Scientist says Conowingo Dam debris likely adds to mess

In the days after record July rainfall filled Chesapeake Bay waterways with debris, Comptroller Peter Franchot said Maryland was “literally drowning in Pennsylvania’s trash.”

How much of the detritus actually came down the Susquehanna River and through the Conowingo Dam’s opened floodgates?

It's impossible to quantify, but one scientist who has studied the effects of major rainstorms on the bay said it could have been significant. The Susquehanna drains an area that makes up 43 percent of the Chesapeake watershed.

As for any debris already built up behind the dam that might have been released when the gates opened, officials at Exelon Corp. say they had recently cleared the filters that protect the Conowingo’s 11 hydroelectric turbines.

And photos Exelon officials shot show a significant load of branches, tires and plastic barrels that the dam caught, and remained behind it when the flooding subsided.

Larry Sanford, a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, said the Susquehanna is a dominant influence on the Maryland portion of the Chesapeake. The river contributes about 90 percent of the upper bay’s fresh water — far more than the half commonly thought, Sanford said.

The Susquehanna watershed stretches 27,500 square miles across parts of New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland — by far the largest fragment of the Chesapeake’s 64,000-square-mile drainage area. So it easily could have been carrying mountains of debris as dam owner Exelon was required to open the Conowingo’s gates to prevent flooding.

Some of the Susquehanna debris could have made it into bay tributaries such as the Severn River and even the Annapolis harbor on the mouth of Spa Creek, he said. When a surge of fresh water enters the bay from the Susquehanna, the flow of such smaller, brackish tidal rivers actually reverses.

The record July rainfall, more than 16 inches in July at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, resulted in one of the biggest surges of stormwater into the bay in years, Sanford added.

The more time in between such large rain events, the larger the amount of built-up debris that can be washed into waterways, he said.