THE WATER'S NOT FINE

 

By http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/57.92, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35926583

 

What's in your water?

I rewrote and added to this blogpost for publication in Pie and Chai magazine, where it can be read here. I'm keeping the original blogpost in place, however, because it holds links to the sources should anyone be interested. But read the Pie and Chai piece, titled "Water, Water Everywhere."

 

Original post:

As a teenager, I remember seeing an old retro ad in a glossy magazine like Smithsonian or maybe National Geographic. If you bought a subscription, they’d send you a small, cap-like canvas bag of a type outdoorsmen used back in the day. You just dipped it over the side of your canoe into the river or lake, took a cool drink, and paddled on. There was a pen-and-ink picture of a man doing exactly that. I was struck by the realization that such wild, unclaimed water was once potable. If you tried that now on Potomac Creek, you’d die. Or wish you had.

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Potomac Creek feeds the Chesapeake Bay, and the Bay is in serious trouble. Each of the Bay’s seven cooperating jurisdictions (Virginia plus five other states and Washington, DC) has agreed to meet important clean up deadlines by 2025. By that time, all pollution control measures are supposed to be in place for the Bay to begin healing. But the commitments aren't being kept.  Joe Wood, a senior scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, confirms that whatever the excuses, the basic fact is that “we’re still severely behind."

So what does “severely behind” actually mean for life in and around Potomac Creek?

In accordance with the requirements of the Clean WaterAct, the 2022 report of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), like earlier DEQ reports, lists Potomac Creek as a Category 5 “impaired water.” This is the worst of the EPA’s five categories. Category 5 means that at least one of the waterway’s designated uses (public water supply, sustaining aquatic life, recreation, etc.) “is not supported or threatened.” In Potomac Creek, the identified problem now is that its pH levels are deemed harmful for aquatic life. (In adjacent Aquia Creek, also a Category 5, the problems are algal blooms, which cause dead zones, and E. coli, which limit human recreation.) Water quality tests by both DEQ and local scientists also show elevated PCBs and E. coli bacteria levels in both Potomac Creek and its own tributary, Accokeek Creek (the latest DEQ report lists both creeks a category 4 for E. coli). PCBs are chemicals that pose serious health risks to humans who consume affected fish. High levels of E. coli bacteria, which often come from untreated sewage, can cause severe intestinal and kidney illness.

In short, Potomac Creek, its tributary Accokeek Creek, and its neighbor Aquia Creek all fail to meet standards set to ensure safety for people or aquatic life. They are poisoning Chesapeake Bay. And while Potomac Creek is supposed to be on a pollution diet, like most diets this one isn’t going very well.

That’s the scientific analysis. In simpler layman’s terms, the Creek is a dump.

Every mob hitman knows at least one environmental fact: If you throw something into the woods or river, it exits the human world. My key ring holds a key I pulled from the ignition of a 1949 Ford pickup I found abandoned in the woods with a couple other rusty vehicles. Enveloped by cedars, and with bramble and vines growing up through its floorboard, the Ford is lost to the world for most of the year.  The surrounding woods are littered with antique stoves, broken washing machines, and other objects no one wanted to pay to get rid of.

Similarly, Potomac Creek is full of tires, clothes, plastic bags, old fishing nets, abandoned crab pots, soda bottles, COVID masks, and anything else that can be left behind, thrown, or blown into a substantial body of water. A good low tide is an adventure: plastic oil bottles, a shoe or hat, maybe even an outboard motor. The water is always opaque, but after a rain the inflow of sediment makes it impossible to see the bottom in only a few inches of water. 

Moving upstream, through Crow’s Nest Preserve towards Unicorn Farm, the Creek’s flow is much disturbed by bridges, roadwork, and the wide, clear-cut easements of Dominion Energy’s powerlines. The County’s landfill is perched atop the Creek’s wetlands. The Creek recently caught a break when locals stymied a politician’s plan to build a commercial tire incinerator there. It lost out, though, years ago, when a heating oil truck crashed into an unnamed stream that crosses Unicorn Farm and feeds into Potomac Creek, releasing its entire load into the marshes. Farther up still, and the Creek – now just a brook – flows under the greasy gauntlets of the Route 1 and I-95 interstate highway bridges, catching the colorful detritus of passing trucks and vacationers.

This trashing started during the colonial era. Yet up until just a few decades ago a summer night’s drive along Brooke Road, which crosses Potomac Creek, still produced a windshield covered with splatted bugs of impressive diversity. The humid marshland offered up species like a febrile Jackson Pollock. I recall nights when my car's low beams revealed an incalculable number of green frogs crossing the road, all pointed in the same direction. It was awful to drive through their zombie-like procession. In the morning, frog slime covered the asphalt. But the amphibians would be back again the next night. 

That unavoidable slaughter, a visceral indicator of biological plenty, is now gone.

The Creek at low tide (R. Singh)