♪ ♪ This program is made by MPT, to enrich the diverse communities throughout our state, and is made possible by the generous support of our members.

Thank you!

NARRATOR: Coming up...

Planting forests underwater.

Baltimore's buried streams.

And...chasing Chesapeake horizons.

Next!

Outdoors Maryland is produced in cooperation with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

(music) ♪ ♪ (bird calls) MIKE NAYLOR: Grasses are super interesting to walk through.

They wrap around your legs and somewhat entangle you.

And as you move along, you can see small fish, sometimes crabs, jellyfish.

(splash) NARRATOR: As the tide rolls out at Round Bay on the Severn River, Department of Natural Resources Biologist Mike Naylor leads a team into the heart of an aquatic jungle... an expansive bed of underwater grasses known as SAV.

NAYLOR: We are out here collecting SAV, which stands for submerged aquatic vegetation, and SAVs are the forests of the Chesapeake Bay.

In the same way that within a forest, you have much higher diversity of animals.

In the Bay, when you have grasses like this you have much higher species diversity.

When you pick up the grasses, they're absolutely covered with invertebrates, which is why the small fish are in here feeding... NARRATOR: This species, sago pondweed, is one of a couple dozen in the watershed.

In early August, it's in seed.

NAYLOR: We come here to collect seeds because they're extremely abundant.

Each seed cluster has 8 to 10 seeds, and we simply snap off the seeds and drop them into our basket.

If you look out across the water, you can see this bed we're in is tens of acres in size.

It's really remarkable.

NARRATOR: Especially, considering that 40 years ago, none of this was here.

Once, upon a time, marine forests like this one covered vast swathes of the Chesapeake's tidal flats.

But during the mid-20th century, Bay grasses began to disappear.

Gradually at first, as pollution from cities and farm fields increasingly clouded waterways, blocking sunlight from reaching the aquatic plants.

Then, a sudden crushing blow: (thunder) Hurricane Agnes... REPORTER: Severe local flooding is occurring in the Harrisburg area.

The flood is gone and everywhere...sour, stinking mud.

NARRATOR: Giant plumes of sediment - more than the Chesapeake would typically receive in decades - blanketing and suffocating grass beds throughout the upper Bay.

NAYLOR: Between the 1950s and when Hurricane Agnes hit in 1972, our grass beds were all lost.

NAYLOR: We started doing grass restoration in Round Bay in the early 1990s.

And the Severn River now has the largest contiguous sago pondweed beds that I've seen in 30 years working with grasses in Chesapeake Bay.

We'll take these seeds to other rivers that don't have the sago palm weed populations like this.

MIKE NORMAN: Alright everybody, we're gonna go ahead and load up the baskets, I'd like to see... NARRATOR: After about a week in bins, the gathered grasses have begun to decompose.

NORMAN: And you can see how that seed is starting to come off.

NARRATOR: Meaning, its time to process them.

Anne Arundel Community College Lab Manager Mike Norman, has been overseeing this messy operation for decades.

NORMAN: I think it smells like wet donkey.

It's an awful smell.

It's elephant poop... One of the two.

NORMAN: Easy does it, easy does it, not on my shoes!

NARRATOR: They use a tool developed and built by the college, called a "turbulator."

NORMAN: Okay, let's good let's keep this jet here.

NARRATOR: Which simulates the wave agitation that separates seed from stem in nature... NORMAN: One, two, three, contact!

(turbulator turns on).

NARRATOR: Only, a little faster.

NORMAN: Alright, will somebody set the timer to ten minutes?

NARRATOR: This one, the third they've built, was commissioned by local environmental nonprofit, Arundel Rivers Federation.

NORMAN: The objective is once we put it in is to continue to agitate the material and keep it loose the entire time in the water column so that it allows the seed an opportunity to find its way through the rack material and down and underneath of the turbulator itself.

NORMAN: There was a moment in the Bay watershed when the decline of SAV was so pronounced that most river systems did not have a healthy population of SAV.

And people finally caught on to when you lose that SAV, you really, you're losing the benefit of a of a healthy watershed and a healthy system.

