Fish Kills

MDE looking into cause of Corsica River fish kill By KONRAD SUROWIEC Star-Democrat Staff Writer October 13, 2006

CENTREVILLE - The Maryland Department of the Environment is investigating a fish kill on the Corsica River near Fort Point.

Local residents called MDE, which sent an investigative team to the river Wednesday, said MDE spokesman Robert Ballinger. He said MDE investigators saw several hundred dead fish, but residents reported seeing several thousand. Ballinger said most of the dead fish found by MDE were yellow perch, white perch, and bullhead. The exact number of fish that died was hard to determine, he said.

Ballinger said the MDE crew did a "thorough survey of the whole area" and took fish and water samples. There's no deadline for completing the investigation; it could take days or weeks, said Ballinger. He said MDE staff doing the survey found Karlodinium, a type of alga which could have been a possible cause for the fish dying.

Cambridge resident Kit M. Bradley, the captain of a boat docked on the Corsica at Fort Point, estimated several thousand fish died. He found lots of alewives dead in the water Oct. 5 near the private dock where the yacht Trillum is docked. In the next few days, he also saw dead perch and rockfish. On the morning of Oct. 11, Bradley said he counted 30 to 35 dead rockfish along a 70-foot stretch of the dock. By late afternoon Oct. 11, most of the dead fish had been swept away by the tide, but some could still be seen along the shore and marsh near the dock.

"I was up here two days ago. This little cove was nothing but (dead) fish," said Tom Lynch, of Starr.

"We had a good flood tide. That took a lot of them out," said Bradley.

Centreville resident Frank DiGialleonardo, president of the Corsica River Conservancy, said that on Oct. 4 conservancy members starting seeing "fish jumping at the surface" - a sign that a fish is in distress. On Oct. 5, DiGialleonardo noticed a number of dead fish on the shore at Gunston Day School, downstream from Fort Point.

He said the conservancy notified MDE and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. DiGialleonardo said the Karlodinium alga was mentioned as a possible cause of the fish kill at a recent meeting of the group working on the Corsica River restoration project. He estimated several thousand fish might have died in the recent incident, but it was a much lower number than the September 2005 fish kill, when estimates ranged as high as 30,000 to 50,000.

"The numbers are far, far less than what we saw last year," said DiGialleonardo.

DiGialleonardo said he checked the river near the Watson Road bridge on Oct. 8, and didn't see any dead fish. He thinks the fish kill was confined to the upper end of the Corsica, from about a half-mile north of Watson Road to Fort Point.

DiGialleonardo and Bradley noticed a lot more sea gulls in recent days coming to snatch dead fish from the river.

"People need to be aware more of what's going on in their own backyard," said Bradley. He believes either stormwater runoff or the effluent from the Centreville sewage treatment plant could have caused the fish to die.

Bradley said "a creek this size should not be dirtier than Patapsco (River), without a doubt." Bradley reported the fish kill to Howard King, an official at DNR, and Sen. Richard Colburn, R-37-Mid-Shore, the state senator representing Bradley's home district.

Lynch, a fourth generation watermen, said he only works on the water on weekends currently because "you can't make a living anymore" as a full-time waterman. He said Eastern Shore waters have gotten more polluted because more people are moving to the Shore, and small municipal sewage treatment plant can't handle the increased wastewater flows.

"The old way of life on the Shore isn't there any more," said Bradley.