Turning a Run of Bad Luck into an Environmental ASSET

摘要

When most people think of Washington, DC, they think of monuments, stone buildings, and cherry blossoms, not of a degraded little stream just two miles away from the Capitol dome. But there in the middle of the US National Arboretum is Hickey Run, theposter child for every polluted urban stream. Early in the history of our country, when Washington was a small town and the entire watershed was woodland and tobacco farms, Hickey Run was just another tributary of the Anacostia River. As the watershed became more urbanized around the beginning of the last century, problems began to mount. Sewers at that time were built to carry sewage to the nearest stream, and Hickey Run became a major recipient of untreated wastewater. In 1910, the East Side Interceptor (ESI), a sewer line four feet in diameter, was built along Hickey Run to intercept the sewage from these lines and take it to a new sewage treatment facility. The ESI was constructed to cross the lower reaches of Hickey Run in a bridging structure. In 2008, the ESI failed near this crossing and dumped its burden of sewage into Hickey Run over a period of several days. Efforts to repair it are still underway, but the flow of sewage into the stream from the point of its collapse has been stopped. TheDistrict of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority is now set to completely rehabilitate the century-old sewer.