public distaste for large and intrusive government projects, much like the expressway battles being fought in Baltimore around the same time. The last barge of dredge arrived at Hart Miller in 2009. The Port Administration was left to lick its wounds, mend fences with an angry public, and find better ways of planning and means of communication if it ever hoped to be successful at finding new sites for dredge material in the future.
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Manmade channels look like the real thing for wildlife[/caption]
Back to the Future
Fast forward to 2014, and Poplar, 16 miles south of Sandy Point State Park, accepts nothing but “clean” dredge, meaning material coming from the Baltimore approach channel from a point beyond the Patapsco River outside the Key Bridge down to the Bay Bridge. The decision to go with Poplar was driven by the state Legislature’s prohibition on creating new islands in the Bay. Since Poplar had been losing land to erosion for decades, a goal was set early on to return it to its 1847 surveyed size of 1100 acres. Discovered and settled in 1627 by William Claiborne, Copley’s Island (as it was originally called) flourished throughout the colonial period, and in recent times, was a hunting ground frequented by President Roosevelt, who came ashore via an abandoned ramp on nearby Jefferson Island. A black cat farm, whose coats were prized in China, fizzled when during a hard winter freeze, the cats escaped by walking across the ice to the Talbot County mainland. A town called Valliant emerged, but by the 1880s the destructive pressures of settlement and agriculture sped up the erosion process. No trace of Valliant remains.
By 1993 Poplar had sunk to only five acres and split into four islands. What happened next changed everything. The port had set to work developing the Dredged Material Master Plan, a 20-year effort that identified 475 potential dredge deposit sites, but this time a public process was set up before any decisions were made that included state, federal, and local agencies as well as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, citizen’s groups and private sector representation. Out of this elicitation of goodwill came a subsequent report that created the Poplar Island Environmental Restoration Project that would be much more than just a dumping ground.
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Signboard listing all the project partners.[/caption]
Construction started in 1998, and the dredge began to arrive in 2001, with more than 25 million cubic yards of it to date. It’s both a working model and a living experiment of creating 550 acres each of wetland habitat, upland habitat, and public education programs so successful that a full-time position is funded just for that purpose. Because of the lost capacity due to the wetlands acreage, a 575-acre expansion was approved to add 1700 acres by 2029, and in the process protect the archipelago from northwest gales.
The Maryland Environmental Service, contracted under the Port Administration, oversees the project all under the watchful eye of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and also Ohio University, which is studying the return of terrapins and planting individual plugs of native grasses on the island. The place has the feel of a working construction site, which it is. But rather than roughshod grading of the dredge, here it is carved and culled into natural looking channels, habitat islands, and other landforms that make it look “returned to God,” as one person exclaimed during my visit. MPA partners with the Army Corps on many projects and boasts an award-winning program that includes stakeholder input throughout the dredging process.
Today, there are cormorants, common terns, and least terns on the island, even as the dredge is barged in and deposited. Raccoons and foxes aren’t prevalent predators, and the “Terrapin Head Start Program” fascinates and enthralls about 250 school groups a year. Poplar might be better now than it ever was, except perhaps in the eyes of mainland black cats.
To arrange your own tour of the Poplar Island Environmental Restoration Project, contact Megan Garrett, Tour Coordinator of the Maryland Environmental Service at (410) 770-6503 or by email at [email protected]. Tours leave from Tilghman aboard the MV Terrapin.
~by Steve Allan
