After 25 years of voluntary efforts, the Chesapeake Bay cleanup has failed and needs a new, get-tough approach, a leading environmental group charged Monday in a landmark lawsuit.

CHARLOTTESVILLE Three Virginia sites are among 10 in the South that the Southern Environmental Law Center regards as most endangered.

The list released Monday is the first by the SELC, but deputy director Jeff Gleason said the center plans to take an annual accounting of places it deems at risk in its six-state region.

POQUOSON For more than 40 years, a 3,276-acre peninsula on the Chesapeake Bay served as a bull's-eye for U.S. military bombs and rockets. But later this month, the Army Corps of Engineers will begin to clear an untold amount of ordnance - some of it unexploded - that litters the marshy landscape of Plum Tree Island.

Federal regulators have rejected pleas from state and congressional leaders to delay plans for oil and gas drilling off the Virginia coast until President-elect Barack Obama can take up the contentious matter.

A New York company has revived its offer to buy SPSA outright, for at least $205 million, and privatize all trash and recycling services in South Hampton Roads.

The numbers, according to a report released Monday, are sobering: - The estimated population of blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay has plummeted to 260 million in 2007 from 791 million in 1990. - More than 4,400 jobs in Virginia and Maryland related to catching, packing and selling crabs have been lost between 1998 and 2006, a 40 percent dive costing the economy about $640 million.

Markus and Gunther Heyder and their father, Die-trich, strolled through a part of their 80-acre Currituck County property where a giant oak fell five years ago in the winds of Hurricane Isabel. Rotting among the weeds, the old tree remained where it fell as a part of nature replenishing itself. "He calls it sculpture," Markus said of his father.

Virginia wants to spend some of its $10 million in federal disaster aid to buy back licenses from watermen who would volunteer to no longer catch blue crabs from the Chesapeake Bay.

VIRGINIA BEACH The developers of Indigo Dunes have asked for federal approval of their large, upscale and controversial housing project at the mouth of the Lynnhaven River.

Complaining of rising trash-disposal fees and calling the agency financially mismanaged, Chesapeake has wanted to leave the Southeastern Public Service Authority since at least 2006, when it sued unsuccessfully to free itself from the authority.