Sunday, May 25, 2008

As the media and local officials fall all over themselves in celebration of the new National Harbor project, a few residents of Prince George's County are less than thrilled. Why? These residents might be paying a hefty price for this project -- a price levied in sewage.

Over the past several years, residents of the Broad Creek area of Prince George's have had numerous meetings with the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission to express concern and outrage over sanitary sewer overflows from its pumping station into Broad Creek and the Potomac River. A sanitary sewer overflow is doublespeak for dumping untreated sewage.

Over the past two years, residents have asked WSSC officials how the National Harbor development would affect a sewer system that couldn't handle the flows it already had. We were assured that National Harbor wouldn't have a major impact. But how could this be, when all of National Harbor's waste would be going directly to the pumping station? Recently, it has become obvious to many that the WSSC and some local politicians were more concerned with an on-time opening for National Harbor than with the health of the people living near Broad Creek or the numerous fishermen, boaters, water skiers, kayakers, etc., using this area of the Potomac River basin.

In 2006, we were told that these overflows were caused by a lack of emergency generators to run the pumps during a power outage and that generators would be installed and operational no later than this spring. No generators have been installed, and now we are told that it will be 2010 before they are operational. When we asked the WSSC about the overflows that occur when there is no power outage, officials admitted that they had a capacity problem caused by groundwater leaking into the system during periods of extremely heavy rain. Correcting the capacity problem will take until 2012 at the earliest and, considering the WSSC's performance to date, perhaps much later.

On April 25, the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, the anchor of National Harbor, celebrated its grand opening. On May 9, the WSSC dumped 968,000 gallons of raw sewage into Broad Creek. On May 11 and 12, the WSSC dumped an additional 3.76 million gallons of untreated raw sewage into Broad Creek. This was the largest sewage dump into Broad Creek in years not resulting from a power outage, and it happened less than three weeks after National Harbor opened. The only dump of comparable magnitude was a 4.6 million-gallon event in February that resulted from a power outage.

The February dump would not have happened if the WSSC had lived up to its commitment to install generators, but it would have been millions of gallons larger if National Harbor had been open at the time. In the past, weather-related sewer overflows were rare because the system could handle most situations; now it appears that the additional flow from National Harbor is going to make it a common occurrence.

In essence, during heavy rainstorms or local power outages, every time a guest at National Harbor flushes a toilet or a urinal, it is dumped in our back yard. Enough is enough.

-- Sean O'Day

Fort Washington