Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to note the Susquehanna River Is not the main source of Harrisburg’s drinking water, which Capital Region Water says comes from the DeHart reservoir. The river is a backup source.
Ted Evgeniadis and Justin Mando have done a great service to the people of the Harrisburg region. They have sounded a very loud alarm about millions of gallons of raw sewage being dumped into the Susquehanna River whenever it rains.
Evgeniadis is the Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper, and Mando is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper Association. In a recent Op-Ed published on PennLive, they warned the city’s ancient water infrastructure is allowing E. coli and fecal coliform bacteria to contaminate the river “where boaters fish, kayakers paddle, and children splash just downstream from sewage outfall pipes leading from the Governor’s Residence.”
They are not only raising the alarm, but they’re acting. They’ve gone to court to demand state and federal agencies force Capital Region Water, the agency charged with safeguarding the city’s water, to stop allowing raw sewage into the Susquehanna River.
The Riverkeeper and his association are right to do so. We join them in demanding local and state officials treat this matter with the urgency it deserves and insist Capital Region Water solve the problem. Raw sewage in the river that serves 49,000 people is nothing short of a public health crisis that can no longer be ignored.
We know the disastrous impact of official negligence in places like Flint, Michigan, where thousands of people drank lead and possibly bacteria contaminated water for years. We know thousands of children suffered irreparable damage to their minds and bodies because of the bad decisions of people elected to keep their communities safe. And we know most of the people impacted in Flint water disaster were Black.
The parallels to Harrisburg couldn’t be clearer. Here, two thirds of the residents are Black or Latino and more than a quarter of them live in poverty. And in the middle of a pandemic, they’re exposed to a river regularly contaminated with fecal bacteria, although officials say the river isn’t not the main source of the city’s drinking water. The main source is the DeHart Reservoir, according to CRW.
Evgeniadis and Mando still think it’s an intolerable situation, and they note this problem dates back years. In 2015, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sued Capital Region Water for violations of the federal Clean Water Act. They entered a consent decree that has not solved the problem. In fact, the situation is even worse. As beautiful as the river is, no one should swim, splash, or boat in it anywhere near Harrisburg.
Capital Region Water knows there’s a problem, and they note in their Op-Ed response they’ve been trying to do something about it for years. The problem, of course, is money. Who’s going to pay the millions upon millions it will take to bring Harrisburg’s water infrastructure into the 21st century?
“If,” we want to do something about it, their officials said, “we need a partnership that unites local, state, and federal governments with local property owners and ratepayers.”
They are right, but our message to Capital Region Water is simple. There should be no “if.” Everyone in any position of authority in the city and state should want to solve this problem, now.
We agree this is an expensive proposition that Harrisburg’s residents can’t bear alone. Capital Region Water rightly points to the millions of federal dollars that are flowing into the region under President Joe Biden’s “American Rescue Act” to fund infrastructure repairs.
A lot of people want a say in how the federal dollars will be spent, but we can think of no better way to spend them than to stop raw sewage from being dumped into the river.
Let’s get the “if’s, ands and buts” out of the equation. Let’s get everyone at the local, county, state and federal levels working on an urgent plan to clean up the Susquehanna River. We think Capital Region Water is the right agency to lead the effort. And we urge the Riverkeeper to pursue all efforts to keep the public informed and to hold the agency accountable.
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