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CHAPTER 1

A River Revived

In a 2012 story for the Washington Post, Ed Merrifield reflected on his work over the previous decade as president of the Potomac Riverkeeper Network. The group was one of several civic organizations in Greater Washington devoted to curbing water pollution, enhancing recreational opportunities, and protecting river habitats. In discussing their approach to environmental stewardship, Merrifield avowed, “If it’s illegal pollution, we go after it as fast as we can to tell them you have to stop. We use all legal means necessary. We won’t back down.”¹ Potomac Riverkeeper engaged in political lobbying, like many environmental groups, but was better known for providing environmental education and hands-on activities to cultivate public stewardship of the Potomac. This kind of work proved ever more valuable during the late twentieth century as sprawling development expanded the sources of pollution and encouraged environmentalists to see their work in the context of the smart-growth movement that was taking shape in the region.

Cleaning up the Potomac River was the most unifying environmental issue of Greater Washington over the past half century. In the early 1970s, the river, like many in the United States, was heavily polluted because of inadequate wastewater treatment, storm-water runoff and erosion from land development, and poor regulations on industry. In 1972, Congress passed the Clean Water Act (CWA), which featured strict water quality standards and a permitting system to govern the discharge of pollutants. Over the next decade, state and local officials built and upgraded wastewater treatment facilities to comply with federal policy, but they still had to find the political will and resources to clean up pollution—and that often depended on pressure from grassroots activists. Environmentalists were supportive of cleaning up pollution but worried that increasing treatment capacity would unintentionally spark growth in outlying areas. In the mid-1980s, the limitations of federal policies for addressing indirect or “nonpoint” sources of pollution that were not connected to sewage treatment infrastructure became more visible. Controlling storm-water runoff, for example, was a significant problem in built-up urban and suburban environments with a high percentage of impermeable surfaces such as roads and rooftops.² As a result, citizen-led activities that tapped into, and grew, public investment in the health and welfare of the Potomac became even more important.

Through the interplay of policy making and grassroots activism, the “nation’s river” is healthier now than at any point in the past fifty years. Citizens pushed officials to clean up the Potomac primarily through community-based debates to address the environmental impact of existing development rather than seeking additional growth. In the mid-1990s, grassroots activists began to take more direct ownership of pollution cleanup. Greater political cooperation across the region supported public-private partnerships between government and environmental organizations. Environmentalists also broadened their approach from a focus on lobbying public officials to more direct activities including trash cleanups, river monitoring, and environmental education. Finally, they adopted a more holistic perspective on river cleanup to address the issues of habitat and species protection, ecological restoration, and open space preservation. The focus of local environmentalists on critiquing both the environmental and financial costs of growth reflected a critique of 1970s metropolitan America that returned with renewed force in the late 1990s under the more formal banner of smart growth. The cleanup of the Potomac, then, was an environmental success story as well as an integral part of metropolitan Washington’s smartgrowth movement.

The Potomac in Postwar America

Postwar growth took a heavy toll on the Potomac. The river, which is 383 miles long with a watershed of 14,700 square miles, knits together Greater Washington as it reaches into West Virginia and Pennsylvania. At its southern end, the Potomac has an estuary with the Chesapeake Bay.³ Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Washington built a combined system to convey sewage and storm-water runoff into the Potomac. By the late 1930s, the most developed sections of the region had their own sewer systems, including the District of Columbia, the City of Alexandria, and Arlington County, and the southern third of Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties. In 1938, Washington opened a regional wastewater treatment facility known as Blue Plains to screen and remove suspended solids as well as to accelerate the breakdown of organic waste by waterborne organisms. Postwar growth, however, soon outstripped the facility’s capacity, resulting in raw sewage being regularly dumped into the Potomac as overflow. Upgrades to expand the plant’s capacity and quality of treatment failed to keep pace with population growth, resulting in pollution levels that were higher by 1970 than in the early 1930s.⁴

Figure 3. The Potomac River Basin. Source: Kmusser, Wikimedia Commons.

Insufficient capacity at Blue Plains was not the only problem. Many postwar suburbs relied on septic tanks, which were easier to construct and less expensive than sewers but had shorter life spans and were more likely to leach sewage into local groundwater that made its way to the Potomac. Fairfax, for example, had two thousand such defective tanks by the mid-1950s. A second issue was sediment runoff from site development, where large lots were left bulldozed and without trees for extended periods before construction was completed. By 1960, streams in the Washington area dumped one million tons of sediment into the Potomac each year.⁵

The worsening condition of the Potomac was the result of rapid suburbanization and the unwillingness of jurisdictions in Greater Washington to work together to curb pollution. In 1940, Congress chartered the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin (ICPRB) to coordinate development of the river’s resources. Its members included elected government officials and experts from the federal government, the four states in the Potomac’s watershed, and Washington, D.C. The commission regularly warned of the need to build more wastewater treatment facilities, reduce erosion, and undertake regional-level planning for compact, gradual growth.⁶ Communities in the basin, however, chose to focus on their local growth and did not feel bound to work together to curb pollution.⁷ “Each community now moves independently in a different direction,” the producer of a local television series about the Potomac remarked. “The interstate commission sets standards but has no authority, and no one lives up to them.”⁸ In addition, Congress was unwilling to strengthen regional coordination to require states and localities to clean up pollution. Instead, it encouraged developing water resources to support regional growth.⁹ Without strong regulation or coordination, local communities were left to their own devices to address their impact on the Potomac.

Conversations about the river shifted in the 1960s as the impact of suburbanization mounted. The construction of several communities without adequate sewage disposal facilities as well as growth around Dulles International Airport in outlying Loudoun led Congress to authorize construction of the Potomac Interceptor to send wastewater from those areas to Blue Plains.¹⁰ While the project helped convey pollution, it overburdened Blue Plains even more, which then sent raw or partially treated overflow into the river. Even as the Potomac’s pollution worsened, few citizens expressed public concern, though the League of Women Voters was a notable exception. Instead, well-off suburbanites with conservationist impulses focused on preserving scenic and open space amenities by seeking to restrict high-rise apartments along the waterfront.

