A century-old electric provider supplying hundreds of thousands of customers allegedly poisoned the Anacostia River in Washington, DC, for decades. The Potomac Electric Power Company will now have to pay more than $47 million in cleanup costs and another $10 million in fines, according to a record settlement announced this week by the District of Columbia Attorney General’s Office.
Attorney General Brian Schwalb announced the deal, the largest environmental settlement in District of Columbia history, on Tuesday, claiming that the business was to fault for “persistent toxic pollution” of the river, which acts as a natural boundary between the two jurisdictions.
Runoff and hazardous waste sites, according to NOAA, have led to “decades of pollution” in the Anacostia River, making it one of the “most heavily altered and contaminated watersheds” in the Chesapeake Bay. According to the EPA, the river’s watershed is home to hundreds of thousands of people, as well as dozens of fish species and hundreds of bird species. However, the watershed has a number of hazardous waste sites.
As a result of those installations, heavy metals, herbicides, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), an industrial waste banned in the country in 1979, have contaminated the river. These substances, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, can cause cancer and other issues in humans and animals by interfering with normal biological processes. They are “probable human carcinogens,” according to the EPA.
These chemicals may take decades to decompose.
The Potomac Electric Power Company (Pepco), according to Schwalb, is mostly to responsible for this issue. The business “resulted in spills, equipment leaks, and intentional release of petroleum and hazardous substances,” including PCBs, according to the attorney general, at two of its old plants, Buzzard Point and Benning Road, as well as numerous of its transformer vaults.
According to the attorney general’s office, Pepco damaged the land and water around its Benning Road facility. There were activities there from 1906 until 2012, and the site has been the subject of an environmental assessment since 2011.
Pepco has been accused of poisoning the soil and groundwater surrounding Buzzard Point with petroleum and other pollutants since it began operations in 1938.
“Until 2013, at a rate of at least twice per month, Pepco intentionally pumped the pollutants in its containment structures – intended to prevent spills and leaks – into storm sewers that emptied into the Anacostia River,” the office of the attorney general said. Despite the company’s own standards stating that pollutant discharges into storm drains were never permissible, the practice continued for years.
According to the attorney general, many of Pepco’s 60,000 underground transformer vaults are frequently affected by unclean runoff. For decades, the company reportedly pumped PCB- and petroleum-contaminated water into sewers, which then flowed into rivers and streams.
Schwalb alleged that “for decades, Pepco routinely discharged hazardous chemicals into soil, groundwater, and storm sewers,” creating a risk to public health and safety due to the pollution of the river. “…””” “… in the “And’s”””””t” of the law.
According to a study done in 2012 and partially funded by NOAA, over half of those who lived near the river, or around 17,000 people, were unaware of the dangers of eating river fish. Because to the high levels of pollutants in the river, the EPA has advised people not to eat eel, carp, or striped bass from it, and has urged banning other kinds of fish from its waters. According to the study, the local fisherman who ate the fish were disproportionately of African-American, Latino, and Asian ethnicity.
Schwalb claimed that, while Pepco had a significant role in the river’s pollution, it is not “solely responsible” and should be commended for accepting official responsibility. In addition to paying $10 million in legal fines, the electric business must pay $47 million to Washington, D.C. to help clean up the Anacostia River.
