while the waters may look idyllic, a century-old sewage system and dangerously high levels of bacteria have made the urban national park unswimmable for decades. now, a team of volunteers is working to change that, one water sample at a time.

no-swim zone

d.c. residents know that swimming in the city’s waterways is not the best idea — in fact, it’s been illegal since 1971. lorde shocked concert goers and made national news last year when she claimed to float in the potomac before her show. there’s a stigma around the cleanliness of these rivers from decades of pollution, but in recent years, the waterways have been slowly improving.

the environmental protection agency has been trying to make the city’s waterways swimmable and fishable since the clean water act of 1972. while the original ten-year timeline for that goal passed forty years ago, the act set in motion a clean water agenda the city is hoping to reach in the next few years.

in 2019, city officials began floating the idea of relaxing or lifting the swim ban. but even after decades of cleaning up the waterways, environmentalists question whether the water is safe enough to open to public swimming. data from the d.c. volunteer water quality monitoring project is helping shed light on the state of the city’s rivers and streams.

watching the waterways

on a cool day in early may, the ground is damp and the water is high in rock creek park. it’s the first day of the 2023 water monitoring season, an overcast morning after several days of on-and-off rain.

landrum beard, community engagement coordinator at rock creek conservancy, sits under a picnic pavilion at a table lined with small red coolers for volunteers to pick up with their water testing kits. they’ll head out toward their assigned sites, marked with ribbons, along the creek and return with the coolers filled with water samples, which are taken to anacostia riverkeeper’s lab for testing.

anacostia riverkeeper launched the d.c. volunteer water quality monitoring project in 2018 to measure and track contamination levels in d.c.’s main waterways: the anacostia river, the potomac river, and rock creek.

with a $140,000 grant from the d.c. department of energy and environment, the project has grown into a collaboration between anacostia riverkeeper, alliance for the chesapeake bay, rock creek conservancy, and nature forward. the groups have trained almost 400 volunteers from all eight wards of the city, collecting more than 2,000 water samples from 2019 to 2022.

each wednesday morning from may to september — considered the outdoor recreational season — teams of volunteers take water samples at two dozen sites across the city and test for ph balance, e. coli levels, water temperature, air temperature, and turbidity, a measure of water clarity. they also note if they see anyone in the water, as many people and their pets still wade in the creek despite park signs warning against it. the results are posted each friday and updated in the swim guide app, which lets users check the water quality of nearby beaches.

most of the volunteers are consistent, beard says. there are some newcomers on this first day of the new season, but others have been a part of the program for years.

benita veskimets is one of those veteran volunteers. veskimets, who used to work in fundraising for rock creek conservancy, is in her fourth year of water sampling. “i’m really curious to see what happens this year,” she says. “last year, i feel like it was worse than the year before.”

only a few of the rock creek sites passed with safe bacteria levels last year, beard confirms. those were mostly on dry weeks, when there was little or no rainfall impacting the stormwater sewage overflow. this morning is not one of those times. after a rainy week, the creek is likely swimming with bacteria from runoff. not the best way to kick off the season, he admits.

rock creek park’s sewage problem

the root of this problem lies with infrastructure, and if you’ve ever walked through rock creek park after a rainstorm, you can smell why. 

after just half an inch of rainfall, hazardous waste and sewage flood into the creek from the city’s old combined sewer infrastructure. in this system, stormwater and sewage flow through the same pipes — and when it rains, they quickly fill up and overflow into the rivers. rock creek is considered dangerously contaminated when that happens, and recreators are advised to avoid the waterway for up to three days afterward.

volunteers have tracked that trend at the sampling areas. “all these sites, for the most part, have a storm drain a few hundred feet or so upstream from where the sampling site is,” beard said. “so after big rain events, we always see that the sites have extremely high bacteria.”

d.c. water is now working on a $2.6 billion overhaul to the city’s sewage system with the goal of redirecting some of these sewage lines away from the city’s waterways and back toward treatment plants. this plan, the clean river project, is set to be completed in 2030. 

in the current phase of the project, the national park service is teaming up with d.c. water to take on piney branch creek, one of rock creek’s main tributaries and victims of contamination. an estimated 39 million gallons of sewage and stormwater pour into the creek each year.

