Md., River Groups Try To Determine Origins of Abundant Plastic Barrels
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 9, 2005
Olmsted Island, a forested median that splits the Potomac River upstream from the District, is a spot where the fast-moving current coughs up debris as it crashes through Great Falls.
For those interested in one of the river's oddest ecological mysteries, it is a great place to find clues.
"There are six right here," said Mac Thornton, a kayaker who paddled out to the island in Montgomery County one recent afternoon. He swiveled to count more, pointing his finger at each new sighting. "Seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, so far."
Thornton was counting barrels: waist-high plastic drums in shades of blue, black and white. They were jumbled at his feet and hidden in the woods behind him-- obvious aliens in the landscape.
The barrels are the mystery.
Dozens, perhaps hundreds of them, wash down the Potomac every year, jostling kayakers and piling up on shorelines, environmentalists have said. The barrels have become the subject of a government inquiry, after a radio reporter opened one and found dangerous chemicals.
Amateur eco-detectives around the river have been trying to find the barrels' origins. For now, "Nobody knows," said Tracy Bowen, executive director of the Alice Ferguson Foundation, which runs cleanups along the river.
The barrels washing up are usually made of thick, sturdy plastic. Some have no writing, some are labeled as having held fruit products and others have more ominous warnings about petroleum products or hazardous materials, experts say.
They have been seen on the Potomac for two decades, some longtime residents have said. And the barrels seem to be more of a problem here than on other major rivers, though a comparison is difficult to quantify.
Rumbling through the Potomac's rapids, barrels can be a danger to kayakers, said Jason Robertson of the Takoma Park-based American Whitewater, a conservation and educational group.
"It's like a truck running into you at 10 or 15 miles an hour," he said. "You get clocked."
Another problem with the barrels is how they look. Where an old vehicle or refrigerator dumped into the river might sink and be forgotten, a bright-blue barrel stands out.
"You have this sense that you're really in this really wild place," said Matthew Logan, president of the Potomac Conservancy. "And then" -- he whistled, watching an imaginary barrel pass -- "industrial society floats by."
Environmentalists' attempts to trace the barrels have led only to frustration.
Gina Mathias, of the Alice Ferguson Foundation, entered words printed on one barrel into an Internet search engine and found a manufacturer's name: Plasti-Drum of Lockport, Ill.
But then she hit a wall: Plasti-Drum ceased to exist in 1986.
The company was sold, and then sold again, and wound up in the hands of the Greif company in Delaware, Ohio, which has no idea which customers in the Potomac watershed might have purchased Plasti-Drum barrels.
"Not after so long," Deb Strohmaier, a spokeswoman for Greif, said.
Ed Merrifield, an environmentalist whose title is Potomac riverkeeper, got a little further up the chain.
He had noticed that many barrels seemed to have once held fruit juice, and he thought that they might be traced to the McCutcheon Apple Products company in Frederick.
Robert McCutcheon III, the company's president, said his business does buy grape juice concentrate in this type of barrel.
But McCutcheon said that his company re-sells the empty barrels by the hundreds and that the public buys them for $9.95 each.
From there, the barrels are believed to be used as floats in Potomac River docks and piers, or as trash cans or feed troughs on farms.
All those uses could put the barrels in the river, environmentalists have said, because strong spring floods can break off docks or wash away the contents of a streamside farm or front yard.
So the trail goes cold at McCutcheon's.
"We can say where they're coming from" in this instance, Merrifield said. "But that doesn't solve the problem of how they're getting into the Potomac."
Several weeks ago, WTOP radio reporter Mark Segraves made an attention-getting discovery. He said he opened a barrel near Great Falls and found a thick liquid inside. The industrial smell "knocked us back when we opened it," Segraves said.
Lab tests showed that the liquid was found to contain five "volatile organic" compounds, Segraves reported, including some that could cause ill health effects in humans.
After that, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency, requesting an investigation of the barrels.
The matter has been referred to the Maryland Department of the Environment. Department spokeswoman Julie Oberg said that emergency response personnel would begin looking this morning for the drums and "finding out the origin, if possible."
Good luck, environmentalists have said.
After months of research, their best guess is that there is no one source for the barrels. Instead, they said, the barrels wash down from houses, farms, and docks across the watershed -- not dumped on purpose, but lost through carelessness and high water.
Many other things get into the river the same way. The Alice Ferguson Foundation's most recent cleanup found eight refrigerators, 23 bicycles and 2,507 sports balls of all kinds. There were 207.8 tons of trash, picked up across 297 cleanup sites.
Mac Thornton got a good view of that kind of flotsam when he turned away from the barrels on Olmsted Island and surveyed everything else that had washed up.
"There's a picnic bench here, water coolers, shoes," he said, talking from the island by cell phone. "Tons and tons of bottles and cans."
Thornton said this chapter of trying to track the barrels' origins might wind up being just one thread in a larger, even more disheartening story about the Potomac's annual tide of trash.
"The barrels are sort of the tip of the iceberg," he said. "They're just the most obvious thing."