Page 20 - Port of Baltimore - May/June 2017

PORT ENVIRONMENT
Innovative Approach Keeps Channels Open
makes sense, and the Maryland Department of the Environment is providing a road map to doing just that in ways that protect public health and benefit the environment,” said Maryland Secretary of the Environment Ben Grumbles.
Each year, 1.5 million cubic yards must be dredged from the Baltimore Harbor to keep the shipping channels open, thanks to constant deposits of silt and runoff. The state became a national model in effective reuse with the creation of the popular Hart-Miller Island, where dredged materials
were used to restore two vanishing islands into one larger island with a containment facility and a popular recreation area that is now a state park.
Poplar Island, a similar project
off Talbot County in the Chesapeake Bay, was restored using materials from the bay’s shipping channels, reproducing critical wildlife habitat and tidal wetlands. At Masonville Cove, another dredged-material containment facility, the state enhanced the surrounding community’s access to the water by restoring a degraded shoreline and developing a green wildlife management and low-impact recreational area.
Finding available parcels suitable for a large quantity of dredged materials gets harder and harder in an urban area. Hart-Miller Island was 1,100 acres, but Masonville is only 110 to 120 acres. The process of finding and permitting a site, with community involvement, can take more than a decade.
Innovative reuse helped, but several factors still needed to be addressed.
One issue was perception — people still viewed the material
as contaminated. Complicating
that perception is the fact that
the dredged material is quite fine, consisting of silts and clays, which bind to metals, such as arsenic — a naturally occurring metal found at elevated background levels in the Mid-Atlantic region. Due to the
Decades ago, dredged materials from Baltimore’s Inner Harbor channels were “dirty,” thanks to pollutants and heavy metals, a legacy of unregulated industry and land use practices. Both industry and the laws have changed, however, and industrial waste has been tightly regulated for many years.
Now, the dredged materials are cleaner, and the potential for their reuse is significant.
The results of these regulations and 40 years of annual maintenance dredging of the harbor channels have paved the way for state officials
to create Sediment to Solutions: Channeling Innovation, an initiative that encourages novel reuse of dredged materials while protecting the environment and human health. Channeling Innovation developed screening criteria for the materials, which are now classified into four categories for appropriate use as
fill or soil on land, and established a policy framework to close previously
existing regulatory gaps.
“The data on the material doesn’t
look the same,” said Kristen Weiss, Senior Policy Analyst and Outreach Strategist in Harbor Development with the Maryland Department
of Transportation’s Maryland Port Administration (MDOT MPA). “It’s not the legacy contaminated sediment it once was. Forty years of maintenance dredging has changed the opportunity for use of it as a resource.”
Not only is the material less murky, but so is the public process
of using it. An overview of the Innovative Reuse and Beneficial Use of Dredged Material draft guidance document was available for public review and comments from March 20 through May 26, and the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) held a public hearing April
25 to solicit comments from all stakeholders.
“Putting valuable material to work for communities and ecosystems
[18] The Port of Baltimore ■ May/June 2017