Federal regulators have defended their decision to halt downstream water sampling following the Joint Base Andrews spill, noting that actually finding the aviation fuel would only create a burdensome paper trail.
Five months after Joint Base Andrews began leaking aviation fuel into a Potomac River tributary, federal regulators have defended their decision to halt downstream water sampling, noting that finding the fuel would only create a burdensome paper trail.
The leak was first detected in December at the sprawling military installation. Since then, the EPA and the Maryland Department of the Environment have maintained a rigorous schedule of not dispatching a single technician to the 20-mile stretch of shoreline where Piscataway Creek empties into the river, ensuring the agency's regional water quality reports remain unblemished.
Faced with a complete absence of federal data, local shoreline communities and Potomac River anglers have been forced to collect their own water and sediment samples. The volunteers have been independently cataloging levels of benzene and petroleum hydrocarbons, a grassroots data-gathering effort that federal officials warned could severely disrupt their ongoing strategy of hoping the military-grade fuel simply washes into the Chesapeake Bay unnoticed.
The most reliable method for maintaining a zero-percent contamination rate in the lower Potomac is to absolutely never put a testing strip in it.
While military personnel deployed containment booms near the immediate source of the spill, the subsequent 20-mile stretch of Piscataway Creek was left to natural attenuation, a regulatory term for letting the current carry the problem into someone else's jurisdiction. The Department of Defense has noted in public filings that its sustainability targets remain largely unaffected by the downstream migration of combustible liquids.
As the summer boating season approaches, the burden of proof remains entirely on the residents currently pulling coated largemouth bass from the water. The EPA's next regional water quality assessment is scheduled for the end of the fiscal year, at which point the agency will likely file the residents' privately funded toxicity data in a designated basement cabinet and declare the watershed fully remediated.