Opinion: How Baltimore made its Inner Harbor (almost) swimmable

July 16, 2024 at 6:30 a.m. EDT

When I moved to Baltimore in 2014, I lived in Fells Point, a waterfront community near the city’s Inner Harbor. I would jog along the promenade and see plastic bottles, takeout containers, broken chairs and all kinds of debris floating in the murky water, which often smelled like rotting meat.

Never would I have imagined that the same waters might be safe to swim in — or that anyone would want to do so. Yet a decade later, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor may finally be swimmable, and plenty of people are eager to jump in.

The daunting task to make the harbor swimmable was spearheaded by the Waterfront Partnership, an organization that brought businesses, nonprofits, researchers and government agencies together to revitalize Baltimore’s waterfront area. Adam Lindquist, the partnership’s vice president and the leader of its Healthy Harbor Initiative, told me the effort focused on three main problems: sewage overflow, trash and stormwater.

One reason for the harbor’s poor water quality was a major structural defect in the sewer system. A misalignment in a 10-mile-long pipe that carries much of the city’s waste to a treatment plant created a bottleneck, resulting in tens of millions of gallons of sewage overflowing into local waterways each year.

The partnership “put pressure on the city for the most important upgrades and repairs in the sewer system,” Lindquist told me. After years of advocacy, city officials finally prioritized this project and made upgrades, such as building a new pumping station and two giant storage tanks to handle excess sewage. From 2019 to 2023, Lindquist said, sewage overflow fell 76 percent.

Excerpt from The Washington Post. Source link here.