Everything within the Bay system itself relies on SAV.

NARRATOR: So, in 2014, the Chesapeake Bay Program set a goal: for the Bay to reach 185,000 acres of SAV.

Aerial mapping in 2023 suggests we've a ways to go, at about 79,000 acres.

♪ ♪ NORMAN: Let's go ahead and get the material off of it while we got it.

Hey it looks pretty good, look at all that seed, good grief.

So, the plug's gonna come out and we're going to open up and we're gonna capture this stuff in a double bag.

We spin it so the material kind of goes to the center of the tank and it all comes out the other end, seed-rich, unrefined material.

NARRATOR: From there, the remaining detritus is sifted out.

NORMAN: So, the seed that we're collecting today, we're hoping to get 250 to 300,000 seeds.

NARRATOR: In a good year, Mike and his students process three to five million SAV seeds.

Most are stored and later scattered directly into the Bay and its tributaries, but not all.

MARK LEWANDOWSKI: What we have here is wild celery, it's vallisneria Americana.

NARRATOR: For the past three months, Department of Natural Resources Biologist Mark Lewandowski has raised this freshwater species from seed in retrofitted kitty litter pallets at Providence Greenhouses in Arnold.

On a May morning, he and Mike Naylor are loading up trays for the long journey west to Garrett County.

First by car.

Then, by boat.

NAYLOR: We're here at Deep Creek Lake in Arrowhead Cove.

NARRATOR: This winter, the county removed about 734 dump truck loads of built-up sediment from this cove... with the goal of improving access for lake users.

NAYLOR: And we're coming here to restore a wild celery bed to help replace the vegetation that was lost as a result of dredging.

NAYLOR: We wanted to do seeds here, but for whatever reason, Deep Creek Lake produces very few seeds.

We came out here and scouted all these locations and found less than a hundred seedpods.

Using adult plants was a way for us to maximize the little number of seeds we had.

NARRATOR: Donning snorkels and wetsuits, the crew navigates the murky waters of the cove... pressing plants into the silty substrate.

NAYLOR: The species, wild celery, that we're planting here will reproduce very rapidly by rhizomes and spread out laterally.

So, we're going to scatter founder colonies all along the shoreline here.

NARRATOR: As the colonies grow, the grasses will release oxygen... filter out pollutants... trap sediment, improving water clarity... mitigate shoreline erosion... and provide food and habitat for wildlife.

NAYLOR: When we do restoration with adult plants we're typically counting our restoration area in square meters.

NARRATOR: But when they have the seed stock for it...

They can cover a lot more ground.

(patting the basket of seeds) NARRATOR: Back in Anne Arundel County, Mark mixes about 200,000 seeds - into sand.

And heads out onto the Rhode River, bound for a healthy bed of horned pondweed, a spring-blooming species.

LEWANDOWSKI: The fact that this grass is here and doing so well indicates that the sediment and the water quality is good enough to support SAV.

So, this might be a good planting area.

NARRATOR: Site selected, it's time to scoop.... LEWANDOWSKI: Fire away.

NARRATOR: ...scatter, and wait for these tiny seeds to work their magic.

NORMAN: We're going out there, and we're planting the seed, but we're just a small part of it.

We can't get success unless we have improved water quality.

It's important for society as a whole to recognize that it's their responsibility, within their watersheds, to create the ideal conditions for this to happen.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Encased in brick and concrete... Forgotten rivers flow unseen beneath the streets of Baltimore.

And on a warm spring morning, local artist Bruce Willen is working to bring one buried waterway to light... ...laying out puzzle pieces of blue thermoplastic... BRUCE WILLEN: It's kind of like putting together a puzzle.

NARRATOR: On 29th Street in the city's Remington neighborhood.

BRUCE: I am installing the final part of "Ghost Rivers" which is a public art installation that maps the path of a buried stream running below the streets of Baltimore.

NARRATOR: A stream called "Sumwalt Run" that Bruce first encountered about a decade ago on an old map.

BRUCE: I noticed there was a line of a creek on the map that was running right through the middle of what's today a very densely populated neighborhood and the creek is no longer here.

