Opinion

King: Galveston Bay's muddy waters solely our fault Bill King says seeing the pristine Great Lakes on vacation was a stark contrast to the sad state of the place where he usually boats and fishes.

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I have been traveling through the Great Lakes this summer. It is an unbelievably beautiful area but, for some reason, is not a prime vacation spot for many Houstonians. Among the many wonderful attributes of this area: how clean the water is. For the most part, it is very clear throughout the system and, in some areas, we have been able to see 40 to 50 feet down into the water.

It has certainly been a stark contrast to the muddy waters of Galveston Bay, where I normally do my boating. And while we take our turbid waters for granted, it apparently was not always so. There are historical accounts in the mid-1850s of being able to see a silver dollar in 10 feet of water in Galveston Bay. So what happened?

We did. During the development in and around - and especially upstream - of the bay, we did many things to adversely affect its health.

Probably the worst thing we did was to dredge millions of tons of ancient oyster reefs for their shell to build highways, streets, driveways and sidewalks. I was walking in an older part of Houston a couple of years ago and found a worn sidewalk that was originally constructed using oyster shell as aggregate.

Oysters are amazing little creatures. Each one can filter about a gallon of water an hour. Additionally, as they die off, their shells form a hard bottom on the bay's floor, which helps control silt being churned in the water column.

But from the turn of the century until 1969, it is estimated that we dredged 150,000 acre feet (one acre covered to a height of one foot) of shell from the bay. To give you some idea of how much that is, imagine taking the top off the Astrodome and filling it with oyster shells. You would have to fill it over 100 times to equal the amount of shell dredged out of Galveston Bay. What it took nature 20,000 years to build, we disassembled in the span of just over 50 years.

The earliest maps we have of Galveston Bay's oyster reefs are from the 1950s. A comparison done by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department in the 1990s estimated that about half of the reefs that existed in the 1950s had been destroyed by then. There is no telling how many were destroyed before the 1950s.

Of course all that dredging, along with other dredging projects over the years, disturbed the silt that flows in from the rivers, suspending it in the water. This, in turn, cut down on the amount of light reaching shallow areas where sea grass beds once flourished. As a result, the sea grass beds died, further destabilizing the bay's floor.

At the same time, through development and by pumping out underground water, we managed to fill or drown thousands of acres of tidal wetlands that stored silt and provided habitat for hundreds of species.

The good news is that for the past several decades, we have been doing some things right. Oyster dredging was outlawed in 1969. The Clean Water Act of 1970 has gradually eliminated the most egregious dumping of chemicals and wastes into the bay's watershed. It also sought to preserve wetlands. We formed the Harris Galveston Subsidence District and stopped pumping underground water at an unsustainable rate. And many groups and companies are now doing restoration projects around the bay, reconstructing oyster reefs and planting marsh grasses.

Today, we are probably almost holding our own or perhaps making a little progress toward restoring Galveston Bay to what it once was.

But we have a long way to go. Our waste water processing still has many gaps. And we discharge our storm drainage without any filtering. As development continues around the bay, the storm water runoff into it will increase, carrying with it fertilizers, insecticides, canine feces, etc.

And there are legacy discharges, such as the dioxin site on the Trinity River that we are going to have to deal with.

My earliest recollection of Galveston Bay is following my father through a grass field in San Leon, sliding down a clay bank to a small beach and wading out through seaweed to get to an oyster reef to fish. In that spot today, there is no field, there is no bank, there is no beach, there is no seagrass and there is no reef. And that occurred just in the span of my lifetime.

Galveston Bay is an incredible natural gift that we have inherited, but we have not taken very good care of it. We need to ask ourselves what kind of stewards we will be in the future. Would it not be remarkable if someone visiting Galveston Bay 50 years from now were to be writing home about its clear and beautiful water?

It is not impossible. But it will take a lot of work.

Bill King's column appears Thursday and Sunday. Email King at weking@weking.net and follow him at twitter.com/weking.