Tide turns as island rebuilt in Chesapeake Bay

Maryland's Poplar Island is re-emerging in the Chesapeake Bay as a wildlife refuge.

POPLAR ISLAND, Maryland (CNN) -- It was an island that disappeared, eaten away by the Chesapeake Bay's winds, tides and storms until only a small portion was left.

Now man is rebuilding what nature destroyed at Poplar Island, where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers -- reviled by some critics as an enemy of the environment -- is creating a wildlife refuge.

Project manager Scott Johnson shows visitors just how far the island already has come since the corps arrived.

"This little remnant in the foreground, along with a couple of other small islets, was all that was left of Poplar Island when we got here in '98," Johnson said. "It constituted about three acres."

Now man-made embankments extend for more than three miles, containing 14 miles of roads and 800,000 tons of rock.

The project, which will continue for years, is grounded in economics: ships, jobs and money, and the requisite yearly dredging of Baltimore Harbor to keep the big ships coming.

"We have ships running that are 2 1/2 to 3 feet off the bottom," said Frank L. Hammons, deputy director of harbor development for the Port of Baltimore. "In other words, in a 50-foot channel, we have ships leaving here with 47-and-a-half feet for draft."

And the muck has to go somewhere. Just dumping it in deep water is no longer environmentally acceptable -- or even legal in Maryland.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been working on the island since 1998.

So it gets barged to Poplar Island, and pumped, as a soup of mud and salt water during fall and winter. The drying muck will build up for more than a decade, piling up layer after layer.

Poplar Island once teemed with birds and was a hunting preserve for politicians in the 1930s.

"Poplar was 200 acres, and there was quite a bit of wildlife," said Peter Bailey, whose family owned the island.

"There were thousands and thousands of ducks, great blue heron and a lot of different shore birds."

For now, it's mostly an industrial site and looks like a moonscape. But by the time it's fully restored, the goal is to have it looking like nearby Coaches Island, just a few yards away, with low-lying marshes and timber on the higher ground.

Volunteers already are planting small patches of marsh. Although the project is years from completion, wildlife isn't waiting, which sometimes creates problems.

In the spring, diamondback terrapins nested in a sandy embankment -- but on the wrong side, where the hatchlings would take a fatal trip to an area under construction. So engineers built a fence, and volunteers must gather the turtles up and release them in a protected inlet that leads to open water.

Biologist Nick Carter calls the island a "fair bargain" between the needs of man and nature.

The project has drawbacks, including a price tag in the hundreds of millions of dollars, three to five times the expense of dumping dredge muck in deep water.

In addition, creating land destroys the environment for fish.

Biologist Nick Carter calls Poplar Island a "fair bargain" between the needs of man and nature. But amid discussions of future islands, Carter urges caution.

"We're making changes in the system that we don't entirely understand," he said. "We just wouldn't want to see these things done over and over and over again."