The Road to Hell...

... Is paved with good intentions, as my Dad used to say. At the Balmer Sun, Tests confirm Herbert Run polluted: Critics say UMBC’s $27M restoration project made it worse

Herbert Run flows through Catonsville’s Spring Grove Hospital campus, accumulating a cocktail of bacteria and pollutants from nearby neighborhoods, businesses and the Baltimore Beltway, government testing shows. However, environmentalists argue that the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s $27 million stream restoration and utility upgrade project further endangered parts of the stream and wasted taxpayers’ money.

Herbert Run contains “bacteria, ions, metals, nutrients, pesticides, sediment, stream modifications, and toxicity [selenium],” according to UMBC documents filed before they cut three acres of streambed forest and bulldozed thousands of feet of streambed. The university’s analysis is being used to support the tree clearing and streambed restoration part of the project, which also includes sewer and road improvements.

But retired forester and Catonsville resident William Rees called it unlikely that UMBC’s project will help Herbert Run. “If anything, the extensive grading, tree removal and destruction of the organic layers did much more harm than good,” Rees told The Baltimore Sun. “The only place where the stream restoration work has potential to be beneficial is in the area [around] the bridge, where there was limited forest and organic layers to begin with.”

Rees and other Catonsville residents and representatives decried the project as wasting taxpayer money for cutting older “specimen trees” — with trunks wider than 30 inches — that protected the stream. The contractor, Whiting-Turner, also bulldozed hundreds of saplings planted by the community, with funding from Maryland’s Tree-Mendous program, intended to create a Spring Grove Arboretum.

Independent testing from Baltimore County and the State of Maryland confirmed the university’s stream quality findings. The Maryland Department of the Environment calls that section of Herbert Run “impaired” by e. coli bacteria, suspended solids and habitat alteration. Where trees were cut, Baltimore County’s Department of Environmental Protection previously found “poor biological integrity” and “partially degraded stream habitat.”