“the way to do it is to build bigger pipes under the ground that can handle all the sewage and the stormwater and keep it in the pipes and get it down to the treatment plant,” said steve dryden, a local conservationist who has worked in the piney branch area for years.

the city is expanding these pipes, aiming to reduce the amount of sewage flowing into the three waterways by 96 percent. it’s part of a hybrid plan for rock creek that includes both traditional “grey infrastructure” — like basins, drains, and pipes — and new “green infrastructure,” such as rain gardens and permeable pavers in 365 acres of the surrounding urban areas. a pilot program for this green infrastructure plan reduced runoff into the creek by nearly one fifth, surpassing d.c. water’s goals.

but sewage overflow and runoff after rainfall is not the only contamination source in rock creek. the water quality monitoring project reports that some sites have had persistently high levels of bacteria even during dry weather, which may be caused by “outdated infrastructure, leaking sewer pipes, or uninvestigated point-source pollution.”

jeanne braha, executive director of rock creek conservancy, said this may also come from pet waste and houses or businesses with sewer pipes that are accidentally hooked up to storm drain pipes that flow into the creek. construction in the urban area is another contributor, veskimets adds. while the potomac and anacostia bacteria levels are a direct result of combined sewer overflows, rock creek’s contamination comes from several sources — making solutions harder to find.

one sample at a time

while solving rock creek’s water contamination problem is a long process, participants in the d.c. volunteer water quality monitoring project are ensuring that city officials and environmentalists have the data to help. 

the potomac and anacostia rivers have been slowly improving in water quality since the anacostia was once dubbed “one of the most polluted waterways in the nation.” people debate whether the rivers have recovered enough to be swimmable.

“i think we’re getting there,” said louis eby, a longtime water quality volunteer and former attorney advisor in the epa’s office of water. he’s seen a lot of progress in the two rivers, but remains cautious about rock creek.

“i wouldn’t swim in rock creek,” he said. “we’ll get there some day for rock creek, but not soon.”

sure enough, the rain in early may was a forecast of remaining challenges. both upper and lower rock creek sites reported unsafe e. coli and ph levels in the first week of monitoring.

still, citizen scientists will continue to keep tabs on the water quality each week. as soon as rock creek is finally swimmable, they’ll be the first to know. 

as the summer recreation season kicks off, people flock to d.c.’s waterways for kayaking, paddleboarding, and sightseeing — and one day soon, they might be able to safely swim in them.

when he toted around his dad’s five-weight fly rod, the grown-ups told him he “ain’t gonna catch nothing.” and yet, wiggins returned from the bays and estuaries near his home with bucketsful of sea trout. 

“where’d you catch all them fish?” they’d ask. “i can’t catch them with a fly rod,” he replied. “bye.”

wiggins was a fishing guide for a dozen years, poling his flats boat and pointing out flopping trout, redfish and mullet. then for 23 years, he starred in a tv show called “addictive fishing,” produced by childhood friend kevin mccabe. wiggins first screen-tested the show in his son’s kindergarten class. the jabbering children hushed to watch. 

“from age seven to 70, we had an audience,” wiggins said, and he still does. his show evolved into “blair wiggins outdoors,” streamed on bally sports sun and youtube. kids still scramble up to him and elders doggedly hobble over for photos.

when he hooks a fish on tv, wiggins famously hollers, “there he is!” he calls prize catches “mogans,” mixing the southern nickname “biggans” and the northern vernacular, “monsters.” 

over the decades, the mogans became harder to find. as wiggins hauled fish out of the indian river lagoon, he observed the coastal ecosystem changing. first came the vanishing critters. as a kid, wiggins recalled, he encountered millions of fragile starfish dotting parris island channels. “i haven’t seen one in 30 years,” he said.

