Urban sections of the Potomac River are on the brink of becoming safe for swimming, but deforestation and polluted urban runoff are holding back efforts to clean up the waterway, according to a new analysis by environmental advocates.
The Potomac Conservancy gave the river a B on its latest report card, matching a high mark last awarded in 2018 and improving upon a B-minus given in 2020. Its analysis found reductions in the amount of nutrients and sediments washing into the river, clouding its waters and disrupting habitats for aquatic plants and creatures.
That progress has already encouraged a surge of recreation on the river in recent years, the report found. And though swimming is illegal along some portions of the District of Columbia, the Potomac is probably clean enough for swimmers during the driest stretches of the year, when water pollution is at its lowest.
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“We’re getting closer to being able to do that 365 days a year,” said Hedrick Belin, the conservancy’s president. A “healthy and resilient” Potomac could be a reality within a decade, he said.
The report is a key fundraising and advocacy opportunity for the nonprofit group. Its findings released Tuesday stressed that progress at restoring the Potomac could be at risk without greater efforts to reduce contamination from urban and agricultural runoff and leaky sewers.
Those sources of pollution foul waterways with nutrients that fuel algae blooms, which block sunlight from reaching underwater ecosystems and strip dissolved oxygen from the water when they decompose. Sewage pollution adds harmful bacteria, while runoff can also carry toxins such as heavy metals and so-called “forever chemicals.”
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The river scored a D on the conservancy’s report card as recently as 2011, so Belin called improvements since then “massive,” though he warned that they have slowed.
“It’s a great comeback for the nation’s river,” he said. “That progress is stalling out.”
The report’s findings are based on data going back to 2020, in most cases the most recent data that is available and has been vetted by scientists, Belin said.
Its evaluations are consistent with other reviews of the health of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. A report that the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science released last year gave the Potomac basin a lower score, a C-minus, though it rated higher than other urban waterways around the Chesapeake, including the Rappahannock and York rivers in Virginia and Baltimore’s Patapsco River.
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That report also emphasized that efforts to improve water quality in the Potomac and across the Chesapeake at large have stagnated.
And a report that the Potomac Riverkeeper Network released last year found that many parts of the river are safe for swimming most of the time, based on hundreds of samples collected regularly from 20 sites around the urban Potomac basin. That group has collected about 400 signatures on a petition asking Mayor Muriel E. Bowser to rescind the District’s ban on swimming in the Potomac.
As the population continues to grow in the region, development spreads and upstream agricultural runoff increases, Potomac Riverkeeper Dean Naujoks said, risks remain that water quality could backslide.
“This B could go to a D very quickly,” he said.
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