And this kind of planted a seed in my head, what would a monument or memorial to a lost landscape look like?

NARRATOR: So, four years ago, he began work on "Ghost Rivers," tracing the historic course of the waterway wherever roads and sidewalks allowed.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Today, the graceful blue line winds its way across Remington for one and a half miles from Wyman Park Dell to the Jones Falls.

Markers at twelve stops tell the story of Sumwalt Run, a story deeply intertwined with that of the neighborhood itself.

(traffic noise) NARRATOR: Back on 29th, a team from pavement-marking company, "Equus Striping," joins Bruce.

INSTALLER: Good to see you Bruce.

NARRATOR: They're here to seal the final stretches into place.

(traffic noise) BRUCE: These segments are actually melted to the pavement.

This is the same material that's used for bike lane decals and other you know like highway grade road markings.

So, it's pretty robust, long lasting material.

It's not just paint.

EQUUS GUY: This brown is just from the heat.

BRIAN: Uh-huh.

NARRATOR: From street level, they head down into Wyman Dell, a public park with special significance in the story of the stream.

BRUCE: This was actually, the only remaining part of the original Sumwalt Run stream valley.

If you look around you can see that this park is sunken down 20 or 30 feet below street level.

Imagine sort of the end of that park down there, this valley just like kept going.

The banks sloped down, just rocky little creek meandering through the valley.

NARRATOR: After searching for a photo of that rocky little creek, Bruce could find only this one, taken in 1905.

That same year, a rapidly expanding Baltimore set out to solve its growing public waste problem... by building a new storm and sanitary sewer system.

Construction crews encased waterways like Sumwalt in underground culverts, up to 45 feet below city streets.

Once, free-flowing streams became state of the art stormwater sewers, the pride of city leaders.

BRUCE: This is it.

This is where Sumwalt Run as an uncovered stream once emptied into the Jones Falls, the confluence of the two rivers.

And just a few steps upstream, Sumwalt Run spills out from underground culverts, the only place that the stream sees the light of day before it joins the Jones Falls, flowing downstream, ending up in the Inner Harbor and then into the Chesapeake Bay.

NARRATOR: With the burial of Baltimore's waterways, the city gained room to grow...but at the cost of the ecological functions that natural streams provide: like wildlife habitat and pollution filtration.

BRUCE: The health of the bay has really been declining for decades.

And a lot of that is due to the stream burial, paving, hardscaping, carrying all these nutrients, pollutants, chemicals, fertilizers, shooting it straight to the Bay.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: It's late summer, and pollution analysts Nick Mitrus and Van Sturtevant with Baltimore's Department of Public Works are paying a visit to the Sumwalt Run outfall.

VAN STURTEVANT: Today, we're here to sample Sumwalt for illicit discharges.

NARRATOR: It's one of hundreds of buried streams they check weekly, looking for pollutants such as chlorine, a sign of potable water, or ammonia, a sign of sewage... ...testing samples on site.

NICK MITRUS: Our result is 0.27.

This is kind of a threshold for us...but, .27 may indicate that there's ammonia entering the water in the storm drain.

NARRATOR: A pollutant identified, Nick and Van go into detective mode, searching for the source.

KIMBERLY GROVE: The pollution source tracking program has been going on for over 20 years.

When they first started it was very easy to find those big smoking guns.

NARRATOR: Kimberly Grove is the department's chief of research and environmental protection.

KIM: Now, it takes a lot more effort, a lot more technology, a lot more time to find smaller problems.

VAN: We narrowed the problem we were looking for within two manholes.

Now, we're going to inspect the storm drain pipe.

NARRATOR: By deploying a pipe crawler, fitted with a camera, to inspect Sumwalt Run.

VAN: What Nick has here is a controller, just like your game controller system.

KIM: All of our waterways are listed as being impaired but we're always taking steps to improve that water quality, and we do have a vision that one day we'll be off the impairment list.

NICK: This looks like a storm drain pipe that's not on our map...

There could be a sewage break.

NARRATOR: Ultimately, their goal is to pinpoint the pollution source and stop it.

