Potomac Sewage Spill Largest in History

According to the Potomac Riverkeeper Network. Atop Da Hill, Potomac wastewater spill appears to be largest in US history

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.
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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.”

So, just an bonus year in Baltimore? 

Another way to put it into perspective is to compare it to the volume of the tidal Potomac River, into which it is being dumped. According to Grok, that volume is about  1.9 trillion gallons. Call it 2 trillion, and we see that if the sewage were evenly mixed in the estuary (it won't be, it will be concentrated near Washington DC), the entire 100 mile estuary would be about 100 ppm sewage.

FWIW, when working in the Anacostia River years ago, they made us get Hepatitis A vaccines. I'm not so sure the people working in the Potomac for the next few months shouldn't consider that. I wouldn't be eating any raw oysters out of the Potomac anytime soon, either.