The most prominent case involved the Merrywood tract in the affluent Fairfax community of McLean, the childhood home of first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. When county officials approved three seventeen-story towers for the site in 1962, members of the McLean Citizens Association protested that it would disrupt the low-rise character of the waterfront and overburden the area’s schools and roads. The case rapidly gained regional attention from civic organizations, planning agencies, members of Congress, and even Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, an ardent conservationist credited with mobilizing support in the 1950s to block a highway proposal and to preserve the 185-mile Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. The most significant actor in the Merrywood case was Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, who lived near the property and refused to grant a permit for a sewer line across the federally owned George Washington Parkway. When the developer defied a second ban, Udall obtained a court order to purchase an easement for $744,500 that restricted development to single-family housing. Several years later, after his tenure as secretary of the interior, Udall concluded that the case had established that a “high rise along the edge of the [Potomac] river was intolerable,” affirming support for preserving the waterfront for its open space amenities.¹¹

Land preservation cases such as Merrywood were rooted in the broad affluence of postwar America and the desire of well-off suburbanites to preserve the local environment from rampant growth. They illustrated how grassroots civic organizing and burgeoning environmental consciousness, paired with political interest, could spark environmental protection. Yet the emphasis on aesthetic concerns and the overloading of existing facilities obscured a social bias among affluent residents. That bias interpreted the waterfront as an amenity to be enjoyed by those who could afford to live in the large single-family homes nearby rather than those who would have lived in the more modestly priced apartments.¹² About a decade after Udall had secured the conservation easement, a developer bought the Merrywood property. By the late 1970s, he had built thirteen single-family homes with five more under construction, which were selling for what was at the time the exorbitant price of $250,000.¹³

As communities struggled to control postwar suburbanization, national officials saw the Potomac waterfront as a prospective test case for a new model of growth management. In a widely touted message to Congress in 1965, President Johnson insisted that the Potomac “serve as a model of scenic and recreation values for the entire county” and directed a task force to develop a program for cleaning up the river and preserving its banks from high-density development.¹⁴ Despite a strong federal commitment, the task force failed because it excluded state and local officials and proposed a model of shoreline preservation that ignored the growth imperative under which many communities operated.¹⁵ As the 1960s ended, much work lay ahead for cleaning up the Potomac.

A Mandate for Cleanup

By 1970, the Potomac was heavily polluted. Wastewater treatment facilities were chronically overburdened, which led to partially treated effluent being dumped into the river. Blue Plains handled 75 percent of Greater Washington’s wastewater treatment, but its 240 million gallons per day (mgd) capacity was regularly exceeded by 30 mgd.¹⁶ Poorly constructed and overloaded sewer lines were also major problems. Sewer lines near the Cabin John Parkway in Maryland spouted raw sewage from manholes—“like ‘Old Faithful,’” as one critic noted—into a creek just above the Potomac’s water supply intake for Washington, D.C.¹⁷ The worst leak was in one of several incomplete portions of the Potomac Interceptor system, the half-mile-long “Georgetown gap,” which dumped 15 million gallons of raw sewage per day from the region’s most affluent suburbs.¹⁸ Storm-water runoff from close-in urban communities along with eroded soil from suburban land development added to the river’s pollution.

Figure 4. The Georgetown Gap. Source: EPA.

The effects of this pollution were on display as Joseph Penfold of the Izaak Walton League hosted an environmental education boat trip in late 1971. Out on the water, he and his passengers could not see even a couple of inches below the surface because of silt and algae buildup and encountered a stench so bad that in certain sections birds did not fly around it. The smell was worst at Blue Plains, where sewage and sludge left over from treatment was piled four feet deep on forty acres of open land to dry out for a year before being shipped out for disposal or use as fertilizer in suburban communities.¹⁹ Aside from being nuisances, overflowed sewage, storm water, and eroded soil yielded high levels of coliform that threatened drinking water quality and high concentrations of nitrogen and other elements that threatened aquatic life by producing low oxygen levels and large algae growths.²⁰ Trips made by Penfold and others, including Maryland congressman Gilbert Gude in 1975, dramatized the pollution of the Potomac, the impact on its aesthetic and recreational amenities, and the merits of preserving the shoreline from high-density development.²¹ Gude, for his part, was one of a number of Republicans who joined their Democratic counterparts during an era of strong bipartisan political and public support for robust environmental protection in the early 1970s.

Enhancing wastewater treatment was the primary means by which the Potomac and other metropolitan rivers were cleaned up in the 1970s. Passage of the CWA in 1972 confronted political resistance to cleaning up water pollution by setting strict, nationally uniform technical limits on pollution from sources that directly, or as a conduit, dumped pollution into rivers or wetlands. The law employed permitting, monitoring, and reporting systems for facilities’ discharges and established deadlines for treatment plants to eliminate 85 percent of conventional pollutants. The CWA reflected a new mentality that pollution should be prohibited unless authorized and that the national government should lead in standard setting. For these reasons, many state officials opposed the command-and-control approach that took away control of an issue long under their purview. On the other hand, the policy recognized the financial impact on states and localities by authorizing a construction grant program of several billion dollars to build and upgrade wastewater treatment facilities.²²

No single person was as important to this work in Greater Washington as Norman Cole. Born in South Carolina in 1933, Cole grew up in Florida, where he later worked as a nuclear engineer for the navy during the 1950s. He and his wife moved to Fairfax in 1959, buying a house overlooking the Potomac and near a sanctuary for bald eagles that later became the Mason Neck National Wildlife Refuge. Cole was impressed with the undeveloped beauty of the Potomac’s shoreline and took a professional interest in water treatment after a “mile-long stinking mat of dead yellow and brown algae … came floating down river and blew in on our shore” during a house party in the late 1960s.²³ Cole then joined local citizens to publicize research that found Fairfax had overloaded its sewage treatment plants by supporting rampant growth. They persuaded the Virginia State Water Control Board in June 1970 to impose a moratorium on new sewer hookups for three plants, thereby halting new development. But Northern Virginia builders persuaded the courts to overturn the ban and force the county to expand the system’s capacity and implement new technologies to accelerate the removal of pollutants. The results were dramatic, as Fairfax turned the worst sewer overload in the state into an example of what state-of-the-art technologies and political management could do.²⁴

