DEPARTMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT

ORIGIN

[photo, Montgomery Park Business Center, 1800 Washington Blvd., Baltimore, Maryland]

Montgomery Park Business Center, 1800 Washington Blvd., Baltimore, Maryland, February 2004. Photo by Diane F. Evartt.

Origins of the Department of the Environment began with Maryland's response to environmental threats to the oyster industry and to public health. Consequently, efforts were divided between State health and conservation agencies. Moreover, since pollution of water resources was apparent long before the invisible and insidious effects of air pollution were recognized, more State initiatives focused on water quality. Finally, because air and water freely move across boundaries drawn by man, work to maintain their quality is necessarily interjurisdictional. With interstate cooperation, Maryland environmental programs frequently have been shaped by federal mandates and funding.

Water Quality. Abundant rivers and streams supplied plentiful water and absorbed the wastes produced in colonial Maryland. Later, attention focused on the siltation of harbors, the condition of fisheries, and public health. The decline of shad and herring in the early 1800s was attributed to ships' wakes, dams, sedimentation, and land-clearing practices, yet by midcentury fishermen observed fish avoiding waters fouled by floating wastes. Unlike modern toxic chemicals, this debris was likely to be organic, a byproduct of small local industries, such as canneries, slaughterhouses, sawmills, or tanneries. In the contamination of water supplies, citizens became alarmed by the visible pollution of floating carcasses or sewage.

In Maryland, an early prohibition against contaminating a municipal water supply is found in legislation incorporating the Baltimore Water Company in 1808. Anyone willfully polluting a certain section of Jones Falls by "throwing any dead animals, or other impure substances, into the same, or by swimming, bathing, or washing clothes or the skins of any dead animals or other impure things therein, or by erecting any necessary or other nuisance so near the said water as to pollute the same . . . " was subject to a fine (Chapter 79, Acts of 1808). In 1874, throwing bodies or carcasses into the Potomac River, which supplied water to many Maryland communities as well as Washington, DC, was outlawed (Chapter 355, Acts of 1874). Though the law gave half the fine to the informer, enforcement was difficult. By 1886, it became a misdemeanor to pollute a drinking water supply anywhere in the State, subject to a fine and additional fines for each day the offense continued (Chapter 6, Acts of 1886). This statute also covered industrial pollution from factories, trades' establishments, slaughter-houses, and tanneries. It gave some authority to the State Board of Health which at the time undoubtedly lacked the resources for statewide action.

The first Maryland agency responsible for water quality was the State Board of Health, precursor of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Created in 1874, the Board was to "make sanitary investigations and inquiries respecting the causes of diseases, especially of epidemics, the source of mortality and the effects of localities, employments, conditions, and circumstances on the public health . . . " (Chapter 200, Acts of 1874).

For most of the nineteenth century, the airborne theory of disease prevailed. To prevent epidemics, cities and towns drained swamps and low-lying areas where stagnant waters gave off noxious fumes. The odoriferous Baltimore harbor and surroundings had long been recognized as unhealthful; though some drainage reduced breeding grounds for mosquitoes, epidemics continued. Despite sewerage commissions in 1862, 1883, and 1893, Baltimore entered the twentieth century with no municipal sewerage system; wastes washed down the streets into the harbor and surrounding waters; "night soil" collected by contractors ultimately was dumped in or near Chesapeake Bay.

Germs, not putrid air, however, were proved to cause disease and, in 1893, oysters were named carriers of the disease in a typhoid outbreak in Connecticut. Thus, when the Baltimore Sewerage Commission in 1897 proposed a giant sewer dumping city wastes into Chesapeake Bay, the powerful oyster interests opposed and effectively blocked action. Baltimore was not the only culprit; smaller cities and towns always had dumped untreated sewage into Bay waters. Nonetheless, Baltimore's rapidly growing population made the problem more acute. Yet, in 1904, the oyster interests again prevailed in the General Assembly, and legislation prohibited the new sewerage commission from building any system "involving the discharge of sewage . . . into the Chesapeake Bay or any of its tributaries" (Chapter 349, Acts of 1904). Interpreting this restriction to mean untreated sewage, Baltimore resolved to have municipal sewage treatment. The City, formerly the only major city without sewage treatment, gained the most advanced, state-of-the-art system when its Back Bay plant opened in 1912.

