The new effort to restore the Anacostia River: transparency

Alexander Prucha used to smoke cigarettes. Even though he kicked the habit, he occasionally still gets the urge. In those moments, he finds a body of water and brings his fishing gear along. A couple of hours of casting, and the itch is scratched.

Prucha first got into fishing as a PhD student at George Washington University, when his mental health was taking a hit. He was inspired by viral angler Ernie the Hog Snatcher.

“It just became almost like when I was a kid collecting Pokémon cards,” Prucha on a recent sunny Monday morning while casting into the Anacostia River from the dock at Bladensburg Waterfront Park. “It’s something elusive yet attainable. You never know what you’re gonna get, or if you’re gonna get anything at all, but you know it’s possible.”

While the Anacostia has become a source of healing and relaxation for Prucha, for others it has been a place to avoid. Swimming in the Anacostia and Potomac rivers has been illegal for about the past 50 years due to toxic pollutants, unsafe levels of E.coli and other organic matter; experts advise against eating fish caught in the rivers.

But a coalition of groups focused on the health of local rivers is looking to change that perception. The Reservoir Center for Water Solutions, the Anacostia Riverkeeper, Anacostia Watershed Society and Potomac Riverkeeper Network recently launched a monitoring program that provides real-time water quality data for the Anacostia, Potomac and Shenandoah rivers. The program’s public dashboard includes information from a network of nine monitoring sites, two of which are in Bladensburg and National Harbor.

Prucha was fishing south of one of the new monitoring sites, which include floating sensors, called Sondes. The sensors are blue cylindrical capsules housed inside yellow robot-looking buoys powered by solar panels.

The platform is a part of an ongoing effort to encourage people to use their local waterways and become invested in restoration efforts, while providing transparency into the current health and safety of the river.

Local watershed conservation organizations have been working for decades to clean up the Anacostia River and its connected waterways. They are working to protect the natural ecosystem and transform these water systems into inviting places where communities can safely boat, fish and eventually swim.

Speaking on a panel in D.C. on Wednesday, Chris Williams, president and CEO of the Anacostia Watershed Society, emphasized that the dashboard is about overcoming decades of community hesitation.

While water quality has been improving, he noted that locals struggle to imagine a future where the river is swimmable.

“What this sensor does on a daily basis is it informs the question of, ‘Is the river swimmable? Is the water fishable?’” Williams said. “That is going to make a huge contribution as the river recovers to build the confidence in the community to interact with the river.”

Prince George’s and the Anacostia River and watershed

Every year, around 275,000 people visit Bladensburg Waterfront Park to fish, kayak, row, paddle, birdwatch and use the network of biking and walking trails and pavilions.

“The Anacostia River is the lynchpin of all we do,” said Robert Walker, who has worked as the park’s nature and facilities manager for more than a decade. “In every program and event, we remain committed to our mission of sustainability and caretaking of our park and river ecosystems, and help guide our community and park visitors to do the same.”

Walker, who grew up in Prince George’s County, said he’s proud of the efforts to clean up the river and the nearby communities.

”Is it a perfectly clean river? No, of course not," Walker said. “You’d be hard-pressed to find any urban river and watershed that is.”

The Anacostia River flows from Prince George’s County through parts of Colmar Manor, Cottage City and Bladensburg into D.C., where it eventually empties into the Potomac River.

But the county holds the largest geographical stake in the system — it contains the largest swath of the Anacostia watershed at 176 square miles, according to Williams. Local tributaries such as Sligo Creek, Paint Branch, Little Paint Branch, Indian Creek, Upper Beaverdam Creek, Dueling Branch and Brier’s Mill Run all weave through the county before draining into the main river stem.

“Even though the Anacostia River is sometimes thought of as a D.C. thing, just as importantly, the bulk of the watershed, all the streams and the wetlands that feed into the Anacostia River, most of those are in the state of Maryland and the biggest chunk is in PG County,” Williams said.

While the rivers are still years away from safe swimming and fishing, the groups behind the public dashboard are aiming to demystify how they measure water health. It gives the public a tool to track real-time changes and see how events like heavy rainfall or sewage spills impact the rivers. The coalition pointed to the recent Potomac sewage spill as motivation for getting the platform up and running.

One metric that the sensors track is dissolved oxygen, which measures how much oxygen is available for fish and other aquatic life. Low dissolved oxygen can indicate sewage discharge or nutrient runoff; but higher levels of oxygen are useful for anglers looking for areas with more fish.

Advocates for urban waterways

Anacostia Riverkeeper Trey Sherard has spent more than a decade at the forefront of the fight to clean up the water. During the unveiling of the new dashboard last week, Sherard acknowledged that federal water quality gauges have existed for decades. But the data from these sensors isn’t accessible to the general public. In his eyes, the new dashboard is a game changer.

“What I hope it gets used for, in addition to paddlers when they check water temperature and anglers checking water temperature, is that this can also become an alarm system for the agencies,” Sherard said. He imagines a scenario where someone notices construction near the river could check the dashboard to see if it’s causing levels of toxins to spike.

Betsy Nicholas, president of the Potomac Riverkeeper Network, says the newly accessible data validates all the hard work they have been doing.

“For decades, urban waters were written off as too dirty, too many people and now we can push back on that,” Nicholas said. “That the work that all of us have been collectively doing is cleaning up our rivers. They are our rivers, they are for the communities that live there, that recreate them. This gives us a chance to use the science and data to protect public health and make sure that people can actually enjoy these amazing, beautiful resources.”

During the panel Williams also emphasized that hard data is often the most effective tool for shaping environmental legislation. In the past, trash trap data collected by local riverkeepers showed single-use plastic bags were a primary pollutant, driving the passage of bag bans and taxes in Prince Geoge’s County and D.C.

“In reality, policy is based on data, and if you have good data then you have good policy,” Williams said. “And we see this over and over again on the Anacostia River.”

Back at the waterfront park, Williams explained that a truly swimmable river still requires extensive infrastructure and safety upgrades before it can become part of daily community life, even if parts of the river technically meet swimmable standards on certain days. He also noted that systemic racism has left a legacy where many surrounding communities of color were never taught how to swim, a gap he says the Anacostia Watershed Society is trying to address by seeking resources for public swimming lessons.

Yet the signs of ecological healing are undeniable. Walking along the banks, Williams pointed out turtles sunbathing on logs and noted that local beavers, once driven out by pollution, have slowly begun to return.

Nearby on the docks, the quiet progress of the river’s recovery felt tangible to those sitting by the water.

“You’re looking for serenity, come to the water,” said Jerome Barr, who spent his morning meditating on the edge of the pier.

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