Man hired to clean National Mall, polluted river at Hains Point

it’s mildly amusing that the stuff that’s in the sewer, which was going to end up in the potomac, becomes a clean water act issue if you take it out of the sewer and then put it in the potomac

@PotomacCyclist 95282 wrote:

He was dumping debris too. Plus there’s the issue of him being paid specifically to remove that waste.

As for the sewage, I don’t think the company was handling that. Maybe it was wastewater from construction sites. More generally, sewage is a Clean Water Act issue of concern. That’s why DC Water is spending billions on the new tunnels to store rainwater and prevent most future overflows into the Potomac.

I thought the article said storm sewers, which generally dump rainwater into waterways all the time. The big issue with DC Water is the fact that the combined system dumps poo into the river, not just rainwater. So it sounds like stuff that would have ended up in the river except that it didn’t make it there and had to be removed in a truck, changing it from stuff that goes in the river to toxic waste. Maybe there’s more to the story.

Completely agree that he should have been prosecuted for fraud either way, if he was being paid to do something specific and pocketed the difference instead.