the same holds true for seagrass, shellfish, horseshoe crabs, sea trout and mullet. wading near the south banyan isles and pineda, scraggly seagrass scratched his little-boy legs like prairie grass, and fanned out just as far. brevard county was known as the sea trout capital of the world, wiggins said. “you could go out off of any given dock, any bank, throw out a shrimp on a popping cork and catch a trout anywhere in brevard county.”

when the seagrasses first disappeared, it was a little easier to fish—the trout were stark in the waters. today, it’s tough to find them at all, he said.

in the past, hundreds of mullet would leap out of the water in a five-minute span. the splashes are now silent.

nearly a half a century after he bought that tiny outboard, and more than two decades after he became a tv fishing star, wiggins is moving into his third act. rather than extracting marine life from his childhood waters, he is putting it back. he and fellow citizens along the indian river coast are planting millions of hard clams, part of burgeoning initiatives across florida to reintroduce historic shellfish to clean up waterways and restore life up the food chain. 

oysters and hard clams, cradled in their self-built shells, clean water as they develop. clams gobble algae through a siphon and expel feces, a fertilizer for seagrass and food for shrimp. once they’re settled on the bottom, they clasp sea grass, rooting it into the soil. each clam filters 20 gallons of water a day. reintroducing shellfish to waterways is a natural solution, a return.

death by 1,000 cuts

quahog clams once thrived throughout florida’s coastlines. native american mounds along the spruce creek reveal an abundance of oysters and clams, along with saltwater fish. but by the 21st century, the populations were devastated. todd osborne, a researcher at the university of florida’s whitney laboratory for marine bioscience, calls it death by 1,000 cuts.

as the four-mile pineda causeway was built in 1973, carving into the indian river and banana river lagoons, blair wiggins and his father chugged along south across from patrick air force base. the pair glared at the hulk of concrete. “take a good look around son,” his father said. “because there’s the beginning of the end.” 

“he was right,” said cari wiggins, blair’s wife and the director of “blair wiggins outdoors.”

the pineda causeway was one of 13 causeways constructed across the indian river lagoon. around the state, the raised roads choke water flow by creating a narrow opening. the bottleneck impedes water exchange and marine life migration. pockets of decaying matter gather in its corners, fueling algal blooms. blair calls them: “dams with roads on top.”

“they funneled into a small opening and everything quit moving,” cari wiggins said. “water is not going to want to flow sideways.”

the collapse of clams can also be traced to the commercial shellfish industry. at its peak in the 1980s and ‘90s, semi-trucks idled at boat ramps to pick up croker bags of native clams. 

the intense harvesting was the “nail in the coffin” for wild clam populations, osborne said. he estimates harvesting data only cover a third of actual numbers because cash was involved.

osborne said at the peak, the wild clam harvest was like the wild west; clammers collected the shelled critters in the thousands. unload. get paid. do it again.

“the clam boats that you saw, you could have lined them up side by side and walked to merritt island,” cari wiggins said.

hard clams burrow in seagrass. as the clammers dragged spiked clam rakes along the bottom, they inadvertently dredged up seagrass and crushed the smallest clams and horseshoe crabs.

“every morning i would get up and go to the boat ramp, literally it was a sea of grass floating on top of the water from where they had been digging with their rakes,” blair said.

listen: uf biogeochemistry professor todd osborne on how humans have engineered “an efficient way of poisoning the lagoon with excess nutrients.”

pollution is another part of the complexity of harm. it flows from industries and local backyards into the water. synthetic fertilizers and septic tanks are two of the culprits. 

“we’ve engineered a really beautiful and safe human landscape.” osborne said. “we’ve also engineered a very efficient way of poisoning the lagoon with excessive nutrients.” 

while shellfish filter the water, larval clams are especially sensitive to pollution and cannot ingest it, said mike sullivan, who owns a st. augustine shellfish farm and seafood market/restaurant called commander’s shellfish camp.

clams, sullivan said, are like canaries in coal mines for the sea.

