Runoff isn’t the problem. Runoff is what naturally happens. Runoff is the system working correctly.
The problem is all the people who are putting tons of fertilizer out there when it isn’t needed; grass doesn’t even use phosphorus, which is what causes the algae blooms which destroys the O2 in the water like that. Conflating the problem is that there is a LOT of chicken farming in the DELMARVA area, which causes problems too; when chicken waste isn’t handled correctly and gets washed away (or put onto fields as fertilizer and gets washed away) it puts a lot of phosphorus into the water too.
I live in an area with a lot of agriculture. We have problems with Lake Erie having occasional algae blooms which cause all kinds of problems too. For us, it’s almost 100% tied back to actual food agriculture and chicken farming, which we have a lot of too. (Thanks to the EPA, Lake Erie is a lot cleaner now than it has been in a very long time, but we still have problems because our swamps all got drained and we don’t have as much biological filtering as we should have between the fields and the lake.)
(I went off on a tangent about my grass being organic and free-range and pesticide and fertilizer free, and not watered. I deleted it. But the deal is that even out east, we need to get over the concept of a bluegrass lawn and start accepting more local, native plants in that role. Sedge is a beautiful plant, not a four-letter word. And yes, you can play golf on a non-blugrass style lawn.)
Basically, the bottom line is… we need to be more careful with agriculture. And we need to stop trying to terraform our environment but to be more accepting of our local nature.
