DC Water
Almost 25 years ago, a coalition of local environmental groups filed a lawsuit against DC Water for allowing billions of gallons of untreated sewage to spill into the District’s rivers. Now, work is complete on a massive system of tunnels that will prevent 98% of sewer overflows into the Anacostia River — a major step in the ongoing restoration of the river.
“This is just a huge milestone,” says DC Water’s Moussa Wone, who is in charge of the project. “This river was really very, very, very impaired.”
On Friday, DC Water put in service the system’s final segment, the Northeast Boundary Tunnel, connecting it with an earlier phase of the project that went online in 2018.
Before the project, the city’s antiquated sewers would overflow into the Anacostia River 84 times a year, dumping an average of 2.1 billion gallons of untreated sewage directly into the waterway. With the new tunnel in operation, overflows are expected to happen only twice a year now, resulting in a dramatic improvement in water quality. Already, the first phase of the project has kept 15 billion gallons of untreated sewage and stormwater out of the river, along with 9,800 tons of trash.
The project came about as the result of a lawsuit filed in February 2000 by the Anacostia Watershed Society, Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club and other groups.
“After years of talking with the city government and DC Water and the EPA to try to get this changed, we weren’t making any progress,” says Christopher...
Trump delivered a dizzying variety of false claims in his public remarks over the past week,” writes CNN’s Daniel Dale. 20) Trump’s election defeats in California: Trump falsely claimed, “If we...