“clams die if the water quality is bad or is getting bad. they can’t survive,” he said. “that’s why they’re not repopulating in a lot of these areas that have been fished out.”

sullivan is the largest clam producer on the east coast of florida, with about 75% of the region’s “clam leases” that the state administers for inshore coastal waters, according to the marine scientist mark martindale, director of the whitney laboratory.

coastal water pollution has reached the point in florida that not many waterways remain safe enough to grow hard clams for people to eat. along the northeast florida coast, sullivan’s spot on the matanzas river is one of the few.

a meeting of the minds between scientists and locals who’ve fished the waters longer than it takes to earn a phd led to a promising solution for what ails the indian river lagoon. restore the shellfish even if people can’t eat them. reintroduce thousands and millions.

restoring the once plentiful shellfish, osborne and wiggins conclude, would represent a major step toward renewing clean water.

a bottom-up approach to clean water

the indian river lagoon clam restoration initiative began as a grassroots movement. 

“we had an idea, and a network of people that came together to say, ok, let’s just do it, and see what happens.’ and we got attention, and it was working,” osborne said. “and then the money came, so it has definitely been a bottom-up approach.”

partners including the st. johns river water management district and the florida fish and wildlife conservation commission (fwc) provide staff, scientific oversight, boats and permitting. in 2019, epa’s national estuary program awarded additional support. every 10 cents puts another clam in the water, osborne said. but what’s crucial about the project, he said, is that the public is the main stakeholder.

“it’s more important that the people that live here and experience this every day, are front and center,” osborne said. “because you don’t need someone from tallahassee telling you what to do over here.”

living on the river is much more motivating than a remote vision, he explained.

beginning in 2019, scientists collected hard clams from mosquito lagoon. osborne describes them as “super clams,” because they had survived both brown tide and toxic algae bloom crises. 

“they are adapted to this ecosystem as it is now,” osborne said.

at the whitney lab’s bivalve hatchery in st. augustine, scientists began spawning the clams and raising them in a nursery that spring. after nine months, when the clams were about the size of golf balls, scientists and volunteers released them into the mosquito and indian river lagoons. 

the clams are grown on licensed shellfish aquaculture leases; blair is among those who offer lease space. nets shield the clams from predators like stingrays, though florida crown conchs that also love to eat them occasionally drill through. the conchs can devour 20 percent of the clams on a bed.

cedar key’s model, “clamelot”

across florida on the rural gulf of mexico nature coast, a gravestone stands outside city hall in the tiny fishing village of cedar key. etched in gray are the words: “in loving memory dedicated to the commercial net fishermen of this community.” the gravestone was erected on july 1, 1995, the summer after florida’s voters banned gill-net fishing by constitutional amendment. the vote followed a major push by sport fishers to stop commercial netting they said was harming fish populations, though researchers later found that the campaign had been misrepresented. the few fishing villages left in florida, including cedar key, seemed doomed to lose a way of life.

instead, a rebound emerged. federally funded job retraining converted net fishers and others put out of work by the ban to become clam farmers. leslie sturmer, a shellfish extension specialist, relocated to cedar key to assist. locals accepted the practice, she said, as the technology is simple, maintenance is low and the relatively clean coastal waters are perfect for clams.

cedar key launched the first clam aquaculture leases on florida’s gulf coast. the legacy began. now, the town, located about 60 miles west of gainesville, provides some 90% to 95% of florida’s eating clams. the clams are cultured in water-side clam shacks and planted on the lease sites around the cedar key coast. the booming industry, which sturmer calls “clamelot” after the legendary camelot, provides a local incentive for keeping water clean. 

the clams in the indian river lagoon, on the other hand, aren’t edible. the water quality is too poor, blair said, and the pollution pulses through these filter feeders. 

“eventually down the line, i would love to be able to go out there and harvest a five-gallon bucket of clams, come back and then have a great clam bake at the house like i used to,” blair said, “but until it gets right and we get our clams and our water back, the farm-raised clams are good enough for me.”

seeding hope in seeding clams

this spring, wading outside the river rocks restaurant in rockledge, volunteers poured 100,000 hard clams from red-ribbed bags into the indian river lagoon. 

the shards collected across the sand, crunching beneath feet. “this is how the indian river lagoon used to feel,” blair said. 

the river rocks spot is among hundreds carefully chosen in the region. when people go out for lunch there, they can see the restoration project’s placard and poles in the water or spot volunteers slugging around bags of clams.

