DC Sues Fed Over Anacostia Pollution

 At the Bay Journal, DC sues feds for ‘polluting the Anacostia River’

The District of Columbia’s Attorney General sued the federal government in January for what it called “150 years of polluting the Anacostia River.”

A costly cleanup of the Anacostia River, which runs through the southeast side of the nation’s capital, has been underway for years. And this isn’t the first time the District of Columbia has filed a lawsuit in an attempt to get a party responsible for polluting the river to help fund its cleanup.

In 2023, the Potomac Electric Power Co. (Pepco) settled a $57 million suit with the district to compensate for the company’s historic contributions to the Anacostia’s pollution woes.

Exelon, which owns the electric utility company Pepco Holdings in the district, is supporting a pilot program to test new solutions for removing toxic substances from the Anacostia River as part of its cleanup work near Pepco’s Benning Road Transfer Station. Along with Washington Gas and the U.S. Navy, Pepco is among the parties that have signed consent decrees pledging to clean up pollution in the river generated by their facilities in the past.

But the district Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb alleged in a suit filed Jan. 10 that the federal government has been the biggest driver of pollution in the Anacostia River over the years. For generations, federal facilities treated the river “as a cost-free dumping ground for the toxic waste and chemicals it generated,” Schwalb said.

Contributors to that waste include the Washington Navy Yard along the river’s banks, which already was a known source of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) contamination to the river. The federal government also operated a waste dump at Kenilworth Landfill that the suit alleges leached chemicals and metals into the river for 25 years. Federal printing facilities also released solvents, metal plating solutions and inks into the river through a drainage system that emptied into the Anacostia and Potomac rivers, the suit alleges.

They do have point, sort of, but without Washington D.C. there, the population of the Anacostia Basin would be much lower. I'm also fairly certain that most of the money that has already been spent to clean the Anacostia was federal.