Cole’s advocacy soon garnered the attention of Governor Linwood Holton. Holton was a moderate Republican and the first member of his party to occupy Virginia’s governorship since Reconstruction. Although he did not start out as an environmentalist, Holton quickly enhanced the state’s commitment to cleaning up polluted waterways after taking a helicopter ride to witness the pollution that bubbled out from the Georgetown gap. His single most important decision in this regard was appointing Cole, a fellow Republican, as head of the State Water Control Board. The board had significant powers to shape local development through the approval or veto of sewage treatment plants, but it had rarely exercised its powers to curb growth, which had strong support in law, policy, and culture in Virginia. As an avid out-doorsman and maturing environmentalist, Cole used the agency’s powers to dramatic effect to upgrade Blue Plains in order to clean up the municipal and industrial wastes polluting the Potomac.²⁵

In the early 1970s, the most egregious issue facing Blue Plains was an overburdening of the facility caused by the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC), which had for years exceeded its allotted capacity by nearly 50 percent while the other users—Fairfax and Loudoun Counties and Washington, D.C.—stayed within their limits.²⁶ Cole moved swiftly to pressure the WSSC to rectify the situation but encountered a rather blasé attitude from his counterparts. Indeed, one of the agency’s officials reportedly approached Cole during negotiations for an interim treatment facility for the Maryland agency and asked, “Why are you trying to clean it up. It’s nothing but a sewer. That’s the way it is, that’s what it always will be. Why kid yourself?”²⁷ Cole remained undeterred, urging the other users of Blue Plains to sue the WSSC to comply with guidelines set by the Potomac Enforcement Conference, a voluntary group of officials from state and local water agencies.²⁸ His colleagues were reluctant to be adversarial, preferring a more diplomatic approach. Cole had none of it, writing in a letter, “I believe polluters and people who overload sewage plants should be put in jail.”²⁹ Cole pressed ahead against the WSSC. In October 1971, the agency agreed to restrict its treatment capacity; however, it soon exceeded its new threshold as it granted over five hundred exceptions to a sewer moratorium between March 1972 and January 1973.³⁰

The violations of the WSSC, along with rising public frustrations with water pollution cleanup, pushed the other users of Blue Plains to sue the agency under the CWA. Nine months later, the parties reached an out-of-court settlement that allocated capacity at Blue Plains and required each jurisdiction to develop a plan for disposing of leftover sludge. The agreement was signed on June 14, 1974, at a public ceremony with Maryland governor Marvin Mandel, Washington mayor Walter Washington, and EPA administrator Russell Train. The consent decree was a major achievement for the region that made it easier for politicians to sell the expensive work of improving wastewater treatment infrastructure to their constituents.³¹

Between 1974 and 1983, Blue Plains was upgraded. Its capacity was increased from 240 mgd to 309 mgd and the usage apportioned according to the terms of the consent decree.³² Advanced treatment, the highest level at the time, was incorporated through a process known as biological nutrient removal that fed sewage to large masses of bacteria and other microorganisms. Upgrading Blue Plains was the most prominent action taken in the Washington area to clean up the Potomac during the 1970s and early 1980s, at a cost of $1 billion.³³ Indeed, improving wastewater treatment was the primary means by which states and localities throughout the United States addressed water pollution through the mid-1980s to comply with the CWA.³⁴

Norman Cole, the leading power broker behind the upgrades to Blue Plains, continued his environmental work into the 1980s. This included the construction of a major treatment plant in the Occoquan watershed that helped Fairfax reduce its dependence on Blue Plains. The facility, later named after Cole, has won numerous awards over the past twenty years.³⁵ Cole also went on to serve as an investigator and advisor after nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. In retrospect, Cole’s commitment to cleaning up the Potomac portrayed a sense of stewardship that transcended his own “backyard.” As one commentator noted, “He did what he did out of a deep concern for the safety and pleasure of his own children and out of a love of the outdoor life and a special affection for the Potomac.”³⁶

While Cole and other public officials upgraded Blue Plains to support development, civic activists sought to curb new growth in the metropolitan area. The most prominent were a group of women known as the “sewer ladies.” The sewer ladies were raised in families with a strong sense of civic duty. Most were college-educated housewives with children, who combined their intellect, time, and concern about the future to advocate for strong curbs on development in order to protect the environment. Finally, each used precipitating events in their own proverbial backyards as a springboard to engage with environmental issues at a regional level.³⁷

Among the hundreds of sewer ladies, three stood out. The first was Charlotte Gannett, the de facto leader of the group. After living for a while in Germany, Gannett returned with her family to the United States in 1971 and settled in Montgomery County. She soon became worried about rampant development, which had led to overcrowding in the school system and provoked an expensive wave of school building. Now that her children were adults, Gannett could focus on her activism full-time, cofounding the Montgomery Environmental Coalition in 1972 to focus on development issues and water pollution.³⁸

The second was Enid Miles. Miles grew up on Long Island, New York, and earned a degree from Cornell University before moving to Montgomery County. There she got involved in civic efforts to limit the development of the Friendship Heights neighborhood and later joined the leadership of the Montgomery County Civic Federation, whose members tended to support compact development and environmental stewardship measures.³⁹

The third was Marian Agnew, the wife of an air force pilot who lived in Fairfax. Like many sewer ladies, Agnew started out as a conservationist interested in preserving scenic and recreational amenities. Her first major involvement in a grassroots environmental campaign was in opposition to a luxury housing proposal for the Burling tract adjacent to the Potomac. After the Burling case, Agnew became president of the Northern Virginia Conservation Council. Over time, her interests evolved to focus more on water pollution issues, and she established the Center for Environmental Strategy as an advocacy organization in Northern Virginia.

