With DC grant in hand, Anacostia Riverkeeper will deploy volunteers to test water quality come May

Anacostia Riverkeeper, a nonprofit organization that works to protect and restore the Anacostia River, will bolster its two-year-old water quality monitoring program in May with the help of a $140,000 grant from DC’s Department of Energy & Environment (DOEE).

The department will distribute the funds over the course of three years, Nicoline Shulterbrandt, the supervisory environmental protection specialist in DOEE’s Water Quality Division, said in an email to The DC Line.

Anacostia Riverkeeper, which launched the monitoring program in 2017, will train volunteers this spring to help fulfill the expanded grant requirements set by DOEE, according to Trey Sherard, the organization’s outreach coordinator and staff biologist.

Anacostia Riverkeeper is partnering with the Audubon Naturalist Society, the Rock Creek Conservancy, the Potomac Riverkeeper Network and the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay for the River Watch DC program. Spanning the District, the numerous testing sites will include Hickey Run, which flows through the National Arboretum; Maddox Branch, which carries water through Battery Kemble Park to a spot near Fletcher’s Boathouse; Thompson Boat Center, used by scholastic crew programs and adult rowing clubs; Buzzard Point at James Creek Marina, identified by Anacostia Riverkeeper as a “known swimming area”; and Anacostia Park, site of a boat ramp and dock used for fishing, paddle boats and more.

“I’m hopeful this will be a long-term project,” said Jeffrey Seltzer, acting deputy director of the DOEE’s Natural Resources Administration. “I think it will give us good data. It’s also something that’s great to educate the public and hopefully build advocates for people that care about the river and engage with it.”

DOEE plans to use the resulting data to monitor progress and help target efforts toward improving water quality — particularly in the Anacostia River, where cleanup efforts helped it pass a health check last year that it had failed annually for the prior 10 years.

Anacostia Watershed Society, which released the health check that gave the river a D- rating, reported progress in the fecal bacteria, water clarity and chlorophyll categories, likely due in part to the DC Water and Sewer Authority’s success in reducing sewage overflows.

Seltzer said the department’s goal is to restore the District’s waterways — namely Rock Creek and the Anacostia and Potomac rivers — to conditions suitable for swimming and fishing.

“Those standards are based on various things. Some of them are based on human health, so if you want to swim in the river, what kind of pollutants are going to cause problems for you?” he said. “Others are based on habitat and impacts to species.”

DOEE will have Anacostia Riverkeeper perform weekly tests throughout the summer at about two dozen sites selected along the Rock Creek, Anacostia and Potomac waterways and their tributaries — up from the eight sites the group monitored in 2018, according to Anacostia Riverkeeper’s website. The monitoring will include testing for pH, E. coli and turbidity, a measure of how cloudy the water is.

DOEE data show that various Anacostia River stations exceeded the District’s E. coli standard last summer. The presence of E. coli, a type of bacteria normally found in the intestines of warm-blooded animals, can indicate that there is fecal pollution in the water.

Sherard said that the DOEE grant will help bring awareness to the program, with the expanded volunteer corps magnifying what the group’s limited staff could otherwise accomplish. Anacostia Riverkeeper will host two- to three-hour training sessions on April 3 and 10 for prospective volunteers, Sherard said.

“This will allow us to take our very small staff, and instead of us needing to be at every water sample taken, like we were last year, we’re going to teach people how to sample and then we’ll be helping them run the samples,” he said.

In addition to promoting the project on social media, members of the group’s staff are attending advisory neighborhood commission meetings to recruit volunteers and inform people about the project.

Anacostia Riverkeeper’s project will focus on monitoring sites that could see more recreational use if the ban is lifted on swimming and fishing, according to Robbie O’Donnell, the group’s project coordinator and monitoring and resiliency lead. Leaders also recognize that some sites along DC waterways are already used for fishing despite recommendations against doing so and particularly against consuming any fish that are caught.

The organization will be using Swim Guide — a website and app that provides water quality information — to publish reports about the monitoring.

“People are going to go make their own choices” about swimming in the water, “but we can keep people as informed or as knowledgeable, as up-to-date as possible,” O’Donnell said.

Sherard hopes that the group will be able to continue the program in the future with financial assistance from the DC government. The organization is applying for a grant to extend monitoring farther into Maryland.

“The more data points and the more monitoring stations that we can get around the Anacostia watershed, [the] better picture we can paint to kind of see where high bacterial zones are,” O’Donnell said.

Improving the quality of DC waterways can benefit wildlife, O’Donnell said, while also providing people with direct benefits. With the expansion to more testing sites and recruitment of volunteers, Anacostia Riverkeeper and its partner organizations look forward to strengthening residents’ connections to DC’s waterfront parkland.

“If you’re just a DC resident in general, I think you should care about the Anacostia and the Potomac,” he said. “It’s a human health issue. A lot of people fish on the Anacostia. A lot of people come and want to spend time on the river. It’s just a human-nature thing.”