VAN: This could be our culprit for the high ammonia we're receiving at Sumwalt Run outfall.

NICK: If we can't find the source of this from the ground surface, we would have to enter into this manhole, and sample this water.

NARRATOR: While, DPW's work continues... BRUCE: Imagine this was a deep wooded valley... NARRATOR: Bruce guides a group of community members along Sumwalt's hidden path.

BRUCE: This whole area once looked something like this, and there's this rocky creek running down the middle through here.

About 15 feet down, this stream is still running.

NARRATOR: Co-leading today's Ghost Rivers tour is John Marra of environmental nonprofit, Blue Water Baltimore.

JOHN MARRA: It was much easier to get across, if you just bury the stream and then pave over it.

Now, you can just walk right across.

NARRATOR: The walk takes them down city streets...

But also, back in time.

BRUCE: This was the location of Sumwalt's ice pond.

NARRATOR: To memorialize this lost stream, and the people who shaped Remington's landscape.

BRUCE: You know, when you live in the city I think a lot of times you have this kind of false idea that there's like the wilderness which is some place out there, and then there's the city, which is here.

Really, there is not that much of a distinction between the two.

We are living in this natural place, just a place that we have really shaped and transformed through our human interventions, like burying waterways or building houses, and streets, and paving things.

BRUCE: That's the stream running 30 or 40 feet down.

I think it's like really important to connect our own social histories with the environmental history and the urban history, and infrastructure history because like these things really are all related.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: As the early summer sunlight dances across the surface of Eastern Bay in Talbot County, a small crew of athletes makes their way down a pier... ready to take the plunge.

Among them, lifelong swimmer Matt Pluta.

(splash) MATT PLUTA: Open water swimming is the sport of getting out in the open water and our rivers and our bays and exercising.

Oh, the water feels good.

You can tell summer's really heating up, you know, water temperatures getting up there.

I'm probably a little overdressed in my wetsuit here, but other than that, you got a little chop on the surface that's making, you know, bringing a little bit of a challenge, but that's great.

NARRATOR: For today's casual meetup, they're swimming about a mile along the shoreline near Claiborne Beach.

MATT: There is a huge difference from swimming in open water to swimming in a chlorinated pool.

Getting into the river is, it's a sensory thing.

You can't see in the water.

You're, you're feeling more as you're swimming.

Water's going through your fingers and over your head.

You're hearing, you know, periodically as you pull your head out of the water and you're breathing and you're catching glimpses of birds flying over that you can hear chirping and everything.

You're right at eye level and you're looking across the river and...you know, on a wavy day, which are the most fun days, right?

You're up on top of the wave and then you're down below and yeah, you can feel pretty small bobbing around out there.

And when you're on land and you look at swimmers out there, it is, they do look small, you know, in the big water.

♪ ♪ MATT: I don't know, just, just putting yourself in the water and...and submerging yourself in there, brings a feeling about that, you know, it's hard to, to replicate elsewhere.

Our swim season here is pretty short.

You know, we start as soon as the water temperature hits high 50s, some of us, and it goes up until the bay nettles come in, and that's usually around mid-July on an average year.

And so that really short swimming window that we have, I think, brings the most out of us... NARRATOR: Jellyfish aren't the only factor that keep swimmers out of the water.

MATT: And then, you add in some of those days following major rain events when we know bacteria pollution can be a problem.

You know, it's that idea of enjoying it when it's safe to, and recognizing when it isn't.

NARRATOR: Beyond swimming the state's waterways, Matt also works to protect them, as the Choptank Riverkeeper with nonprofit Shore Rivers: an organization that conducts regular bacteria monitoring through its program Swimmable ShoreRivers.

Lynn Stewart is one of more than 60 volunteers with the program, pulling weekly water samples from popular swimming and recreation sites across the Eastern Shore.

LYNN STEWART: I am taking bacteria samples for the five, you know, little beaches in Cambridge where people generally wade, play in the water, or swim.

So, we're at Sailwinds Park Beach right now, and I'm going to take three samples here.

MATT: One of the number one questions we get is, "Is it safe to swim in our waterways?"