The sewer ladies combined familiar tools of grassroots organizing with formidable expertise on the technical details of water pollution to become leading environmentalists in Greater Washington. Gannett’s ability in particular to master intricate details and sway officials was not only impressive but also disarming to many given her slight appearance. Gannett invited local officials to her home to watch films about wastewater treatment and then gave them thick technical volumes to read on the subject. One Montgomery Council member, Rose Crenca, intimated, “She looked like a simple housewife … but she was a mental giant on all that technical junk.” The sewer ladies attended hundreds of public hearings and private meetings with officials, converting their backyard interests into effective political mobilization. The director of Montgomery’s Office of Environmental Planning said of the sewer ladies’ expertise: “These women who come in our offices make bureaucrats sit up and listen,” and, in many cases, “will tell their staffs to go back and do more work to satisfy the women’s questions.” The planning director also learned while reviewing case files that the sewer ladies actively lobbied officials at the EPA.⁴⁰

The sewer ladies disagreed with Norman Cole about expanding and upgrading wastewater treatment facilities because they worried that it would open the door for more development that would, in turn, generate more pollution. Gannett and Agnew, among others, were also critical of Cole’s technology-driven approach to wastewater treatment that focused on the use of chemicals over preventative efforts to limit pollution.⁴¹ Cole retorted that the sewer ladies’ efforts to restrict sewer access as a means to curb new growth instead just made cleaning up pollution more difficult. He also praised more moderate environmental voices that believed that technology could solve pollution problems if there was sufficient political will.⁴²

The sewer ladies emerged at a time when government was responsive to greater citizen input in decision making, particularly on environmental issues.⁴³ On the other hand, many felt ignored in planning processes. The experience of Ruth Allen was a good example. Allen, who earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale and a graduate degree in epidemiology, was hired by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) to oversee the implementation of Section 208 of the CWA to develop regional plans for pollution and water supplies. Allen was supposed to collect public feedback, but her colleagues told her to listen to political officials and technical bureaucrats instead. That bothered Allen, who met Marian Agnew at a committee meeting where environmentalists were advocating for an alternative to incinerating the sludge left over from sewage treatment. Allen’s interest in the citizens’ views did not resonate well with her superiors at COG, who forced her out. Upon leaving, Allen joined up with the sewer ladies and, in an ironic twist, became a member of the citizen’s advisory group for COG, where she challenged her former colleagues to be more responsive to public concerns.⁴⁴

The most prominent case of civic engagement in wastewater treatment issues during the 1970s involved a new facility in Maryland to treat sewage and sludge that Blue Plains could not handle. In early 1973, the WSSC applied for federal funding to build a facility for Montgomery County in Darnestown. At the time, much of the county was under a sewer moratorium to curb additional growth.⁴⁵ The EPA rejected the proposal, arguing that the facility’s discharge of treated wastewater near water supply intakes for the Washington area would harm drinking water quality and violate the guidelines of the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974.⁴⁶ As the Montgomery Council tried to determine a new site, the governor intervened at the behest of the state’s construction industry to site a new facility in Dickerson.⁴⁷ The new location was further away from drinking water intakes, thereby offering a longer distance for dissipating effluent.⁴⁸

While the business community endorsed the Dickerson plant to support current and future growth, environmentalists opposed the high costs and uncertain impact on downstream water intakes. At public meetings, the sewer ladies, in particular Charlotte Gannett, insisted that the agency revisit the facility’s costs, which more than doubled in two years, the project’s full impact on public health, and alternatives such as composting.⁴⁹ Enid Miles and the Montgomery County Civic Federation used data from federal environmental agencies to insist that the plant’s discharge points should be below water intakes because existing technologies were insufficient for fully treating municipal sewage.⁵⁰ The focus of local environmentalists on critiquing both the environmental and financial costs of the Dickerson project reflected a strain of smart growth in 1970s metropolitan America that returned with renewed force in the late 1990s.

In March 1976, the WSSC applied for $273 million in federal funding to build the Dickerson plant. The next month, a preliminary EPA review raised concerns about the facility’s high costs and impact on drinking water. As the agency continued its review, the sewer ladies lobbied against the project. Patty Mohler persuaded the county health department to submit a letter of concern to the county council, while Enid Miles relayed materials through a neighbor to the U.S. Surgeon General, who wrote to EPA administrator Train opposing the health impact of the facility.⁵¹ Shortly thereafter, the agency rejected the project, citing the facility’s high costs, slowdowns in projected population growth, and construction of small interim facilities that satisfied demand for the foreseeable future.⁵²

While the sewer ladies and other grassroots environmentalists praised the EPA’s decision, elected officials as well as the Greater Washington Board of Trade argued the facility was needed to support current and future growth.⁵³ Montgomery’s county executive, James Gleason, rebuked the EPA for wielding heavy-handed regulations to interfere in the local project, “We are being choked to death by federal bureaucracy,” he said.⁵⁴ State and local officials filed suit against the agency to revive the Dickerson proposal, but a federal judge rejected the appeal.⁵⁵

The defeat of the Dickerson plant left an open question of how to dispose of waste from Blue Plains. As part of the 1974 consent decree, its users were given four years to agree to a regional plan for disposing of the leftover sludge. When they failed to do so, a federal judge ordered each jurisdiction to find a site to dispose of its share. Montgomery officials decided on a composting facility as a more environmentally conscious option than incineration, but their selection of a site near the county’s border with Prince George’s County inaugurated a four-year political fight that was only resolved when the county selected another site.⁵⁶

By the early 1980s, the water quality of the Potomac had improved significantly. Area treatment plants were under the CWA’s permitting system and offered an improved quality of treatment. The Georgetown Gap had been closed and intermittent raw sewage overflows above the water intake for the nation’s capital eliminated by 1974. The number and variety of aquatic plants and fish made comebacks, while pollution levels dropped enough in some places to allow swimming and other activities for the first time in nearly a quarter century. Boats filled the Potomac in Washington for bicentennial celebrations, and annual raft races began in 1978.⁵⁷

Despite the gains made in cleaning up the Potomac, political challenges continued to stymie progress. Upgrading and building new wastewater treatment facilities was expensive and took time. Part of the problem was a complicated federal review process and President Nixon’s impounding of half of the funds for three years before their release in 1975. By 1977, only one-third of the funds had been spent on less than half of the nation’s facilities.⁵⁸ Political conflicts over treatment facilities as well as disposing of sludge also slowed pollution control. Many of the nation’s municipal treatment facilities and conveyance infrastructure failed to meet federal guidelines for water quality by the original due date of 1977, leading Congress to push back the deadline five years. Because of these widespread delays, the Montgomery Environmental Coalition and the Environmental Defense Fund were unsuccessful in blocking the EPA from renewing a permit that allowed the continued discharge of untreated or partially treated waste from sixty different overflow points in the Washington sewer system.⁵⁹ Finally, the Section 208 planning process created under the CWA, which was intended to create a regional approach to water pollution, was derailed by officials’ unwillingness to work together and openly engage the public.⁶⁰ As a result of these shortcomings, states and localities were left to undertake river cleanup on their own schedules.

