Cleanup On Isle 5

Either the EPA is slacking off, or they caught onto the fact that I make fun of their press releases, and cut me off; I didn't get my daily assortment of Bay press releases at any of my accustomed email addys.  But I did manage to find this article about the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers in WAPO, so I'll have to milk it for everything it's worth:

Potomac River’s and Anacostia River’s cleanup makes progress, but much work remains:

It’s Saturday morning on the Anacostia River, and the sun is filtering through the trees on Kingman Island. In the distance, a pair of deer splash across a large, lush cove. Six turtles tumble, one by one, from a sun-soaked log into the river below.

“This is exactly what you think of when you think of Ward 7,” said a sarcastic Brent Bolin, director of advocacy for the Anacostia Watershed Society, who is steering the boat through Kenilworth Marsh. “The sad thing is, there are people living less than a mile away who have no idea this is here.”

That has been my observation numerous times when visiting the Anacostia; you drive through the most depressing neighborhoods imaginable (no, I take that back, Camden, NJ was worth), but once you get of the water, it's hard to see that your even in the city, at least in the upper part.  A few bridges go overhead, but for the most part, activity in the area is focused away from the River.  No houses or businesses look out on it; even the parks that border have no human traffic nearby.  If it weren't for the absolutely astonishing amount of trash that washes in the River from nearby streets and subsurface drainage, you could even imagine it being clean (it isn't)..

That’s because for many years, the Anacostia was one of the most polluted rivers in the country. Meanwhile, its larger neighbor, the Potomac, was the focus of a major ongoing cleanup.

And still is.  Not much has changed, and it would take a lot to change it; like a complete change of the bottom sediments.

This could slowly be changing. Inlets such as Kenilworth Marsh are starting to show signs of revival. With the rise of nearby high-profile development projects such as Nationals Park and luxury apartments by the Navy Yard, the neglected Anacostia riverfront is getting attention.

The last batch of work I did up on the Anacostia was in preparation for building the new stadium, located in the lower zone.  That portion of the waterfront, that used the be the all but abandoned Navy Yard, was perhaps the most blighted ares.  It looks better now, but as far as I know, the same dirty sediment is still in the River in front of it.

But environmentalists stress that because the region’s waterways are connected — the Anacostia flows into the Potomac, which flows into the Chesapeake Bay — a holistic approach to cleaning them is necessary. If one river is neglected, the region suffers.

“The greatest concentration of PCBs [polychlorinated biphenyls], a serious poisonous toxicant in the Potomac, is the spot where the Anacostia enters it,” said Ed Merrifield, head of the Potomac Riverkeeper group. “So if you care about one, you care about the other.”

True, but the Potomac is many times bigger than the Anacostia, and while pollutants do slosh back and forth between them with the tide, the influence of the Anacostia is substantially diluted out in the Potomac.

There are several arguments as to why the Anacostia has been so neglected, primarily that it doesn’t supply drinking water, but the prevailing theory is that the communities surrounding the river — wards 6, 7 and 8 — have been forced to bear the brunt of the District’s waste.

“America has a shameful history of putting our pollution on poor minorities, and there’s no other way to say it,” said Mike Bolinder, head of the Anacostia Riverkeeper group. “You can slice and dice it any way you want, but the Potomac got cleaned up first because it isn’t near poor minorities and toxic landfills.”

OK, watch your wallet, because here comes that "Environmental Justice" crap again.  The Anacostia got dirty because the government built itself up around it.  I don't think it's a coincidence that one of America's dirtiest rivers happens to flow through the nations capital.  Frankly, the government is the first to exempt itself from environmental and health laws that it inflicts on the rest of the country (for a fine example, look to the military), and cares less about it's citizen than it does about spending they money they've coerce out of their hands the way it want than taking care of them.

You can bet that if the majority of the land on either side of the Anacostia were in private hands it would be a lot better of.