ENVIRONMENT : EPA Chief Aiming to Bring Urban Waterways Back to Life

The Anacostia River was once a proud urban waterway that flowed through the nation’s capital and boasted a deep-water tobacco port and a rich diversity of fish and wildlife.

But the chief of the Environmental Protection Agency recently gazed into this smelly brown river and, surrounded by excited sixth-graders, pronounced it a symbol of the nation’s dying waters and its moldering urban environments.

“Rivers like this used to be cities’ cultural centers, but now they’re just dead,” EPA Administrator Carol Browner said. “Our cities can no longer make use of these rivers. People can’t swim in them; they can’t fish from them; they can’t come down and spend an afternoon on their banks. The nation’s urban communities deserve to have their lakes and rivers back.”

Browner’s field trip to the blighted Anacostia River, which runs for 20 miles through a string of minority communities, was designed to dramatize the Clinton Administration’s new commitment to cleaning up the nation’s degraded waterways and to lessening the burden of pollution on urban populations and people of color.

With the ability of rivers to provide water, ease transportation and carry away waste, cities historically sprang up beside them. Today, however, most urban rivers are muddied by silt and agricultural chemicals from pastures upstream, befouled by the runoff of city street grime and burdened by industrial density along their banks.

Many, like the Los Angeles River--which an environmental group recently designated as threatened--have been muscled into concrete channels by the Army Corps of Engineers, frequently in an effort to control floods. And virtually all urban rivers have been stripped of what Browner called “their kidneys,” as adjoining wetlands, which help purify river water, have been filled in to make way for housing developments and industrial sites.

Those changes not only have transformed the appearance of urban rivers--which often look more like wall-edged channels than meandering waterways--but also have changed the way they flow and operate as living, self-cleansing organisms. The Anacostia, like many urban rivers, is so muddy from silt and so polluted that its bottom has virtually no vegetation. Without vegetation, fish have no place to live and feed. Waterfowl who feed on fish disappear. Rivers die.

To make matters worse, industries on city rivers frequently dump toxic chemicals into the water during heavy rains or flooding. The EPA’s inventory of toxic releases showed that 273 million pounds of dangerous chemical waste were discharged into rivers and streams in 1992--an increase of 12% over 1991. That increase is attributed to runoff releases from four fertilizer facilities in Louisiana and Texas during heavy rainfall.

Browner said she understands how children from the district’s northeast quarter could grow up believing that all rivers are like the Anacostia River they see within the city’s limits. Browner grew up in Miami, where the Army Corps of Engineers has put most water flows within concrete walls, and said she was 10 years old before she learned that rivers were not all encased in concrete.

Under Browner, the EPA and several other federal agencies have proposed to use the Anacostia River to launch a model program of “watershed management” in urban areas. With a proposed federal budget of $2.3 million and additional funding from Maryland and D.C. city governments, the EPA plans to help clean the Anacostia by restoring wetlands along the river’s banks to their natural state and developing more effective ways to ensure that the runoff from city streets and local industries does not flow untreated into the river.

The Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, two bills that the Administration is pressing for Congress to approve this session, also would have a dramatic effect on urban rivers, officials said. The Clean Water Act would make between $2.5 billion and $7 billion available as loans to state and local governments to build pipes and treatment plants capable of handling the trash-strewn sewage overflow that many cities suffer during heavy rains.