WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 (UPI) -- Environmentalists say the cost of meeting the deadline for cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the United States, is prohibitively high.
They say it would take an extraordinary amount of work and $28 billion in funding to complete the project by the deadline of 2010, The Washington Post reported.
"We have done a truly tremendous job of defining the problem and we have done a truly tremendous job of defining the solution but we have not yet succeeded in actually implementing the solution," Charles Fox, a former head of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, told the Post.
When the project began in 1987, experts thought cleaning up the bay would mostly involve stopping large industrial polluters. It turned out, however, that some of the worst pollutants came from such things as manure, lawn fertilizer and human waste, the newspaper said.
Meeting the deadline in three years would involve fixing millions of septic tanks, overhauling hundreds of sewage plants and asking farmers to make expensive changes in how their farms work.
The consensus among environmentalists now is to aim for an 80 percent reduction of pollutants, the Post said.