Perhaps the most vexing environmental concern was that improving wastewater treatment only addressed 40 percent of the Potomac’s pollution load in the Washington area. The rest came from nonpoint sources such as storm-water runoff, which the CWA did not address at the time it was originally adopted.⁶¹ Instead, runoff was largely the product of impermeable surfaces in built-up urban and suburban communities. While the expansion of Blue Plains was a major contributor to cleaning up the Potomac, there was a far tougher task ahead of effectively controlling nonpoint pollution through stronger land use and development regulations.

The Potomac in Broader Context

Enhancing wastewater treatment was the primary means by which metropolitan communities cleaned up water pollution during the 1970s and early 1980s. Even after its upgrades, however, Blue Plains was in a state of disrepair. In 1984, the EPA fined the District of Columbia $50,000, mandated repairs to Blue Plains, and required the city to hire nearly three hundred more employees to improve the plant’s operations. The EPA’s decision reflected a more litigious approach to enforcement after the political and public backlash that followed the Reagan administration’s efforts to dismantle the agency.⁶² But the users of Blue Plains also recognized the need to improve the facility’s operations. In 1985, they agreed to create a regional committee to oversee the facility, allocated capital and operating costs based on use, ensured Washington had priority in using the facility, and required monitoring all sewers with a minimum discharge amount.⁶³ Unlike the Blue Plains upgrades, which were financed through the CWA, this agreement required states and localities to foot the bill. The agreement reflected a new era of pollution cleanup characterized by more limited federal financing and oversight. With the “command-and-control” era in environmental enforcement now over, community-based strategies led by civic and environmental activists became even more critical, especially given the challenges of controlling runoff and other sources of pollution.

After decades of neglect, the pollution of the Chesapeake Bay, into which the Potomac drains, began to garner attention in Greater Washington and the eastern shore of Maryland. The context for cleaning up the bay, however, was rather different from the Potomac. While environmental concerns were key for the latter, economic concerns centered on the declining stocks of seafood for Maryland’s fishing industry drove the former’s cleanup. The political landscape had also changed. The bay cleanup began as conservative opposition to environmental protection privileged voluntary agreements over regulations.⁶⁴ The governors of Maryland and Virginia and the mayor of Washington, D.C., signed two agreements during the 1980s for cleaning up the bay. While they helped improve water quality for wildlife, expansive regional growth and lax accountability limited their effectiveness. Although the bay’s cleanup was less successful than that of the Potomac in the prior decade, it laid the groundwork for treating the river as a regional resource to be protected.⁶⁵

At a more local scale, the cleanup of the Anacostia River shifted the conversation about water pollution in Greater Washington from wastewater treatment to more diffuse and difficult-to-control sources. The Anacostia, a tributary of the Potomac, flowed through primarily urban communities in Southeast Washington and Prince George’s. Nearly half of the river’s watershed consisted of impermeable surfaces like streets and rooftops that fostered runoff, while the river itself, according to one account, was a “silted wasteland of mud, stench, murk, trash, and sparse aquatic life” that was far more polluted than the Potomac.⁶⁶

Despite environmental conservatism within the federal government, the 1980s and early 1990s became an opportune time for cleaning up urban rivers and waterfronts. In 1987, Congress amended the CWA to better regulate storm water and related pollution, but the standards were more limited than for wastewater treatment and were not fully implemented until the end of the century.⁶⁷ Federal investment in cleaning up water pollution had also receded. Cleaning up the Potomac cost about $5 billion between 1970 and 1990, but federal grants subsidized much of the expense. As the EPA’s grant program for wastewater treatment facilities wound down, few sources of federal money were available to clean up the Anacostia and other urban rivers.⁶⁸

State and local actors stepped into the void to craft a new model of environmental stewardship. The governments of Maryland and Washington, D.C., signed two agreements in the 1980s to address combined sewer overflows in the District of Columbia as well as heavy erosion and sedimentation in Maryland, which came primarily from quarrying operations.⁶⁹ An unusual combination of civic, environmental, and business interests also joined forces to broaden the scope of river cleanup from pollution control to watershed and wildlife restoration.⁷⁰

Compared to the Potomac, the Anacostia garnered little attention for cleanup until the late 1980s because of the geography of the region’s population. The Potomac flowed through mostly middle- and upper-income suburbs, where many environmentalists and supportive public officials lived, and featured expanses of open space or low-density development along the waterfront. The Anacostia, however, flowed through industrial sites like the Navy Yard and mostly poor urban communities, whose access to the river was mostly blocked off by highways and whose residents faced far more immediate shortcomings in housing, schools, and police than their suburb peers.⁷¹ District residents, for their part, had been largely absent from discussions about the Potomac. In contrast, they became more involved with the Anacostia as part of a nascent environmental justice movement concerned about the location and disproportionate impact of polluting facilities on poorer communities and those of color.⁷²

In 1989, a handful of Washington residents established the Anacostia Watershed Society to encourage citizens to become caretakers of the river.⁷³ The group’s leading figure was Robert Boone, who moved to Washington in the mid-1980s. Boone worked for an environmental agency tasked with monitoring the Anacostia and was outraged about all of the trash, sewage, and toxic chemicals that poured into the river. He turned his frustrations into action, joining lawsuits to contest runoff from the Navy Yard and leaking sewage in D.C. and Maryland. Boone was also an avid outdoorsman, hosting boat trips for schoolchildren, D.C. politicians, and members of Congress to learn more about the river. In a 2008 article reflecting on two decades of service for the society, Boone, now a “grey-haired former hippie with a temper like a wasp,” offered a prescient statement on the importance of the public’s investment in the river, “We are here to be stewards of this … and we have let down our mantle.”⁷⁴

The Anacostia’s early cleanup featured more hands-on public involvement and educational efforts than with the Potomac. By late 1991, dozens of projects were under way to clean up storm water and trash, reach out to students through environmental education, plant trees along the shoreline, and build hundreds of acres of new wetlands. Between 1987 and 1994, fish populations and underwater grasses increased significantly.⁷⁵ One of the most successful projects built a thirty-two-acre marsh to fill in a mudflat near Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, which restored aquatic life after years of neglect. New recreational opportunities for boating and biking also became more prominent as conditions improved.⁷⁶ By the mid-1990s, local concern about the river had reached a high point. A survey by the D.C. Coalition for Environmental Justice found that three-quarters of registered voters wanted more done to clean up sewage and trash in the Anacostia, while 20 percent identified a medical problem caused or worsened by pollution.⁷⁷

