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The city of Alexandria has agreed to halt the leak of coal tar into the Potomac River once and for all and to clean up the mess, as part of the settlement of a federal lawsuit brought by an environmental organization last year.
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The legal agreement with the Potomac Riverkeeper Network attempts to resolve a problem that has been going on for decades as coal tar, creosote and other pollutants seeped into the river from a leaky storm water sewer at the former site of a coal-to-gas plant owned by the city in Old Town.
Under the consent decree filed on Wednesday, city officials agreed to take new steps to seal the leaking storm sewer and install additional recovery wells used to collect coal tar residues.
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The city also agreed to clean up contaminated areas on shore and take corrective action to deal with underwater sediments near the outflow of the pipe by Oronoco Street.
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The agreement additionally calls for the city to contribute $300,000 to a Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources project for restoring freshwater mussels that, like oysters, naturally remove pollutants and other toxins from water.
“I’m really pleased with the outcome and the settlement we reached,” Dean Naujoks, the Potomac Riverkeeper, said Wednesday. “This has been months and months and months of negotiations.”
The city also agreed to repay $190,000 in the plaintiff’s legal fees.
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Naujoks said it is difficult to estimate how much of the coal tar and other pollutants have entered the river over the years. At least 2,000 gallons of pollutants have been recovered from the drainage pipe and reservoirs designed to collect the waste since city officials began trying to keep it from entering the river.
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Berkeley Teate, a city spokeswoman, said the agreement was in line with those voluntary efforts that Alexandria has taken to address the problem for more than 20 years. In a statement, Teate said the city has spent more than $12 million in efforts overseen by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to halt the storm sewer leak and clean up the pollution. The city also has committed nearly $12 million in its capital improvement budget to continue dealing with the pollution.
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Naujoks, a former Alexandria resident who has been monitoring the oily leak for years, said the environmental organization decided to take legal action in 2022 despite efforts by the city to deal voluntarily with the pollution, largely by installing internal liners on leaky pipes and floating a 400-foot-long containment boom on the river.
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All those remedial efforts, however, were ineffective at preventing a particularly toxic pollutant from entering the water near Founders Park, contaminating a major tributary of the Chesapeake Bay tributary that provides drinking water to an estimated 5 million people. The Potomac Riverkeeper Network lawsuit charged that Alexandria had not done enough to stop the pollution, in violation of the federal Clean Water Act, and left humans and animals that come into contact with the river at risk.
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“I would frequently see people fishing over this pipe,” Naujoks said.
The pollutants come from the site of the former Alexandria Town Gas manufacturing plant, which produced coal gas from 1851 to 1947 at North Lee and Oronoco streets in Old Town, according to a 2021 report prepared for the city by Cardno, an environmental consulting firm. The report said coal tar and other toxic residues started seeping into groundwater through the bed of a 72-inch storm water pipe the city had laid below Oronoco Street when the plant site was redeveloped in the late 1970s.
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