The Justice Department and Maryland’s state environmental department separately sued DC Water on Monday over the pipe collapse that leaked millions of gallons of sewage into the Potomac River in February.
In separate lawsuits, both entities alleged that the D.C. utility neglected to properly maintain the faulty section of the Potomac Interceptor, the sewer line that carries wastewater from Maryland and Virginia to its treatment plant in Washington.
Federal government lawyers said in a court filing that DC Water’s mitigation efforts after the spill were “sorely lacking,” leading President Donald Trump to issue a federal emergency declaration and compel the Environmental Protection Agency to take charge of the cleanup.
“Because DC Water failed to adequately address the collapse threatening the waterway of the nation’s capital, the federal government acted,” the lawsuit said. “The United States now acts again by bringing this judicial action to force DC Water to cease unpermitted discharges and take necessary actions to prevent additional collapses.”
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The Trump administration did not pay any public attention to the spill until several weeks after it began, once news of the disaster started to gain traction online. Trump quickly blamed Maryland Gov. Wes Moore for the spill, accusing both him and the state of Maryland of failing to properly maintain infrastructure.
But there was a problem with that strategy. Maryland does not have oversight over the Potomac Interceptor — the federal EPA does. And the spill occurred on National Park Service land, also overseen by federal regulators.
Moore pushed back aggressively, accusing Trump of “lying to the public.”
Now, the Trump administration is formally changing its target. The DOJ is suing the private utility that manages the Interceptor, as well as the D.C. government, which initially escaped the majority of Trump’s attacks while he went after Moore.
Even though the spill occurred on federal land, DC Water is required to maintain the section of the interceptor that caused the spill to comply with its permits under the Clean Water Act, the federal government’s lawsuit said.
Neither lawsuit mentions the EPA’s purview over the pipe.
The Potomac Interceptor is aging and possibly at risk of degradation at several points along the line — a fact the utility and regulators have known for years. NOTUS previously reported that the National Park Service has known about the risks of sewage released into the environment since at least as early as 2022.
Both lawsuits argue that the utility’s inspections of the sewer system have not been up to par, and that DC Water did not address issues despite previously knowing that the interceptor was aging.
“Prior to the rupture, DC Water inspected the Potomac Interceptor between 2011 and 2015 and acknowledged that the results of that inspection indicated that the majority of the pipe showed signs of corrosion,” Maryland’s lawsuit said, adding that the utility “acknowledged that it did not use traditional methods to inspect the Potomac Interceptor and did not use industry-accepted methods to rate its defects.”
The utility said in a statement that it is “fully committed to the long-term rehabilitation of the Potomac Interceptor.”
“Executing this work on federal land requires close collaboration with the lead regulatory agency, which in this case is the National Park Service,” DC Water said.
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