“we wanted to engage the public so that they could see what we were doing,” osborne said.

the area was a former productive aquaculture lease, with clam shell remnants speckling the shoreline. the scientists replant clams where they once lived. 

across the state in southwest florida, sarasota bay watch follows a similar strategy. the nonprofit began releasing scallops into the bay in 2009. however, the sensitive scallops couldn’t survive the poor water quality. in 2016, the group shifted to clams. the southern quahogs are heartier, said ronda ryan, sarasota bay watch executive director. they survived florida’s devastating 2017-2018 red tide.

the nonprofit also releases clams where seagrass is sparse in the bay. “the hope is that putting clams in the water will help clear the water and improve the capability for photosynthesis and thus increase seagrass,” ryan said.

osborne agrees.

“the goal here is to reestablish seagrass, because seagrass is the functional base or foundation of the ecosystem,” he said. “everything out there either eats it, lays their eggs in it, hides in it or lives in it. without it, it’s like a desert.”

a greater purpose

in 2019 when the indian river lagoon restoration project began, water samples didn’t detect any clam larvae. but in this spring’s spawning season, osborne said, hundreds of free-swimming clam larvae — known as veligers — showed up in the samples.

“we know that at least what we put out there has spawned,” osborne said.

the project has released 13 million clams since its inception, with nearly a million in this year alone. by october, the volunteers and scientists will plant three million more. the next phase, which the fwc is sponsoring, will add 12 million clams to the lagoon’s troubled waters in the next two years. 

osborne paints a vision for the future he and other scientists and volunteers are working to create: once the quahogs clear out the algae, water clarity will improve and sunlight will reach the darkened, dying seagrasses. 

pinfish, a prominent bait fish, nibble off of clam siphons, unclogging them. 

clams are the base, sullivan said, and with their flourishing, others along the ecological chain will, too.

on a recent friday, three generations of women converged in the shallow water near river rocks restaurant: a grandmother, annette bushnell, 57; her daughter, cami waldon, 36; and a granddaughter, kaylee waldon, 14. annette and cami donned straw hats and giggled as they hauled the quahogs. 

 “we’ve heard rumors that the indian river lagoon was once clear, and we’d love to try to make that happen again,” cami said. “i like releasing the clams, knowing that they were going to serve a greater purpose.”

bushnell said she appreciated working arm and arm with the community, passing the bags between one another. her father lived on a houseboat, and her grandmother owned a boat named “tattletail.” in washington state, the family clammed with her grandparents.

brine pulses through blair’s veins too. a sea breeze saturates his lungs.

his family’s fishing legacy traces back five generations, he said; on his dad’s side, back to his great-great grandad in southern alabama, and on his mom’s side, back to the seminole indians of florida.

the solution to florida’s water woes can’t be just about the shellfish, he acknowledges. for all the work he, his neighbors and the scientists are doing to restore clams, an even greater effort must be made to stem the pollution torrent killing the lagoon. 

he and other locals can wade in florida waters and chuck clams out — an action.

born and raised on the indian river and its lagoon, blair said for him, it is now dead. he aims to revive it.

this story is part of the uf college of journalism and communications’ series watershed, an investigation into statewide water quality marking the 50th anniversary of the clean water act, supported by the pulitzer center’s nationwide connected coastlines reporting initiative

this story was featured in our series, slipping through our fingers: the future of water.

the rest of the group arrives, and we all don our masks and regulators. i make eye contact with autumn, our dive safety officer back on the beach, before emphatically reaching up and patting my head: the universal divers signal for “ok.” looking back at the group, i give a thumbs down – the signal to descend – and start to let air out of my bcd. just as i’m about to go under, one of the group members points behind me and gives a muffled yell through her regulator. reinflating my bcd and spinning around, i see an otter floating on its back less than 40 feet away from our group. we all watch for a moment as she nibbles on some unfortunate shelled creature picked up from the bottom. as quickly as we notice her, she slips back beneath the surface in search of more snacks. i give the thumbs down, and we follow her. 