The long-delayed cleanup of the Anacostia offered a new approach to improving the health of rivers in Greater Washington. While wastewater treatment had been the focus during the 1970s and 1980s, nonpoint sources such as runoff now received more attention. There were two consequences of this shift. First, the scope of activities to improve river health expanded from pollution cleanup to ecosystem improvement. While passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973 had conferred federal protection on certain rare species to block harmful actions, restoration activities such as building wetlands offered a more holistic approach to sustaining habitats, not just individual species.⁷⁸ Second, members of the public became key partners in cleanup and restoration in concert with lobbying to improve policy making for water pollution.

This new paradigm was evident in the campaign to restore the shad population to the Potomac, which was historically the river’s most abundant and commercially important fish. The construction of Little Falls Dam in the late 1950s, overfishing, and pollution had destroyed shad habitats and nearly depleted the fish’s ranks.⁷⁹ Beginning in 1995, biologist Jim Cummins harvested and fertilized eggs from shad during the spring spawning season in order to replenish the Potomac. Over the next seven years, thousands of volunteers worked day and night and through inhospitable weather to stock 15.8 million shad and create a self-sustaining population.⁸⁰ Many participants were local students who participated through educational programs sponsored by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Anacostia Watershed Society, whose mostly white, middle-class members had begun to engage a broader cross-section of the river’s community in its stewardship. To support the restocking, a new fishway was created through Little Falls Dam. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony in 1999, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt remarked on the broader potential of restoring the Potomac: “For seven years, I’ve watched hundreds of cities restore their communities by restoring their rivers. Now it’s our turn.”⁸¹

The shad restoration project was also an example of new efforts to compensate for the impact of large-scale development in Greater Washington.⁸² Another example was the expansion of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge between Alexandria and Prince George’s, which eliminated two hundred acres of forests, wetlands, and underwater grasses. Government agencies and environmental groups carried out a series of compensatory projects that included transplanting twelve thousand native plants and trees to replace invasive species at a one-acre site in Alexandria; planting twenty-two acres of underwater grasses in the lower Potomac and Chesapeake Bay; protecting an eighty-four-acre bald eagle sanctuary in Prince George’s County, and constructing ladders to help spawning fish traverse Rock Creek and tributaries of the Anacostia River.⁸³ As the sources of pollution became more diffuse, and government willingness (and ability) to regulate them eroded, public investment in the Potomac became more critical to the river’s health. The challenge would be to scale up from individual projects to an ecosystem-based approach that transcended political boundaries.⁸⁴

Direct Action and Collaboration on the Potomac

Metropolitan growth was a major contributor to the pollution of the Potomac, with runoff from built-up areas being the fastest growing source of pollution.⁸⁵ Compared to forested land, developed land offers far lower levels of water infiltration and soil conservation; and this exacerbated the overloading of wastewater treatment plants.⁸⁶ Close-in communities experienced “urban stream syndrome” characterized by “increased flash floods; elevated concentrations of nutrients and contaminants; altered stream morphology, including incised channels that cut off vegetation from its water source and increased sedimentation from eroded stream banks; and reduced diversity, with an influx of more tolerant species to counter the loss of more sensitive species.”⁸⁷

Large-scale industrial farming outside of the metropolitan area also contributed ever-higher pollution loads as their operations expanded and came to rely on pesticide-intensive agriculture.⁸⁸ As exurban growth made its way into West Virginia during the 1990s, the state’s poultry industry more than doubled and dumped 4.6 million pounds of bird carcasses a year into the Potomac, which overburdened rural municipal treatment facilities that then dumped pollution back into the river.⁸⁹ This was a major reason why American Rivers, a national nonprofit conservation organization, ranked the Potomac one of the ten most polluted rivers in the late 1990s.⁹⁰ Many environmentalists, however, tended to discount the environmental impact of farms because they valued their open space, bucolic aesthetic, and wildlife protection. In a more critical light, one could argue that environmentalists held a sentimental view of farming that elided the industrial nature of its operations, particularly with chemical usage and waste.

Federal policy making proved far less effective in dealing with nonpoint pollution than it had been with using command-and-control regulations to upgrade and build wastewater treatment facilities. The primary reason was that nonpoint pollution was generally a consequence of land use planning, which was traditionally the domain of local communities. The federal government had no mandate to intervene into zoning and land use planning except where federal monies, lands, or other interests were at stake. In addition, many federal agencies supported development through housing, highways, and business creation as well as overseeing an industrial model of agriculture that lacked strong pollution controls. Finally, controlling pollution from farms was largely the province of states and localities, whose imperative for growth often led to weak standards for compliance.⁹¹

Even as more environmental actors turned their attention to nonpoint pollution, wastewater treatment remained a challenge as development continued apace in Greater Washington. During its inspections of Blue Plains in 1995, the EPA found deteriorating conditions, maintenance issues, and other violations of the facility’s federal operating permit despite a mandate nearly a decade earlier for the plant to add personnel and invest in operations. After filing a lawsuit against the District of Columbia, the EPA reached a settlement requiring the city to use its existing revenues to make upgrades and repairs over the next two years. By 2000, the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority (WASA), which operated Blue Plains, had invested $100 million and were able to cut the facility’s pollution by half.⁹²

At the turn of the century, however, Blue Plains dumped three billion gallons of raw sewage per year into the Anacostia and Potomac as overflow during periods of heavy rains. Environmentalists sued WASA, and in a 2003 settlement the agency agreed to undertake a $143 million project “to upgrade pumping stations, reroute some sewage pipes and install dams in others.” A year later, it had reduced overflows by 24 percent. In 2004, WASA settled another lawsuit with the EPA when it agreed to build three underground water storage tunnels to eliminate more than fifty sewage overflow discharge outlets into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers and Rock Creek.⁹³

