Rejuvenation Near the Anacostia May Leave One Component Behind: The River Itself
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
The Anacostia River, planned as the scenic centerpiece of massive redevelopment in the District, remains heavily polluted by sewage, trash and toxic chemicals, environmentalists say -- and it might be years before the river's health catches up with its new cachet.
In the city's plans, the Anacostia will soon be surrounded by a necklace of new stadiums, office buildings, condominiums and parks. A river that has come to symbolize neglect, both of its water and of the neighborhoods near its banks, will become a new hub of urban life.
But that bright vision is hard to square with the Anacostia of the present. Its channels are choked with mud and floating debris. Its catfish have tumors on their livers and lips. And, dozens of times a year, it actually stinks, from human waste dumped out by the District's sewer system.
Now, activists wonder whether a dirty river will start to hold this development back. Or maybe, they hope, all this building will speed the Anacostia's recovery by making activists out of people who are seeing its plight for the first time.
"You really cannot build a world-class city on a wrecked river," said Thomas Arrasmith, a leader at the Anacostia Watershed Citizens Advisory Committee. "You cannot have a world-class city with a sewer running through it."
The Anacostia winds its entire course inside the Capital Beltway, beginning near Bladensburg and emptying into the Potomac River 8.4 miles downstream at the District's Hains Point. It is often out of sight, though, even to those who live near the river. People have been kept away by the U.S. National Arboretum, the Anacostia Freeway and other barriers -- and the historical perception that the river isn't worth visiting.
"One of the sad things about the Anacostia: It's been so dirty for so long that people shunned it," said Joseph Glover, a Southeast Washington resident who helps monitor the health of an Anacostia tributary, Pope Branch.
If the plans on city drawing boards are followed, however, it will not be that way for long.
The marquee project of the new waterfront development effort is the Washington Nationals baseball stadium, whose steel skeleton is rising near the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge. City officials hope to surround it with a new entertainment and residential district. They also plan to remake the area just to the east, adding office buildings and a three-block Washington Canal Park.
They want to turn the area around the old D.C. General Hospital into a neighborhood, extending Capitol Hill to the riverside. On the south side, a stretch of empty land called Poplar Point could be converted into a D.C. United soccer stadium or perhaps a park surrounded by a crescent of residential buildings.
"The whole purpose here is to think of the river as a great centerpiece of the city and not a dividing line," said Uwe Brandes, a vice president of the city-chartered Anacostia Waterfront Corp.
Most of the pollution the Anacostia suffers from is not the kind for which miscreants are tracked down and fined. Instead, most of it comes from obvious sources, such as lawns, sewage plants and storm drains -- within the law, or at least not the target of stringent enforcement.
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.
MarylandAcross 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.
There have been efforts to fix that problem by using filters to capture trash and using plants and artificial wetlands to absorb stormwater upstream.
But in Montgomery and Prince George's, officials say the problem is much bigger than the solution. It will be very hard to retrofit entire neighborhoods, they say, because many of the changes would have to be made on private property.
The DistrictIn the District's section of the Anacostia, the problem is not water running too fast; it's the opposite. The Anacostia in the District is beyond languid. It can take more than 30 days for water to make the trip from Bladensburg to the Potomac.
That means the river doesn't flush out pollution quickly. It remembers insults. One of the biggest came from Washington Navy Yard, where runoff from ship maintenance and munitions-building washed down hazardous metals and other chemicals.
The Navy Yard is an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund cleanup site, though some of the most toxic soil and groundwater has been removed or cleaned. One current research project has put down layers of sand and absorbent materials a foot thick on the river bottom there, hoping to bury the remaining pollutants.
Another problem is the District's sewer system, designed more than a century ago to dump out raw sewage during moderate rainstorms. It still does. At last count, the system dumped 2.14 billion gallons of mixed rainwater and waste into the Anacostia. The river's count of fecal coliform bacteria has been found to be 21 times the EPA's limit.
Being on the river when waste is flowing in is "like being in a toilet," said Connolly, the watershed society's director.
When he said it, he was steering a boat to show the location of one sewage "outfall" -- within sniffing distance of the new Nationals ballpark.
"It's going to be stinky, especially after a rain," Connolly said. "You'll stand up in the seventh-inning stretch and get a big whiff of sewage."
The D.C. Water and Sewer Authority is working to solve this problem, with a plan to dig enormous tunnels under the city where water can be stored during a rainstorm, then treated to remove the sewage.
WASA Chief of Staff Johnnie Hemphill said 30 percent of the problem had been eliminated. But fixing the bulk, he said, will probably take close to 20 years and $2 billion.
The FutureThe Anacostia today provides stark contrasts of beauty and ugliness, sometimes on the same day.
Gabriel Horchler, a Library of Congress employee who often commutes from Cheverly in a rowing shell, said he sees beavers and deer on the river's wooded shorelines -- but he has had people spit at him and throw rocks from the Benning Road bridge. He has seen the bald eagles that have recently come back -- and dodged car bumpers and baby carriages in the current.
"Sometimes, it's depressingly dirty and noxious," Horchler said. "And sometimes, it's very beautiful."
New parks and high-dollar developments could sharpen the contrast between what the Anacostia is and what it should be. Environmentalists hope that will translate into a greater public demand for cleanup.
Already, though, there have been battles over pollution control at the stadium. Environmentalists say they're happy that the city plans to try to corral stormwater, but they had also hoped for a green roof of plants on the stadium.
Planners say that would take away from one of the ballpark's signature features: its sweeping silvery roof canopy.
"This is a great opportunity for the river, and it still can be, hopefully," said Brian Van Wye, an activist whose title is Anacostia riverkeeper. "But the stadium has so far been fundamentally disappointing."
Thinking about the future, city officials tick off encouraging stories from other cities, where waterside development led to environmental improvements: the Chicago River, Boston Harbor.
But skeptics in Washington can also think of a counterexample, less than 40 miles north. It's got a ballpark and shops near the water -- and, still, one of the worst pollution problems in the mid-Atlantic.
"I'd take that person up to the Inner Harbor" in Baltimore, said Ed Merrifield, who serves as the riverkeeper for the Potomac. "And have them jump in the water there."
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