now 40 feet below the waves, i check in with the group; my nerves are replaced with the natural calm that i always experience when diving. i feel the power of the ocean as i am pushed and pulled by the same forces that move the kelp forest all around me. though the power of the water should be disconcerting, i find it quite comforting, as though i’m being held. on the rock reef next to me are countless red and blue anemones. crabs crawl around them as fish dart from crevice to crevice within the rocks. a lingcod disguises himself into the top of the reef, hidden from prey but visible to me. i can quite literally feel how alive the ocean is. just as we are about to start the swim deeper into the forest, our otter friend pays us a visit. slinking through the water just on the edge of our view, she swims a lap around us before darting to a crevice in the rocks, grabbing her next snack, and heading back to the surface. as i sit in admiration, a snickers bar wrapper floats past my mask.           

for the last few years, i’ve found it increasingly difficult to find refuge from the signs of human impact. whether it be a candy wrapper on the bottom of monterey bay, a plastic water bottle floating in a remote alpine lake, or a tree cut down by boy scouts in a wilderness area, i can’t escape the signs of damage like i could when i was younger. some of that must be an increase in awareness as i’ve aged, but recently, the wild spaces in which i take refuge have felt increasingly used, neglected, and disrespected. for me, moments of awe and deep respect for the natural world are frequently soured by reminders of what we are doing to our planet. as a kid, i couldn’t wait to become an adult and spend the rest of my life experiencing all the places david attenborough told me about. now, in the beginnings of my adult life, it is apparent that many of the places and much of the biota i once hoped to see are already gone. over the course of my lifetime, we’ve added more than 1.5 billion people to the planet, increased atmospheric co2 by almost 50 ppm, and destroyed an amount of wilderness larger than all of alaska (lindsey 2020; ritchie and roser 2021; roser et al. 2013). i’m only 20. 

these realities often leave me feeling depressed, morose, apathetic, and frankly, pissed-off. i’m not alone in this. even in contingents of my least environmentally conscious friends, these feelings are frequently expressed in our conversations. my whole generation is coming of age under the burden of knowledge that our planet is dying. we’re faced with the constant uncertainty of whether we will be able to save it and many of us have already spent years fighting on its behalf. personally, i’ve spent the last eight years working to protect the boundary waters canoe area wilderness. of that, it has taken the last six years and more than $10 million for our campaign to build back to where we were when obama left office. how are we supposed to battle the same broken system on behalf of the whole planet? for some time now, i’ve felt the tendrils of climate despair and burnout taking hold of me. i’ve seen them grab my friends. we’re only 20. 

i reach out and grab the snickers wrapper just before it drifts out of reach. as we go through the rest of our dive, i pick up several more pieces of garbage; an empty coors can, a cloth napkin, and several more wrappers all make their way into the pockets of my bcd. as i take in all the life around me, i can’t help but wonder how much more i would’ve seen before industry took over the bay, but also how much less i would’ve seen in the early 20th century before conservation efforts began. 

monterey bay is a story of incredible ecosystem recovery (sotka and palumbi 2011). since moving here in january, experiencing the culmination of years of conservation work has reminded me of the positive transformation that is possible when we effectively attack our problems. many of us get so caught up in our fights for the places we love that we forget to remind ourselves why we are fighting.  seeing the bay and coming to understand its conservation success has put some hope back in me and reignited that spark of wonder i felt as a kid watching “planet earth.”

