Over the weekend, DC Water completed repairs on the Potomac Interceptor pipe—the sewer line that broke in January, launching nearly 300 million gallons of poopy pollution into the Potomac River. After 55 days of construction, which involved enough gravel to cover four football fields and enough f uel to power a dozen homes for a whole year, the pipe is once again funneling sewage from Fairfax and Loudoun Counties to the Blue Plains Advanced Water Treatment Plant in Southwest DC. Now that our region’s collective excrement is traveling along its intended route, local agencies can focus on addressing the myriad environmental concerns that a sewage spill of this magnitude poses for the river and its wildlife—and how to prevent something like this from happening again. DC Water crews are working to clean up the CO Canal, where a temporary bypass system had been diverting wastewater away from the broken Potomac Interceptor pipe segment during repairs. A freshwater dam upstream of the spill site will “help flush out residual waste and contaminants” in the canal, the agency said in a press release; meanwhile, workers are vacuuming “sludge” out of the waterway. Monday’s rain is also expected to help wash away some of the filth. Drone footage shared by the agency, showing the return of wastewater flow to the newly restored pipe, also paints a pretty gnarly picture of the scene. The video “tells the story of what a mess it is” at the rupture site, says Betsy Nicholas, president of the nonprofit Potomac Riverkeeper Network. “It just sort of looks like total destruction in a few areas where you can’t really tell what’s the canal and what’s the ground, and it’s all brown and gross.” Before the rupture,  DC Water already planned to spend $625 million over the course of a decade to upgrade the Potomac Interceptor, which is more than 60 years old. The agency inspected the 54-mile length of the pipe between 2011 and 2015, finding that “the majority of the pipe segments [showed] signs of corrosion, and some [showed] settled deposits.” Earlier this month, law firm Hagens Berman filed a class-action suit against DC Water, alleging that the agency was negligent in its efforts to prevent such a disaster. Plaintiff attorneys note that crews had repaired a section of the pipe just upstream of the 72-inch portion that ruptured in September. “DC Water’s engineers and contractors were physically present in the immediate vicinity of the section that would fail four months later, performing work on the same pipeline prompted by the same corrosion findings, yet took no documented steps to assess or safeguard the adjacent unremediated section,” the lawsuit reads. Litigation aside, Nicholas thinks that DC Water needs to conduct further inspection and preventative repairs of the Potomac Interceptor much more quickly than the original 10-year timeline. “We need to know how this happened and how to make sure it doesn’t,” she says. “How many other sections of this same pipe could be in as bad a shape?” The other pressing concern is environmental remediation. Nicholas would like to see a concentration on “natural solutions” to the impact on wildlife, including the introduction of native freshwater mussel species to the area around the spill site—as filter feeders, mussels can help suck up some of the pollution that the sewage overflow introduced. “It’s not like you can go and recapture everything that spilled out,” she explains. “So a natural system for doing that, I think, would be really good.” As of Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency will head up water quality testing efforts in the river, taking over “for the various jurisdictions who are working together on it—because ‘working together’ is a bit of a misqualification of what’s actually been happening,” Nicholas says. “Each governmental body here has been doing it a little bit differently and having maybe a little trouble coordinating and getting coverage over things consistently, so I hope it’s a good sign that we’ll have EPA in charge of the water quality monitoring going forward.” The Potomac Riverkeeper Network will also ramp up its independent environmental testing efforts, according to Nicholas; not only will the University of Maryland continue to support the organization in monitoring water quality, but George Mason University will now be assisting with sediment testing. “That will give us a much better understanding about what’s on the ground there and what might need to be done to help remove any of those contaminants, because it could be much beyond just bacteria there,” she says. “We don’t know if there’s heavy metals that could be in there, PFAs, other toxic chemicals, because all that stuff gets into wastewater. It’s not just what’s going down your toilet.” The DC Department of Health lifted the recreational advisory for the river earlier this month, when testing revealed E. coli levels in the waterway had remained within the Environmental Protection Agency’s safe threshold for human contact for 21 days. “We should be able to recreate in most areas of the Potomac, and of course everything upstream of the sewage spill, in normal ways—it’s around the area of the site that’s going to take a long time to clean up, and it may or may not be safe this summer,” Nicholas says. “I don’t know if people are going to want to take the bike paths right at the CO Canal around Lock 10 for a little while. It does not smell good.”The post The Broken Sewer Line That Filled the Potomac River With Poop Has Been Repaired. What Happens Next? first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less