Polluted Waters Stain D.C.'s Shining Vision

Brandes said he worried that development will slow if the river doesn't get clean.

Douglas Jemal, whose Douglas Development Corp. plans to build near the new baseball stadium, said he believed that development and new public attention would lead to a cleaner river.

"I can't imagine it's not going to get taken care of," he said.

Today, though, the Anacostia is not ready for its close-up.

Maryland

Across the street from a shopping center in Prince George's County, and a few feet into some thorny woods, James Connolly stopped at a 12-foot-deep gully. Its bottom was littered with plastic bags, chunks of brick, even campaign signs from the fall election.

Connolly, executive director of the Anacostia Watershed Society, pointed out what made the gully: a storm sewer pipe. Running downhill from the shopping center, he said, the rainwater in the pipe moves fast enough to carve earth.

The water flows to the Northwest Branch, a tributary of the Anacostia, carrying dirt and trash.

Environmentalists have nicknamed this gully and others like it "The Gorges of Prince George's," although there are similar problems in Montgomery County tributaries. These deep channels are a stark example of what they call a major problem in Maryland, home to more than 80 percent of the Anacostia's roughly 176-square-mile watershed: Suburbanization has supplanted trees and paved over dirt with concrete. Rainwater is funneled swiftly downstream, carrying with it dirt, trash and chemicals.

The dirt: One survey found that sediment levels in the river needed to be reduced 77 percent to meet water-quality standards. At Bladensburg, where in Colonial times the river was deep enough for oceangoing ships, so much sediment has built up that there is often exposed mud in the middle.

The trash: An estimated 20,000 tons come downstream every year. There are coffee cups, soft drink bottles -- an astounding number of basketballs, river aficionados say -- plus tree trunks and other more dangerous debris.

The University of Maryland men's crew team, which practices on the Anacostia, had six boats damaged this season by things in the water. "After a big rain, we've had to turn around," said Chris Mattingly, the team's president. "It's just a lot of shopping carts, big stuff that gets down there after a rain."

And the chemicals: They wash off roads and parking lots and include oil and grease and exhaust byproducts called PAHs. The high concentration of PAHs, known to cause cancer, was cited when a survey found that more than half of the river's brown bullhead catfish had tumors. It was equal to the highest tumor levels ever seen in a U.S. river.