—

works cited

hannah ritchie and max roser (2021) – “biodiversity”. published online at ourworldindata.org. retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity’ [online resource]

lindsey, r. (2020, august 14). climate change: atmospheric carbon dioxide. climate change: atmospheric carbon dioxide | noaa climate.gov. retrieved march 7, 2022, from https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide#:~:text=since%202000%2c%20the%20global%20atmospheric,mauna%20loa%20observatory%20in%20hawaii.

max roser, hannah ritchie and esteban ortiz-ospina (2013) – “world population growth”. published online at ourworldindata.org. retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth’ [online resource]

palumbi, s. r., & sotka, c. (2011). the death and life of monterey bay: a story of revival. island press.

eckerd college student researchers share why our oceans are such a vital part of our environment, and why it is important to keep our oceans plastic-free. shannon grace-day, a research assistant at eckerd college discusses the microplastics found in manatee specimens from tampa bay and how critical the situation is becoming.

funding for the research behind this project was provided by the tampa bay environmental restoration fund.

sediment, runoff, and nutrients all deposit into the gulf of mexico, sometimes originating as far north as minnesota. the large number of pollutants entering the outlet causes massive problems, sometimes in ways that one would not expect. for example, it might be surprising to learn that a large inflow of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus have adverse consequences for the ecosystem of the gulf of mexico.

when an excess of nitrogen and phosphorus enter a large body of water, an algal bloom occurs. as these algae blooms grow, two things happen: the algae on the surface prevent light from reaching aquatic plants below the surface, causing these plants to die, and the algae also die. bacteria break down the dead organisms, a process that requires the use of oxygen. this results in a deficit of oxygen, creating a dead zone where plants and animals cannot exist.

such a dead zone exists in the gulf of mexico, and it is at its largest size since measuring began in 1985 — roughly the size of new jersey. the large size is concerning considering the massive impacts the dead zone has on the gulf of mexico and the gulf coast area.

besides disrupting the ecosystem, the dead zone poses economic problems to the area. seafood is a large industry in the region, and fish kills represent a major threat to this industry.

the dead zone is projected to grow, and it certainly will not shrink without some sort of change occurring.

one way to reduce the amount of nutrients that reach waterways is to implement nutrient removal techniques in wastewater treatment facilities.

in washington, d.c., dc water has introduced enhanced nitrogen removal facilities that allow the blue plains treatment plant to significantly reduce the amount of nitrogen discharged into the potomac river; they claim that these new facilities have prevented over 144 million pounds of nitrogen from entering the potomac river.

dc water is also constructing a new tunnel system that will prevent sewer overflows from being flushed into waterways without first being treated. with rising concerns over excess nutrients in water ecosystems, wastewater treatment facilities around the united states are facing pressure from local, state, and federal governments to implement nutrient removal processes similar to those utilized by dc water.

besides discharges from wastewater treatment plants, runoff also represents a major source of nutrients in waterways. phosphorus and nitrogen are the main components of fertilizers and make their way into rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water as a part of agricultural runoff. runoff is classified as a non-source pollution and is therefore unregulated, so it has been difficult to track and prevent the amount of nutrients entering waterways through this route.

however, this does not mean that it is impossible to reduce the amount of runoff that reaches bodies of water.

investing in green infrastructure can prevent an abundance of nutrients in waterways and has other benefits like reducing flooding. green infrastructure includes rain gardens, bioswales, permeable pavements, and rainwater harvesting. incorporating green infrastructure alongside traditional infrastructure can help reduce the amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus reaching waterways.

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citations:

“gulf of mexico ‘dead zone’ is the largest ever measured.” national oceanic and atmospheric administration. august 2, 2017. https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/gulf-of-mexico-dead-zone-is-largest-ever-measured.

“removing nitrogen from wastewater protects our waterways.” dc water. 2017. https://www.dcwater.com/nitrogen-reduction.

“tunnel dewatering pump station and enhanced clarification facility.” dc water. 2017. https://www.dcwater.com/projects/tunnel-dewatering-pump-station-and-enhanced-clarification-facility.

“what is green infrastructure?” environmental protection agency. july 03, 2018. https://www.epa.gov/green-infrastructure/what-green-infrastructure.

in this podcast, frisbie speaks with colin boyle, a planet forward environmental correspondent out of chicago, about the past, present and future of the river.