Conversations about the river shifted in the 1960s as the impact of suburbanization mounted. The construction of several communities without adequate sewage disposal facilities as well as growth around Dulles International Airport in outlying Loudoun led Congress to authorize construction of the Potomac Interceptor to send wastewater from those areas to Blue Plains.10 While the project helped convey pollution, it overburdened Blue Plains even more, which then sent raw or partially treated overflow into the river. Even as the Potomac’s pollution worsened, few citizens expressed public concern, though the League of Women Voters was a notable exception. Instead, well-off suburbanites with conservationist impulses focused on preserving scenic and open space amenities by seeking to restrict high-rise apartments along the waterfront.
The most prominent case involved the Merrywood tract in the affluent Fairfax community of McLean, the childhood home of first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. When county officials approved three seventeen-story towers for the site in 1962, members of the McLean Citizens Association protested that it would disrupt the low-rise character of the waterfront and overburden the area’s schools and roads. The case rapidly gained regional attention from civic organizations, planning agencies, members of Congress, and even Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, an ardent conservationist credited with mobilizing support in the 1950s to block a highway proposal and to preserve the 185-mile Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. The most significant actor in the Merrywood case was Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, who lived near the property and refused to grant a permit for a sewer line across the federally owned George Washington Parkway. When the developer defied a second ban, Udall obtained a court order to purchase an easement for $744,500 that restricted development to single-family housing. Several years later, after his tenure as secretary of the interior, Udall concluded that the case had established that a “high rise along the edge of the [Potomac] river was intolerable,” affirming support for preserving the waterfront for its open space amenities.11
Land preservation cases such as Merrywood were rooted in the broad affluence of postwar America and the desire of well-off suburbanites to preserve the local environment from rampant growth. They illustrated how grassroots civic organizing and burgeoning environmental consciousness, paired with political interest, could spark environmental protection. Yet the emphasis on aesthetic concerns and the overloading of existing facilities obscured a social bias among affluent residents. That bias interpreted the waterfront as an amenity to be enjoyed by those who could afford to live in the large single-family homes nearby rather than those who would have lived in the more modestly priced apartments.12 About a decade after Udall had secured the conservation easement, a developer bought the Merrywood property. By the late 1970s, he had built thirteen single-family homes with five more under construction, which were selling for what was at the time the exorbitant price of $250,000.13
As communities struggled to control postwar suburbanization, national officials saw the Potomac waterfront as a prospective test case for a new model of growth management. In a widely touted message to Congress in 1965, President Johnson insisted that the Potomac “serve as a model of scenic and recreation values for the entire county” and directed a task force to develop a program for cleaning up the river and preserving its banks from high-density development.14 Despite a strong federal commitment, the task force failed because it excluded state and local officials and proposed a model of shoreline preservation that ignored the growth imperative under which many communities operated.15 As the 1960s ended, much work lay ahead for cleaning up the Potomac.
A Mandate for Cleanup
By 1970, the Potomac was heavily polluted. Wastewater treatment facilities were chronically overburdened, which led to partially treated effluent being dumped into the river. Blue Plains handled 75 percent of Greater Washington’s wastewater treatment, but its 240 million gallons per day (mgd) capacity was regularly exceeded by 30 mgd.16 Poorly constructed and overloaded sewer lines were also major problems. Sewer lines near the Cabin John Parkway in Maryland spouted raw sewage from manholes—“like ‘Old Faithful,’” as one critic noted—into a creek just above the Potomac’s water supply intake for Washington, D.C.17 The worst leak was in one of several incomplete portions of the Potomac Interceptor system, the half-mile-long “Georgetown gap,” which dumped 15 million gallons of raw sewage per day from the region’s most affluent suburbs.18 Storm-water runoff from close-in urban communities along with eroded soil from suburban land development added to the river’s pollution.
Figure 4. The Georgetown Gap. Source: EPA.
The effects of this pollution were on display as Joseph Penfold of the Izaak Walton League hosted an environmental education boat trip in late 1971. Out on the water, he and his passengers could not see even a couple of inches below the surface because of silt and algae buildup and encountered a stench so bad that in certain sections birds did not fly around it. The smell was worst at Blue Plains, where sewage and sludge left over from treatment was piled four feet deep on forty acres of open land to dry out for a year before being shipped out for disposal or use as fertilizer in suburban communities.19 Aside from being nuisances, overflowed sewage, storm water, and eroded soil yielded high levels of coliform that threatened drinking water quality and high concentrations of nitrogen and other elements that threatened aquatic life by producing low oxygen levels and large algae growths.20 Trips made by Penfold and others, including Maryland congressman Gilbert Gude in 1975, dramatized the pollution of the Potomac, the impact on its aesthetic and recreational amenities, and the merits of preserving the shoreline from high-density development.21 Gude, for his part, was one of a number of Republicans who joined their Democratic counterparts during an era of strong bipartisan political and public support for robust environmental protection in the early 1970s.
Enhancing wastewater treatment was the primary means by which the Potomac and other metropolitan rivers were cleaned up in the 1970s. Passage of the CWA in 1972 confronted political resistance to cleaning up water pollution by setting strict, nationally uniform technical limits on pollution from sources that directly, or as a conduit, dumped pollution into rivers or wetlands. The law employed permitting, monitoring, and reporting systems for facilities’ discharges and established deadlines for treatment plants to eliminate 85 percent of conventional pollutants. The CWA reflected a new mentality that pollution should be prohibited unless authorized and that the national government should lead in standard setting. For these reasons, many state officials opposed the command-and-control approach that took away control of an issue long under their purview. On the other hand, the policy recognized the financial impact on states and localities by authorizing a construction grant program of several billion dollars to build and upgrade wastewater treatment facilities.22
No single person was as important to this work in Greater Washington as Norman Cole. Born in South Carolina in 1933, Cole grew up in Florida, where he later worked as a nuclear engineer for the navy during the 1950s. He and his wife moved to Fairfax in 1959, buying a house overlooking the Potomac and near a sanctuary for bald eagles that later became the Mason Neck National Wildlife Refuge. Cole was impressed with the undeveloped beauty of the Potomac’s shoreline and took a professional interest in water treatment after a “mile-long stinking mat of dead yellow and brown algae … came floating down river and blew in on our shore” during a house party in the late 1960s.23 Cole then joined local citizens to publicize research that found Fairfax had overloaded its sewage treatment plants by supporting rampant growth. They persuaded the Virginia State Water Control Board in June 1970 to impose a moratorium on new sewer hookups for three plants, thereby halting new development. But Northern Virginia builders persuaded the courts to overturn the ban and force the county to expand the system’s capacity and implement new technologies to accelerate the removal of pollutants. The results were dramatic, as Fairfax turned the worst sewer overload in the state into an example