To Be Fair, They Could Hardly Make it Worse

Fleming Park could rise from the weeds by dredging up spoils, funds

“We’d come down here in the morning and by lunchtime we’d have a bushel of crabs,” he said. “Right over there, there was a boathouse,” he recalled, pointing toward Clement Cove on the north side of the park. “They used to have dances and everything when we were little.”

Today, community leaders hope to reclaim their waterfront access and enhance the park, using a material that’s historically been shunned by other communities — sand and silt dredged from the shipping channels in Baltimore’s harbor.

“I’d like a boardwalk and the shoreline enhanced, where we can get back on the water,” said Gloria Nelson, president of the Turner Station Conservation Teams, recently as she and Bannerman, chairman of infrastructure, traffic and safety for the group, walked around the 16-acre park and talked about the plan for giving it a makeover.

With design help from Mahan Rykiel Associates, a landscape architecture firm, they propose to use sediment pumped in from the harbor bottom to transform the reedy, rocky shoreline into a marsh that would support native vegetation, waterfowl and other wildlife. They also want to use some of the dredged material in a playground in the park, to give children some low mounds to run up and down.

“Essentially, you don’t have a waterfront park here because you don’t have access to [water],” said Isaac Hametz, Mahan Rykiel’s research director, who’s working with the community on the plan — which has the support of a host of public agencies, area companies and the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

If the community and its partners can secure the funding and regulatory approvals needed for the proposed park upgrade, it would mark the first time that material dredged from the harbor’s bottom has been placed back on land in a residential neighborhood — and in this case, at the residents’ request.

Bear Creek

That level of acceptance has been a long time coming. The Maryland Port Administration has been toiling for decades to melt public resistance to placing the harbor’s dredged material on land anywhere near people. Part of that hostility has been sensory — the muck can give off a rotten-egg sulfur smell when it first comes out of the water. But there’s also been concern about contaminants from two centuries of shipbuilding and manufacturing along Baltimore’s waterfront.

It took the port 14 years to overcome lawsuits and public opposition to using dredged material to create Hart-Miller Island, which sits out in the Bay just off the Baltimore County shore. The port now has approval to place harbor material in a pair of diked containments at Masonville Cove in industrial southern Baltimore and at Cox Creek, near the mouth of the Patapsco.

Sparrows Point, Dundalk

Bear Creek is right around the corner from the old Sparrows Point Steel Mill, which, back in the golden era prior to the Clean Water Act, was the worlds largest steel making facility, back when they thought the capacity of the Bay to absorb contaminants was infinite. As a consequence, Bear Creek, upon which Fleming Park sits, is one of the more contaminated areas in Baltimore Harbor, itself one of the three areas of special concern for toxics in Chesapeake Bay.

Amazingly, dredging contaminated sediment out of the bottom of the harbor, and using it to build land at Fleming Park will probably make both the harbor and the park cleaner.