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| Water covered: During high tide Aug. 30, a truck passed on the road from Ewell to Rhodes Point, two of the three hamlets on
Smith Island in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. Andy Nelson - staff |
In Maryland, sea slowly claims a historic island
With water levels in the Chesapeake Bay rising an inch per decade, Smith Island has lost more than 3,200 of its 11,000 acres over the past 150 years.
By Andy Nelson | Staff photographer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the November 15, 2007 edition
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Smith Island, Md. - Sometime in the 1780S, John Tyler, a landowner on Smith Island in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay, dug a narrow boundary ditch in the soft ground to mark his property. After more than 220 years, wind and water in the bay have conspired to eat away at the land. Today the "ditch" is a waterway nearly a quarter-mile wide and an example of how nature is slowly consuming the island.
"Over the years it got wider and wider, but we still call it Tyler's Ditch," says local historian Jennings Evans.
Smith Island is actually a collection of small islands that together make up the last inhabited island in the Chesapeake Bay not connected by a bridge to the mainland.
Scientists calculate the water level in the bay is rising by a little more than an inch per decade: The sea is slowly taking over these specks of land, home to the hardy descendants of 17th-century English settlers.
"I know [an inch per decade] doesn't sound like much, but the reason for concern, especially in Maryland, is because the land is very low," says Michael Kearney, a University of Maryland geology professor who has studied the impact of sea-level rise on Chesapeake Bay.
Higher water levels mean stronger waves, increased erosion, rapid loss of marsh, and bigger storm surges. This could have a devastating effect in southern Maryland counties, where the average tide level extends more than a half-mile inland from the bay. That means waves from a big storm could penetrate far inland, Dr. Kearney adds.
Waverly Evans, a lifelong Smith islander, doesn't need a scientific study to tell him what's happening. He has been a witness as the creeping Chesapeake waters swallow what were once island homes.
As he guides his boat through Tyler's Ditch, Mr. Evans raises a weathered hand and points across the water to a marsh-and-grass-covered island.
It was on this now-abandoned parcel that Evans was born in 1926 and lived as a boy. People there tended gardens; their chickens and pigs roamed their yards. The 10 homes made up a small community. But the water's unrelenting attack on the little island forced the families to leave.
"Down through the years, the salt and the marsh ate in, and the erosion and everything, and people started to move to higher ground," Evans says.
'We were eroding something fierce'
In 2001, the Army Corps of Engineers completed a $2 million bulkhead project at the Smith Island town of Tylerton to protect the town and stop erosion. At high tide, water slaps at the metal barrier at a level clearly above the land on the other side.
"We were eroding something fierce, terrible. [The bulkhead] has really prolonged this little town, anyway," Evans says.
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