After years of planning, WASA deployed a special machine nicknamed “Lady Bird”—in homage to the former first lady’s commitment to conservation—that began digging thirteen miles of underground tunnels in July 2013.⁹⁴ Two years later, the machine had completed the first four-mile section of the tunnel, which measured twenty-three feet in diameter. Unlike the upgrades at Blue Plains, which were largely financed with federal money, the $2.6 billion tunneling project received less than 10 percent of its funding from federal sources.⁹⁵ This discrepancy was a by-product of the declining influence of environmental issues in national politics in relation to the rise of homeland security, reviving a struggling economy amid the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and a more conservative fiscal and political climate. Federal environmental agencies had also chosen to spend more of their money, time, and resources on legal action and implementing court orders than congressional mandates or capital financing.⁹⁶

In a highly pluralistic and competitive interest group environment, it was difficult to find common ground for improving water quality on a large scale.⁹⁷ Environmental lobbying and litigation were often restricted to well-funded national organizations or affluent local environmentalists who had the skills to act on the political stage. In addition, these activities had a limited ability to inculcate a keen sense of public investment in environmental issues beyond updating constituents about the latest issues or asking for money to finance political activities. The rise of environmental education and local direct action in the early twenty-first century was a way to break through the political deadlock to continue improving the Potomac’s health.

One of the earliest and most successful organizations doing this kind of work was the Alice Ferguson Foundation. Its namesake was an artist who in the 1920s bought the 130-acre Hard Bargain Farm in Accokeek about twelve miles south of Washington in Prince George’s. Ferguson managed the farm and later purchased hundreds of acres of nearby land, which she resold to conservation-minded individuals who built homes scattered throughout to block against intensive development. Alice’s husband, Henry, established a nonprofit foundation in her name in 1954 to protect the site’s environmental and cultural resources. In the 1960s, the bottom half of the now 330-acre site was deeded to the National Park Service as part of Piscataway National Park. In the early 1970s, the foundation established an educational center that offered classes for thousands of elementary and middle school students each year, encouraging them to develop a sense of environmental stewardship by visiting the Potomac waterfront and learning about its natural resources and farming history through hands-on activities. Programming was later added to support K–12 school curriculum and to bring high school students to the site. At present, the foundation serves four thousand elementary school students per year in one- and two-day environmental and agricultural programs at Hard Bargain Farm, reaches out to six thousand middle and high school students visiting national and state parks in the Washington area through its Bridging the Watershed program, and trains hundreds of teachers in outdoor environmental education.⁹⁸

The Alice Ferguson Foundation is best known for its an annual springtime Potomac Watershed Cleanup. The first cleanup began in 1989 at Hard Bargain Farm with fifty volunteers. In 2000, the event had grown to three thousand people at 110 sites. By 2006, it had brought together over thirty-five thousand volunteers, many of them young people, to remove 2.5 million pounds of trash since its inception. The organization’s website proudly documents the number of volunteers, cleanup sites, total trash, and items found to showcase the tangible benefits of the cleanups.⁹⁹

Over the past decade, the foundation has expanded its outreach about the harm of litter. In 2006, it hosted the First Potomac Watershed Trash Summit to better understand why trash volume increased year after year. Two years later, it published a survey of residents’ attitudes that found nearly two-thirds were bothered “a lot” by litter in the Potomac watershed and wanted to see government do more about it. Yet the survey also revealed that most people littered out of laziness and a mistaken belief that others will clean it up or that it would wash down a storm drain and be filtered.¹⁰⁰

Admittedly, the amount of trash collected through public cleanup campaigns was a small part of the Potomac’s overall pollution. However, cleanups and environmental education could inspire a sense of environmental stewardship that reached beyond the typical white, middle-class, college-educated residents who traditionally engaged in environmental advocacy. This possibility was on display when a group of fifth graders from nearby Bowie, Maryland, took a two-day field trip to Hard Bargain Farm. While there, the group viewed the open space of the Potomac riverscape, observed plant and animal life, and learned about pollution through an exercise where they were given a gallon of water and fourteen different containers of pollutants commonly found in the Potomac to add to the bucket to understand the impact of pollution. They also enjoyed team-building exercises, socializing, and cooking out at night. The lessons learned about the pollution of the Potomac were clear. When asked, “Who polluted the Potomac?” one student aptly responded, “All of us did.”¹⁰¹

A growing sense of stewardship also manifested itself in more aggressive public surveillance of conditions along the Potomac and the threat of legal action to rectify concerns. The most notable organization undertaking this work was the Potomac Riverkeeper Network, founded in 2000. The group was part of a national and international network of water-keeper organizations dating to the 1960s, when commercial and recreational fishermen in New York organized to protect their way of life and save the Hudson River from industrial pollution. Like many groups, it sought enforcement of existing pollution laws governing the Potomac watershed through media campaigns, lobbying, and litigation. It also had a broad range of environmental concerns, including erosion and runoff, illegal dumping of trash and toxics, the loss of wetlands, air pollution, and changes in fish populations.¹⁰²

In 2003, Ed Merrifield became the first Potomac Riverkeeper. A former chiropractor and longtime sailor of the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay, Merrifield joined the organization after reading a history of the river-keeper movement and being inspired by its argument that people had enjoyed the legal right to fish and enjoy waterways for centuries in America. As president of the Potomac Riverkeeper Network from 2003 to 2012, Merrifield focused on fund-raising, building a leadership team, and cultivating alliances with Washington-area law schools and private law firms to secure discounted or pro bono legal aid to reinforce civic action. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Potomac Riverkeeper Network had nearly three thousand members across the watershed, including at least a couple hundred trained “riverwatchers” who regularly surveyed the Potomac’s water quality and investigated illegal pollution.¹⁰³ Other groups also undertook this work, including the Potomac Conservancy and Arlington’s local government.¹⁰⁴ As one environmentalist explained, “I think the stream monitoring program is a really good way for volunteers to take ownership for helping the environment.”¹⁰⁵ In addition, the work of nonprofits like the Potomac Riverkeeper in some ways compensated for the decline of government monitoring over the past fifteen years that was a product of neoliberalism.

