The “Pooptomac" Is A Warning

We Have To Keep Demanding Real Plans & Action For Aging Infrastructure.

Photo by Sara Cottle on Unsplash

I’ve spent much of my life standing next to rivers that people told me were “fine.”

Rivers where the water looked a little off, smelled a little wrong, and the officials kept saying, “don’t worry about it.” I know what it looks like when a community is being failed by the very systems built to protect it.

And right now, I want us all to take a good hard look at the Potomac River.

More than 200 million gallons of raw sewage poured into one of the most storied waterways in America after a section of the Potomac Interceptor collapsed in January.

It’s the largest spill in U.S. history. To attempt to visualize it, you’d have to picture 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools filled with untreated wastewater.

People in Cabin John, Maryland, are calling it the “Pooptomac” now, and I get it. Dark humor is how you cope when your government lets you down.

I want to shine a light on what’s really been lost here, because this crisis isn’t a punchline. It’s a catastrophe unfolding in slow motion, and the American people deserve better.

George Washington could have built his home anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard. He chose the Potomac River, forever identifying it as the Nation’s River. It has earned that name in every generation since.

This river—all 380 miles of it, running from the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia through the hills of Virginia and Maryland, draining a watershed of nearly 15,000 square miles—feeds the Chesapeake Bay, the most important estuary on the East Coast.

It provides 90 percent of the drinking water to the Washington, D.C. metro area. Four million people a year come to its banks just to be near it. Olympic paddlers train on it. Families tube down it on hot summer afternoons. Fly fishermen. Kayakers. Wildlife watchers. This river is not just beautiful; it’s alive, and it’s essential.

David Hearn, an Olympic canoeist who has paddled these waters for almost 60 years, told the media he is “heartbroken” over what happened. That word broke something open in me as well. It’s not just one man’s loss. A whole community’s soul has been washed away in filth.

This contamination didn’t have to happen, and most times it doesn’t. The Potomac has been fighting for its life for decades.

President Lyndon Johnson stood on its banks in 1965 and called it “a national disgrace” because of the pollution choking it. He was right. Wetlands bulldozed. Algae blooms. Trash. The river that carries the weight of this nation’s history was being treated like a dump.

Then the Clean Water Act of 1972 came along, and slowly—painfully, imperfectly slowly—the Potomac started to breathe again. Bass came back. Shad returned. White perch too. The Potomac Conservancy started giving it better marks. It was working.

And now a 60-year-old pipe that collapsed, because nobody replaced it, and millions of gallons of human waste are flowing through what was supposed to be a crown jewel of wilderness. Researchers are already finding E. coli. Staph bacteria. The kind of pathogens that don’t care what party you vote for. They just make you sick.

I’ve heard the official reassurances. I’ve heard “no new sewer overflow has gone into the river since January 29.” But I’ve also heard residents say the smell still wafts into their homes. I’ve heard them say they won’t let their dogs or their kids near the water. And I’ve heard a community leader say that hope “has dimmed a little bit.”

I know what it sounds like when people have been told to wait long enough that they’ve stopped believing things will change.

The real repairs to the collapsed pipe can’t even begin yet. The rocks blocking the line have to be removed one by one. The bypass system has to be strengthened first. This is going to take months. Months, while fecal bacteria seeps into the ecosystem. While underwater grasses, already slow to recover from decades of damage, absorb the blow.

What are we doing about it politically? Fighting over who to blame. The president is pointing fingers at Democrats. The governor’s office is firing back. Meanwhile, the people of Cabin John just want to be able to walk their dogs by the river again.

I’ve been called a troublemaker. I’ve been told I don’t understand science, don’t understand law, don’t understand how these things work. But I understand that when a community stands next to a river full of sewage and the people in charge are holding a press conference instead of a wrench, something has gone very wrong.

The Potomac doesn’t belong to any politician. It doesn’t belong to any utility authority. It belongs to the millions of people who visit its banks every year. It belongs to the millions of others downstream whose drinking water flows through it. It belongs to the shad and the bass and the white perch who spent 50 years coming back from the brink. It belongs to every child who has ever dangled their feet in its current.

President Clinton recognized the Potomac as an American Heritage River in 1998. Heritage. That means it belongs to the future too. To our kids. To their kids.

