By Leland Schwartz

The E. coli levels in the Potomac have all returned to normal and safe levels since the sewage spill in January, but what keeps the Potomac Riverkeeper Network staff up at night is the concern that the 60-year-old,  54-mile-long sewage pipe could crack open again in another — let alone worse — location.

The estimated 243 million gallons of raw sewage that poured into the river over about three weeks luckily came out of a break downstream from the drinking water intake at Great Falls.

“I would be comfortable recreating. I would encourage everyone to look at the data,” Network President Betsy Nicholas told The Georgetowner. PRKN has had a water quality monitoring program for six years in a row “that establishes we’re also seeing health improvements pretty steadily,” she said.

However, Nicholas said, “the other side of the coin is that there are other spots that may be in dire shape, like the part that collapsed, and that is now a real concern.”

“We need to make sure that we don’t face something else to this level, and in an even worse spot,” Nicholas said of what is thought to be the worst sewage release in U.S. history.

“If it had collapsed where it crosses the river, there’s no stopping that, right?” she said. “There’s no switch to turn it off. It just would have been pouring out there until they replaced the pipe. It would have been horrible.”

DC Water officials said the cause of the collapse was a thinning of the pipe due to gases, combined with the weight of the rocks and boulders used the cover the pipe when it was built.

Repairs on another section of the pipe a half-mile upstream from the January spill site began months before the spill on what the National Park Service deemed “a high priority task to prevent collapse.”

In his testimony before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in May, DC Water CEO and GM David Gadis said “the incident did not occur because DC Water ignored infrastructure challenges. Rather, it occurred within one of the nation’s oldest and most complex wastewater systems, a system DC Water has spent decades modernizing, rehabilitating and improving for the benefit of the region and the environment.”

He told the congressmen the boulders and debris workers pulled away from the caved-in pipe weighed about 18 tons and that “these materials obstructed flow within the pipeline and likely contributed to significant structural stress to the Interceptor over many decades.”

The presence of the rock blockage, Gadis said, “significantly complicated emergency response and rehabilitation operations. The boulders restricted access to the damaged sections of pipe, impeded wastewater flow, created dangerous and unstable working conditions for crews and substantially increased the complexity of excavation and debris removal efforts within an environmentally sensitive and highly constrained work area. All during historically cold weather and ice.”

The location of the collapse, Gadis explained, “nestled within a heavily regulated and environmentally sensitive federal corridor, significantly increased the complexity of both emergency operations and long-term rehabilitation planning.”

He also said this experience “has also highlighted broader challenges associated with maintaining and rehabilitating major infrastructure systems that cross multiple federal, state and local jurisdictions, particularly within environmentally sensitive and nationally significant corridors such as the Potomac River and the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park.”

Gadis said it was important to note that prior to the Jan. 19 collapse, DC Water had “already identified portions of the Potomac Interceptor for rehabilitation and had been actively engaged in planning, engineering, environmental review and permitting discussions associated with future repair work. In fact, it had been part of our capital improvement planning process for several years, to begin construction in spring 2026, and the permit request was submitted to the National Park Service before the collapse occurred. Those efforts reflected the utility’s recognition that portions of the interceptor 10 required continued long-term investment and modernization as part of its broader asset management and infrastructure rehabilitation programs.”

He also told the committee that “DC Water has learned that having long-term easements to access the Potomac Interceptor, standardized permitting timelines, streamlined reviews for similar rehabilitation work and better field coordination with regulatory authorities can help to prevent a recurrence of the failure.”

The Potomac Interceptor collapse, Gadis said “was a serious and deeply consequential event for our region, our environment and the communities we serve. While this incident does not define DC Water’s decades-long record of environmental stewardship, operational excellence and infrastructure investment, it does demand accountability, reflection and continued action — responsibilities we fully embrace. We recognize that this incident impacted not only critical infrastructure, but also the confidence and sense of security of the communities we serve and the many people who treasure the Potomac River.”

American Rivers, another group that monitors rivers, and works with PRKN, put the Potomac on top of its new most endangered rivers list in April.

“This river, threatened by both data center expansion and pollution, exemplifies how the compounding threats our rivers are facing can collide, creating impacts that can reverberate far downstream,” the group said. “The rapid, unchecked buildout of data centers along the Potomac River threatens the drinking water for our nation’s capital and surrounding areas, while a historic sewage spill raises alarms about aging infrastructure.”

PRKN has three groups: Upper Potomac Riverkeeper, the Potomac Riverkeeper and the Shenandoah Riverkeeper. It has a dozen-plus staff, hundreds of volunteers on both sides of the river and works with a roughly $2-million annual budget. It is a member of Waterkeeper Alliance, the global entity that licenses Waterkeeper organizations and started in 1983 with a group protecting the Hudson River.

In addition to its water-quality monitoring and its regular public updates of the results here, the organization advocates for public-health protections and accountability and pushes for long-term ecosystem restoration.

Nicholas was with Chattahoochee Riverkeeper in Atlanta in 2003, served as a trial attorney in the Justice Department in its Environmental Natural Resources Division, worked with Big Green groups in D.C., and started Waterkeepers Chesapeake before joining PRKN.

“If we want to try and make some lemonade out of these lemons here for the Potomac River, it’s a wake-up call that this infrastructure is a disaster waiting to happen, and we saw the potential of it here.”