What distinguished Potomac Riverkeeper from other groups was its tenacity. Speaking to a Washington Post reporter about the group’s philosophy, Merrifield noted, “If it’s illegal pollution, we go after it as fast as we can to tell them you have to stop. We use all legal means necessary. We won’t back down.”¹⁰⁶ Mike Bolinder, the current Anacostia Riverkeeper, affirmed Merrifield’s commitment to swift action and holding polluters accountable as an inspiring model of activism: “The thing I learned from Ed that will make me a better riverkeeper is never accept weasel words like ‘showing improvement’ or ‘making progress.’”¹⁰⁷

In its first few years, the group’s biggest success was compelling the Maryland Department of Natural Resources to clean up lead pollution from an old shooting range. In 2003, it sued the agency for allowing members of the National Capital Skeet and Trap Club to operate a shooting range for half a century on state land that discharged lead bullets in and around the Great Seneca Creek, a tributary of the Potomac. The case generated a media investigation that publicized the CWA violations the group had identified. Four years later, the lawsuit was settled in an agreement that required the Maryland agency to clean up the lead pollution and to conduct testing for the next fifteen years to ensure its success.¹⁰⁸

The Potomac Riverkeeper Network also publicized the impact of endocrine disruptors on fish and public health. Appearing in dozens of news stories and testifying before a congressional committee in 2006, Merrifield and the organization discussed how products like soaps and medications, cleaning agents, lawn fertilizers, and plastics contained toxic chemicals that sparked massive fish kills in the Potomac near West Virginia and produced intersex bass, rendering male bass as female. These chemicals in the Potomac also posed a public health concern for Washington-area residents, who received nearly 90 percent of their drinking water from the river, because they could not be filtered out using existing technologies and because the EPA does not yet regulate them. The public health impact of endocrine disruptors is not yet clear; however, there is research suggesting that these chemicals, for which there is no known safe level of exposure, can produce developmental, reproductive, and neurological conditions, with the greatest impact on fetuses and newborns.¹⁰⁹

The Potomac Riverkeeper Network’s greatest success to date has been its litigation against a familiar foe: the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. In February 2014, it joined the Environmental Integrity Project and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to sue the WSSC for dumping millions of pounds of sediment, aluminum, and other pollutants into the Potomac in the process of purifying and supplying drinking water for homes and businesses in suburban Maryland. Their claim argued that excessive amounts of pollution harmed fish, underwater grasses, and other aquatic species, although the public health impact was not clear. These activities, along with failure to properly monitor pollutants, had been ongoing for nearly twenty years and were in violation of the commission’s federal water control permit. To add insult to injury, the commission’s permit had expired in 2002 but was continued without being updated. The Maryland Department of the Environment joined grassroots activists in their lawsuit to get the WSSC to clean up its act.¹¹⁰

Twenty months after the lawsuit was filed, the parties negotiated a consent decree. The WSSC agreed to make long-term improvements to comply with the conditions of its permit and relevant federal and state clean water policies. The terms required WSSC to overhaul or replace its water filtration plant, to immediately undertake $8.5 million in pollution control projects at the existing plant, including $1 million to reduce sediment pollution, better monitor pollution, and find ways to minimize the need to discharge pollution. The improvements will reduce pollution by over two million pounds in the first year and greater amounts in later years. The agreement also included $100,000 in civil penalties to be paid to the state. According to the agreement, which has to be ratified by the U.S. attorney general and the U.S. District Court, the WSSC would have up to ten years to comply or face an additional $1 million in fines.¹¹¹

The legal director of Potomac Riverkeeper noted, “the work of restoring the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay will take a big step forward with this agreement,” as the settlement “ensures that years of unmitigated pollution discharges into the Potomac are at an end.”¹¹² In thinking about how to use the money, an attorney for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation recommended farm conservation projects in western Maryland to prevent runoff at its source rather than trying to clean it up later.¹¹³ The WSSC’s general manager, however, worried about the high costs of long-term improvements to the existing plant, built in the 1960s, which he estimated could exceed $100 million.¹¹⁴ This was in addition to the commission’s struggle to pay for $1.5 billion of work to reduce sewer spills required under a 2005 agreement as well as undertaking an independent program to replace aging water pipes. Forty years after agreeing to rein in its pollution, the WSSC continued to face sharp criticism for polluting the Potomac, suggesting that perhaps the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Today, the Potomac is healthier than it has been in decades. In part, this is due to the CWA and federal lawsuits to force compliance with cleanup and water quality standards. The bulk of the river’s cleanup, however, has been the result of state and local action on the ground. Upgrading wastewater treatment facilities was the primary way in which public officials at these levels have acted to clean up the Potomac. Environmentalists during the 1970s contested these efforts out of concern that they would catalyze growth, which they did, although the scale of the Potomac’s pollution certainly warranted cleanup. The emergence of nonpoint pollution as a more significant issue in the late 1980s accentuated the importance of efforts to curb runoff through land use regulations that reduced erosion, preserved open space, or limited the scale of development. Unlike the command-and-control regulations of CWA, improving land use planning and restoring local habitats has varied in scope and success across communities.

Figure 5. The Great Falls of the Potomac, just upriver from Washington, D.C. Source: Carol M. Highsmith Archive.

The case of the Potomac confirms that grassroots activism to harness the tools of smart growth in support of environmental protection was central to the cleanup of the river. In focusing on policy over politics, scholars have obscured the crucial role of citizens in lobbying and litigating for compliance with environmental policies, blocking undesirable treatment facilities and development projects, educating the public about the importance of environmental stewardship, and undertaking hands-on activities to put environmental ethics into practice. Moreover, citizens have been primarily responsible for broadening the view of the Potomac from more traditional conservation-based values of open space to modern ideas of pollution cleanup to newer practices of ecological restoration. In short, more citizens became more involved in a variety of ways to act as stewards of a river that not only knits together Greater Washington but also serves a symbolic role as “the nation’s river” in the capital area.

Other cases of citizen involvement produced markedly different outcomes for development and illustrate the fractured nature of local politics in the context of metropolitan growth and preservation. The next chapter examines how a high tide of environmental consciousness in the early 1970s inspired a dramatic grassroots movement in an affluent community in Fairfax County to preserve one of the last forested landscapes in the county. The following chapter moves us into the turn of the century, where Prince George’s County saw a groundswell of support for upscale commercial development in a county long passed over for it. These two cases underscored how an unequal distribution of people and development could favor environmental protection in certain communities while undermining it in others.