‘We Are Killing the Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs’ : Waterways: Scallops, oysters and thick ribbons of eelgrass have vanished from Delaware’s Inland Bays. The fishing trade and tourists feel the crippling effects.

REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. —  As a little girl, Til Purnell swam in the crystalline bay waters here, scooping up soft-shell crabs, oysters and clams for dinner. She could see her toes wriggle on the sandy bottom and watch the fish brush by her ankles.

But that was before poultry became big business in Sussex County, bringing in 83 million chickens. Before the summer crowds arrived with their roaring Jet Skis. Before the hot-dog joints and T-shirt shops popped up along the boardwalk.

And before Delaware’s Inland Bays started to die.

Now when Purnell wades at her waterfront home in Millsboro, her feet look as if they are lost in a sea of chocolate milk. Old-timers complain of this so often that people joke about the crazy old folks of Sussex County who can’t seem to find their own feet.

“Everybody who grew up in this area either swam in the Inland Bays or fished there as a child, and they have strong memories they’re trying to hold on to,” said Paul Petrichenko, a federal soils expert who works with farmers to control runoff into the bays. “What people say is they want to be able to see their feet again.”

The plight of the sick estuary illustrates why, from Santa Monica Bay to Cape Cod, nutrients that clog coastal bays pose such an intractable problem. The circumstances are nearly always identical: A growing community watches its cherished swimming and fishing holes turn into cesspools.

In Sussex County, chicken farmers blame retirees, retirees blame tourists and tourists blame farmers. They all are right--everyone shares the blame. The Inland Bays, a trio of shallow estuaries where streams meet the sea, are a big nutrient trap--the depository for everything flowing off streets and farms over 300 square miles.

The bays are under siege by nutrients from all directions--air, land, underground--at a rate of 6,700 pounds per day in 1990. Nitrates and phosphates are 10 to 20 times greater than under natural conditions and the bays are too shallow to handle the load, said Kent Price, a marine biologist at the University of Delaware.

“In terms of nutrients, it is highly likely this is one of the most enriched estuaries in the United States,” said Price, who heads an Inland Bays scientific advisory team. “We all contribute to the problem in some way--by flushing our toilets, by watering our lawns, by driving our cars.”

For residents of such a sparsely populated state--Delaware has fewer people than San Francisco--it is a matter of fouling their own nest. Unlike the Chesapeake Bay and the Great Lakes that cross state boundaries, the Inland Bays are Delaware’s own, and their decline is a subject of deep embarrassment as well as intense political debate and economic worries.

At the end of World War II, Purnell and her husband, Lewis, bought 20 acres on Herring Creek--one of the bays’ biggest tributaries--then spent 30 years in the foreign service.

When they retired in 1976, they were horrified. “I saw huge, enormous, disastrous changes,” said Til Purnell, now known for her feisty efforts to revive the bays. “I almost burst into tears.”

Today, the scallops, oysters and thick ribbons of eelgrass where crabs and other fish nurse have vanished. Longtime residents such as Crabbin’ Jim Murray, who owns a bait shop, and Milton Cooper, who worked 22 years for the Coast Guard, say that once-plentiful striped bass, white perch and winter flounder are almost gone.

One-third of the area’s shellfish beds are off limits to harvesting because of bacteria. Blue crabs and hard-shell clams are about the only local shellfish left.

At stake is more than childhood memories of fish fries. Delaware has a $950-million annual tourist and recreation trade, mostly at the bays.

Year-round, only about 50,000 residents live within the bays’ watershed, but in the summer the population quadruples with urbanites plunking down $1,200 a week to rent waterfront homes.

“We are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs,” Purnell said, “and it’s so stupid I can’t stand it.”

This stretch of Atlantic coast is not industrial; in fact, Delaware’s shoreline can have no major factories under a 1972 state law. Sussex County essentially remains rural, with slim grain silos, pastel dogwood trees and weathered, milk-white farm houses.

The poultry industry, which spreads 520 million pounds of manure a year on the ground in the bays’ watershed, is considered the largest source of nutrients. A Rehoboth Beach waste-water treatment plant, household septic tanks and boats exacerbate the problem.

Two years ago, a cleanup plan seeking to alter the widespread practices affecting the bays emerged from a task force of residents, farmers, government officials and scientists.

The waterfront homeowners--mostly senior citizens in modest mobile homes--are not eager to convert their septic systems to expensive sewer systems.

The chicken farmers, however, are slowly solving their manure disposal problem under new federal and state programs. For decades, they spread tons of manure on their crops or stored it in six-foot mounds on the ground. In the 1980s, they also began nourishing their fields with liquid nitrogen, which moves rapidly through creeks and sandy soils.

Petrichenko, of the Soil Conservation Service, said 40 of the area’s 300 farmers have built $12,000 sheds to shield manure piles from rain. Farmers also are building composters for chicken carcasses, learning to spread manure just before planting instead of letting it lie in fields all winter and using lighter formulas for liquid nitrogen.

But farm traditions die hard. Even if every ounce of new manure was controlled, the bays would keep degrading from the tons already seeped into the ground.

“The overall trend,” Petrichenko said, “is from real bad to better.”