I’m asking you not to let this moment pass. Don’t let them spin it or bury it or wait until the cameras move on.

Make The Ask

Ask who was responsible for maintaining that pipeline. Ask why a 60-year-old pipe was carrying an ever-increasing load with no long-term plan. Ask why a community is being told to wait, again, while their river suffers.

Demand that the rehabilitation of that pipeline, all 2,700 linear feet of it, is done right and done with urgency. Demand a real long-term plan for aging infrastructure before the next collapse, because there will be one.

The Potomac has survived coal country runoff. It has survived nitrogen and phosphorus loading from farms. It survived being called a national disgrace and came back from it. It is resilient. But resilience has limits.

They nicknamed it the “Pooptomac,” but this river was named after a people who lived along its banks for centuries before anyone built a nation around it. It deserves better than 200 million gallons of waste and a political argument.

It deserves what every river in this country deserves. It needs to be treated like it matters. Because it does. Because you depend on it, whether you know it or not.

And I, for one, am not going to let anyone forget that.

Rivers Aren’t Just Scenery…

Let me tell you something that gets lost in the political noise every single time something like this happens. Rivers aren’t just scenery. They aren’t just recreational assets or tourist attractions or pretty backdrops for real estate listings.

Rivers are the original infrastructure—the one that every other system we’ve built depends on, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Right now, about 70 percent of all the freshwater used in the United States comes from surface water such as rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. More communities in the U.S. get their tap water from surface water systems than from groundwater.

Think about that the next time you turn on your tap to fill a glass, brush your teeth, or boil water for your kids’ pasta. That water might have come from a river. And if that river is compromised—by sewage, by runoff, by neglect—the treatment systems downstream are working that much harder, and the margin for error gets that much thinner.

We’ve been lulled into a false sense of security by the miracle of modern water treatment. We trust that the water coming out of the faucet is safe.

But treatment plants aren’t magic. They are designed to handle a certain load, a certain type of contamination. Dump 200 million gallons of raw sewage into a watershed, introduce E. coli and staph bacteria at scale, and you’re stress-testing a system that was never meant to absorb that kind of shock.

The people of Flint, Michigan, know what happens when water infrastructure fails, and officials look the other way. The people who worked and lived at Camp Lejeune know. The people of Hinkley, California, know. Ask the people of Jackson, Mississippi, too.

Beyond drinking water, rivers hold communities together in ways that are harder to measure and just as real. A healthy river is an economic engine thanks to all the fishing guides, the outfitters, the riverside restaurants, the marinas, and hotels.

In the Potomac basin alone, recreational water use generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually. When a river gets sick, those livelihoods get sick too. When parents won’t let their kids swim, when anglers can’t eat what they catch, when paddlers stay off the water, the damage ripples out far beyond the riverbank.

Something that’s even harder to put a dollar figure on is how rivers give people a reason to show up for where they live. They create belonging. They are where families spend Sunday afternoons ,and where kids learn that the natural world is something worth protecting.

When a river is poisoned, something in the community’s sense of itself gets poisoned too.

That’s why we can’t treat this incident as an isolated infrastructure failure and move on. Every river in this country is downstream of every decision we make whether that’s about development, about funding, or what we’re willing to demand from the people who manage our public systems.

The Potomac is telling us something right now. It’s telling us that aging pipes and political finger-pointing are no match for the basic needs of millions of people who depend on clean water to live.

It’s telling us that the progress we’ve made since 1972 is real but fragile. It’s telling us that rivers remember everything we do to them, and so do the communities that love them.

We must LISTEN.

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The Potomac Conservancy is calling on DC Water to:

Immediate & Short-Term Actions:
Provide transparent, ongoing updates regarding the volume of sewage released, the duration of the spill, and the effectiveness of the containment measures.

Investigation & Accountability:
Identify other known or potential weak points within the system and provide a clear, swift timeline and plan for addressing them.

Restoration, Mitigation, & Long-Term Prevention:
Commit to comprehensive environmental mitigation and restoration efforts to address ecological harm to the C&O Canal and Potomac River, both in the immediate aftermath and over the long term.

You can learn more here.

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Keep the conversation going in the comments below. What does your local river mean to you?