And it's a really good question because we need to be thinking about it.

Yes, it is safe to swim, just not all the time.

NARRATOR: Samples are delivered to the Easton Headquarters, where they're tested to answer the question: is this water swimmable right now?

MATT: The swim-ability of a river really comes down to, is there anything in there that's going to get you sick?

And so, this program is geared towards bacteria monitoring.

And really, let's be honest, it's poop.

It's, it's what's coming out of septic systems that aren't properly maintained.

That's what's being washed through our aging sewer infrastructure that, you know, after major rain events, that all overflows and gets into our rivers.

You know, we do a lot of good work managing waste water in different sectors, but there is always room to improve and that is exactly the data we are generating, that there is still work to be done.

NARRATOR: Once, full testing is done; this information is made available to the public in English and Spanish.

MATT: Providing access to these rivers builds stewardship and so, you can define access in a number of different ways but you know...our, our open water swim community are some of the best advocates for this stuff because of the experiences that they've had and the inspiration they've gotten from it.

NARRATOR: It was that very desire to share this resource that inspired Matt to co-found Maryland's annual Freedom Swim.

A two mile open water swim across the Choptank River.

MATT: Welcome to the Maryland Freedom swim 2024.

So, they're going to do about a quarter of a mile to get under the bridge here.

Once, they get under the bridge, it's a straight shot down.

I say it's the largest lane lines in the world here coming across the Choptank River.

NARRATOR: A challenge that Jake Shaner is attempting for the first time today.

JAKE SHANER: I feel like I kind of had to, you know, I really like being in the water, doing water sports, and all kinds of different stuff around the water.

And I feel like, you know, I'm living in the Cambridge area.

I got to do it.

I cross that bridge every day.

And I'd love to swim under it.

NARRATOR: While, Jake joins nearly 300 wetsuit-clad athletes on the west bank of the river... Matt takes his position out on the water as safety coordinator, overseeing a small armada of volunteers.

MATT: Alright, we're good.

Quality's good.

So, we collected samples the other day.

Um, the bacteria levels were very low.

No concern there.

And then, after monitoring the rain and the chance of rain over the past couple days, we feel pretty good about it.

Yeah.

MATT: Yeah okay!

(laughs) You excited?

Going to see all the swimmers out here?

NARRATOR: Once, all the volunteers are in place, the first wave of swimmer's charges into the water...

They have two hours to make the two mile crossing before the channel reopens to boat traffic for the day... ♪ ♪ For Matt and the safety volunteers, it's time to wait...observe, and be at the ready.

MATT: We had to cancel in 2018, our first year, because of the bacteria levels were so high.

And then...in COVID, we had to cancel again in 2020.

So, this is the fifth year over what, seven year period.

And I feel great to have 325 people sign up and buy into this crazy idea to swim across this amazing river.

It's just awesome.

MATT: We got word that the first swimmer finished probably somewhere around 35, 40 minutes for that person to, to swim the course, cross the Choptank.

NARRATOR: At just over an hour, Jake has made it over the channel and is nearing the shore.

JAKE: I often have a running soundtrack in my head, which is kind of entertaining, depending on which song my brain decides to choose.

Today...honestly, the water is so nice that I was thinking about that a lot.

Wow, it's beautiful in here.

NARRATOR: And all within two hours, every swimmer makes it across with no disqualifications.

MATT: 158!

MATT: So, today went great.

We had 286 swimmers go in and 286 swimmers come out.

So, from the swim safety perspective that's all that matters.

From the swimmers' satisfaction, everyone's smiling, looks like they're having a good time.

And people talk about how nature is just like that vitamin that, you know, brings the best out in you and does great things.

MATT: Every time we swim and we're talking on the beach afterwards, like, the smiles are huge.

The attitudes are great.

Like, they don't have to say it because you can see it, you know?

Woohooo!

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: To stream episodes of Outdoors Maryland , visit mpt.org and don't forget to follow us on social media.

(owl hoots) Learn more about Maryland's diverse natural resources at dnr.maryland.gov, or download the official mobile app.

♪ ♪