Meanwhile, factors other than untreated sewage were recognized as polluting Chesapeake Bay. In 1910, the federal Public Health Service investigated pollution in both the Bay and the Potomac River. Truck farming and canneries had proliferated around the Bay, and the Public Health Service report agreed with the findings of the State Fisheries Commissioners that canning wastes harmed fisheries.

In that same year, the State Board of Health was reformed as the Department of Health, within which the Bureau of Sanitary Engineering was established (Chapter 560, Acts of 1910). The Bureau protected water purity, oversaw sewerage and water supply projects, and in time became concerned with industrial waste and air pollution. In 1914, the Department of Health was made responsible for "preserving the purity of the waters of the State" (Chapter 810, Acts of 1914). The Department's Bureau of Sanitary Engineering regulated public water supplies and sewerage systems and issued cease-and-desist orders to manufacturing or industrial establishments found polluting State waters with their wastes, if a threat to human health or a public nuisance. In 1918, two employees of the Department of Health developed a formula to chlorinate water thus ensuring a pure drinking water supply not only for Maryland, but ultimately worldwide. One of them - Abel Wolman - went on as sanitary engineer, and later consultant to more than fifty nations and helped bring safe drinking water to millions of people around the world.

Because concerns about water quality originated with fishery and oyster interests, in 1917 the Conservation Commission began to enforce abatement procedures for discharges which threatened fish and shellfish, or their "propagation, cultivation or conservation thereof, or to their safety as human food . . . " (Chapter 14, Acts of 1917). Discharges from public sewage disposal plants were exempted, however, and the Commission prohibited from infringing upon the jurisdiction of the Department of Health.

The Conservation Commission sought cooperation from Maryland factory owners in treating their wastes to prevent industrial pollution. The Commission's 1917 annual report stated that no one would "wilfully persist in such an abuse" once they realized how untreated industrial wastes killed marine life. Lacking staff and facilities for scientific research or chemical analysis, the Commission's work to control pollution never received the same attention as did the condition of the oyster spat or the enforcement of game laws. Nonetheless, the Commission with the Department of Health began by examining pollution in the Curtis Bay area of Baltimore harbor. There, war-related industries had concentrated since 1914. Trade wastes exuded up to four million gallons per day from just one alcohol plant, whose attorneys in 1922 suggested that safeguarding Curtis Bay waters was impractical and impossible. They recommended that the area be designated an industrial zone exempt from water quality requirements. Despite the area's highly colored, thick and odoriferous waters, the Conservation Commission was unwilling to pinpoint Curtis Bay pollution as the cause of oyster decline in the Patapsco River and upper Chesapeake, blaming increased salinity and excess rainfall instead.

In the early 1920s, industrial pollution was overshadowed by oil pollution, a problem exceeding the enforcement capabilities of the Conservation Commission. Oil-burning ships pumped oil from their bilges in quiet waters of Chesapeake Bay and its harbors, devastating beaches, waterfowl, and oysters. Conditions were alleviated somewhat in 1924 when the federal Oil Pollution Act prohibited vessels from dumping oil in navigable waters. That act was only the second major federal law on water pollution; the first - the federal Rivers and Harbors Act - outlawed dumping debris in navigable waters in 1899.

The oyster faced a serious crisis in 1924. After a typhoid outbreak, eating raw oysters was outlawed in Illinois, and the U.S. Public Health Service began an investigation. In Maryland, oyster packing houses closed and soup kitchens opened on the Eastern Shore to feed the newly unemployed, even though Maryland's governor stated unequivocally that Maryland oysters never had caused a single case of typhoid. The Commission, reformed as the Conservation Department in 1922, strove to give the oyster a clean bill of health. This required regulation of oyster packing rather than water quality.

To control water pollution, the State Department of Health and the Conservation Department continued their cooperative work. The 1927 annual report of the Conservation Department optimistically claimed: