The fallout from the January sewer collapse that dumped over 200 million gallons of wastewater into the Potomac River continues to pile up, bringing a new lawsuit and a report that suggests the river might still be getting contaminated.
A Great Falls resident filed a class action lawsuit against DC Water on Friday (March 6) in the U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland, calling for the utility to compensate himself and other individuals “whose property interests in and use and enjoyment of the Potomac River … have been impaired by [the] Defendant’s conduct.”
Dr. Nicholas Lailas, who works in Reston as a urologist for Loudoun Medical Group, owns a 45-foot-long boat that he regularly takes out onto the Potomac River for recreation, his complaint says.
The vessel is moored at the National Park Service’s Columbia Island Marina on the Pentagon Lagoon in Arlington, where the waters were “directly contaminated” by the untreated sewage that flowed into the river after a 54-mile-long pipeline collapsed in Maryland on Jan. 19.
“Dr. Lailas has incurred specific out-of-pocket costs for vessel cleaning and decontamination, has been deprived of use of his vessel, and has suffered physical contamination of his property,” the complaint said.
The lawsuit alleges that it was DC Water’s responsibility as the owner and operator of the ruptured pipe, known as the Potomac Interceptor, to maintain it in a “reasonably safe condition and to prevent foreseeable harm to persons and property.”
The lawsuit said that preliminary data indicates that there are thousands of people who own property or vessels in the affected parts of the Potomac.
Andrew Levetown, an attorney for the plaintiff, said in an interview Monday that it will take time to get the full breadth of the class, with business owners, property owners and recreational users all having interest in the potential damages caused by the Jan. 19 collapse and leak.
“You’re going to have businesses who lose business because instead of sitting next to the Potomac, their clients are sitting next to the open sewer,” he said.
The suit did not specify a damage amount. DC Water spokesperson John Lisle said in a statement that the collapse of the Potomac Interceptor was “a serious and unexpected event, and our teams remain focused on the response, environmental protection, and restoration efforts. Because this matter is currently subject to ongoing litigation, it would not be appropriate for us to comment further at this time.”
Nonprofit raises alarm about possible leak
While DC Water continues work on emergency repairs to restore service to the pipeline, which carries wastewater from the Dulles area in Loudoun County to the Blue Plains treatment plant in D.C., the nonprofit Potomac Riverkeeper Network (PRKN) found that sewage might still be actively leaking into the Potomac River.
Staff with the nonprofit, which advocates for clean water in the Potomac and Shenandoah watersheds, noticed “continuous dripping” from as many as 20 to 30 locations within a culvert that carries a tributary of the Potomac River directly underneath the currently sewage-filled Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal, according to a report released yesterday (Monday).
Located on the Maryland side of the river north of McLean, the tributary flows down from the Clara Barton Parkway where the Potomac Interceptor ruptured, through the culvert under the C&O Canal and into the Potomac.
PRKN staff observed the dripping while collecting water samples on Feb. 19, Feb. 23, March 3 and March 5 to measure E.coli bacteria levels in the wake of the Jan. 19 sewage spill, though it’s not clear when the leak began.
“All the sewage — both the liquid sewage that flows through the C&O Canal, but also the solid sewage — it’s building up in the canal,” Evan Quinter, the network’s water quality and volunteer coordinator, explained. “It’s to the point where the solid sewage is so much that it’s coming over the water line at this point, so now, there’s like islands of solid sewage in the canal. I don’t think we can say if this was here before or not, but right now, there is constant dripping coming from the ceiling of that tunnel.”
The nonprofit’s tests found that bacteria levels in samples taken from the tributary upstream of the culvert have dropped within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s recreational safety limit of 410 E.coli. Samples taken inside and downstream of the culvert, however, remain well above safe levels.
Because bacterial levels in and downstream of the culvert remain well above safe limits, PRKN believes there may still be ongoing contamination, Quinter says.
According to Quinter, the nonprofit has alerted DC Water, the National Park Service, the EPA and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to its findings.
“We just wanted to make sure that everyone was aware that this was happening as soon as possible, because it’s could be both an active contamination that’s still going on, and it also worries us for the integrity of the actual C&O Canal … especially because now, like I said, we have that solid sewage, so it’s just more and more weight and pressure on the C&O Canal,” he told FFXnow.
DC Water didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from FFXnow, but Quinter says PRKN was told that the utility “would look into it.”
Following the Potomac Interceptor collapse, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser declared an emergency Feb. 18 and requested that President Donald Trump provide federal resources to help the city fight the leak that dumped 250 million gallons of raw sewage into the Potomac River in its early stages. The president approved the emergency assistance days later to help the city address the emergency.
DC Water said it knew the pipe, first installed in the 1960s, was deteriorating, and rehabilitation work on a section about a quarter-mile (400 meters) from the break began in September and was recently completed. The pipe that ruptured was scheduled for repair this summer.
DC Water’s updates say the emergency repairs are beyond the halfway point and there are no flows into the river.
At a public briefing last week, officials with the utility said they were assessing the cause of the rupture, including whether the way the pipeline was initially constructed contributed to the emergency. David Gadis, the CEO of DC Water, said at that briefing that while it was too early to say definitively, “we are seeing indication that this incident may have been highly unusual.”
Last week, the Virginia Department of Health lifted a recreational water advisory that had been in place since Feb. 13 for some of the Potomac River, but health officials continue to advise against touching or getting on a 4.7-mile stretch of the river between the American Legion Bridge in McLean and Chain Bridge in Arlington.
Quinter says he’s largely supportive of DC Water’s efforts to fix the broken sewer line and clean up the sewage and debris left by the spill. But in addition to seeing a need for more frequent inspections of the entire Potomac Interceptor, PRKN is pushing for the utility to expand the scope of its remediation plan to include impacts on the environment and communities farther downstream of the rupture.
“I think the remediation plan really needs to extend further downstream into Maryland … and I would say, continue down even into D.C. waters,” Quinter said. “I think on the long term, there’s a real harm and potential scare for algal blooms, fish die off, events, these kind of things, and we just need to be ready for the monitoring and for the response side of it.”
