Bay Journal Editor’s note: This article is the first in a series examining the health of smaller streams and sections of rivers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. If you would like to suggest a waterway to feature, contact Jeremy Cox at jcox@bayjournal.com.
When Walter Boynton arrived as a summer intern at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory on Solomons Island, MD, in 1969, the scientist recalls, Calvert County had only one traffic signal. That was it for a county 35 miles long and 9 miles across at its widest point.
Since then, the population has multiplied nearly five-fold to about 100,000 residents – growth that can be traced, in part, to the conversion of about 30 miles of once-sleepy Solomons Island Road into a major divided highway. That greatly reduced the commute to the DC metro area, accelerating the county’s shift from a farming outpost to a bedroom community.
Down at the tip of the peninsula, near where the Patuxent River sloshes into the Chesapeake Bay, those changes have had consequences. In recent years, water-monitoring indicators show that the health of Solomons Harbor and its network of creeks has been slowly deteriorating.
The data suggests that the “water moving from the land into the harbor is more enriched, probably with nitrogen,” said Boynton, who initiated the harbor’s water-quality survey program in the late 1980s. “That’s no surprise. There’s a lot of stuff being built around the Solomon’s area. It’s a place people love.”
The story of Solomons Harbor is a familiar one in the Bay watershed, which as a whole has experienced a roughly 60% increase in population over the same 55-year period.
Growth has brought more roads, buildings and parking lots, whose hard surfaces block the infiltration of rainwater into the ground. That additional stormwater pollution has flushed higher amounts of nutrients and grit into waterways, triggering harmful algae blooms.
What distinguishes the Solomons area from similar places is that it has been the focus of one of the most comprehensive and longest-running water quality monitoring efforts in the Bay region.
Boynton, an environmental engineer and professor who retired from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s Chesapeake Biological Lab (CBL) in 2017, said the program grew from his frustration with the monitoring data that was available — or not available.
For example, he was tasked in the late 1970s with summarizing water quality trends for the Patuxent. He found 42 papers that matched his criteria dating back to the early 1930s. But the short duration of each study and the varying methods they employed made their conclusions all but useless.
He loathed the idea of future researchers encountering the same problem with Solomons Harbor. “We didn’t want to be sitting around 30 years later, scratching our heads,” Boynton recalled.
With funding from the Calvert County government, CBL scientists collect data from 10 monitoring stations in the harbor’s waterway network. That includes Back, Mill and St. John creeks, which feed the harbor. (The effort has expanded beyond the harbor area since its inception, amassing 32 additional stations in other Patuxent tributaries and along the county’s Bay shoreline.)
Water quality tends to vary each year based on how much precipitation occurs, with wetter years sending more pollution downstream. Restricting analysis to the 10 “dry” years in the Solomons data — for a more apples-to-apples comparison — shows that dissolved oxygen levels have declined and chlorophyll concentrations have gone up, Boynton said.
Low amounts of oxygen indicate “dead zones,” where any living thing that can’t flee fast enough eventually suffocates. Warming water temperatures have likely exacerbated the issue, according to CBL’s reporting. Chlorophyll, meanwhile, is a proxy for algae blooms; there were 13 outbreaks documented in the harbor and its creeks in 2023, the most recent year for which data was available.
“Even when you don’t have those big flushes off the watershed, you’re still getting that algae growth,” said Lora Harris, a CBL researcher who took over the monitoring effort more than a decade ago, along with her colleague Jeremy Testa. Cynthia Ross, a faculty research assistant, attends to the day-to-day work at the lab.
Most of the efforts to remediate the damage have been focused on recruiting homeowners living near the shoreline to upgrade their septic systems with enhanced nitrogen-removal capabilities. But there are many more aging systems to be addressed.
Many studies, in the Bay region and elsewhere, suggest that 10% impervious land cover represents a critical juncture for a watershed, when the aquatic ecosystem falls into distress. Solomons Harbor is at 20%, said Ted Haynie, president of the Friends of Mill Creek.
“We’re already passed that tipping point, considerably,” Haynie said.
He and other environmental advocates strongly oppose a proposed development that would replace about 30 acres of mostly forested land in Lusby, an unincorporated area north of the harbor, with a 276-unit apartment complex to be known as Lusby Villas. A citizens group, called Save Lusby Inc., sprang up last year to appeal the county’s approval of the project. The case remains open.
County attorney John Mattingly declined to comment for this report. Neither the landowner, John Gott Jr., nor a representative of the developer, Quality Built Homes, returned messages.
Megan Farringer, secretary of the Save Lusby group, said she moved to the county in 2013 to be closer to nature. She loves to spot bald eagles and ospreys around her neighborhood.
“The more we build this up, that’s going to go away,” she said. “It would be great to have nothing ever be touched” at the Lusby Villas property, Farringer added. But “at some point, something is going to be developed in there. What we want to see is responsible growth.”