A wastewater spill into the Potomac River that began last month now appears to be one of the largest in American history.
DC Water, a local water utility, said in a press release last week that part of a sewer system known as the Potomac Interceptor collapsed along the Clara Barton Parkway on Jan. 19. In that same release, the utility said it “estimates that approximately 243 million gallons of wastewater has overflowed from the collapse site.”
On Monday, DC Water said there had been a “significant overflow” Sunday amid a “high flow period,” with some bypass pumps not in service at the time.
Potomac Riverkeeper Network, a local environmental advocacy group, claimed in a Facebook post Wednesday that the sewage spilled had topped 300 million gallons.
Dean Naujoks, who holds the title of Potomac Riverkeeper, told The Baltimore Sun in an article published Tuesday that the only other spill he could compare in size had occurred in 2017 on the U.S.-Mexico border, leaking 230 million gallons.
“The Potomac River is a shared natural treasure, and any event that threatens its health understandably causes concern, frustration, and a sense of loss. Those feelings are not only valid – but they are also shared by all of us at DC Water,” DC Water CEO David L. Gadis said in a Wednesday open letter.
When asked about the scale of the Washington sewage spillage, Gussie Maguire, a Maryland staff scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation compared it to annual sewage spillage in Baltimore.
“The way that I put it into perspective for myself and for people before, is I compared it to annual sewage overflow amounts,” Maguire told The Hill in a Thursday interview. “You don’t really necessarily want to think about it, but there are a lot of sewage overflows going on in any particular year.”
“I follow happenings in Baltimore pretty closely, and their largest volume of sewage spilled in a year. … The largest year that they’ve had in terms of volume in the last — in recent memory is from 2018, and they had right around 260 million gallons over the course of the entire year, or 250.”
Maguire also said the area where the rupture occurred was set for upgrades by DC Water, with the utility having already “allocated over $600 million.”
The sewage spill was “a single event, but the circumstances that led to it are not unique, according to Maguire, who also pushed for a continued stream of money to go to infrastructure upgrades and repairs, calling taking that kind of action, “really, really important, so that we don’t see this sort of large-scale spill become a regular occurrence.”
University of Maryland researchers have said they found levels of E. coli bacteria at a Potomac River site that topped Environmental Protection Agency recreation standards by 10,000 times two days after the Jan. 19 rupture. A week later, according to the researchers, the bacteria levels had dropped to 2,500 times over standards.
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