The Potomac River Is Full Of SHIT. ...Literally.

Let me walk you through a story so absurd that if I pitched it as fiction, you'd tell me to tone it down. On January 19, 2026, a 72-inch sewer pipe from the 1960s collapsed near Cabin John, Maryland,[1] and began pumping raw, untreated human sewage directly into the Potomac River. Eight miles upstream from the United States Capitol. The river that 5 million people in the region rely on for drinking water.[2]

And when I say "raw sewage," I don't mean a little trickle. I mean a volume of human waste so staggering that we need to talk about it in Olympic swimming pools. Because that's where we are as a society.

Let's put that in perspective. The Potomac disaster dwarfs even the roughly 143-million-gallon Tijuana River sewage crisis of 2017[3] making it potentially the largest wastewater spill in American history. DC Water didn't just break that record. They lapped it. They doubled it and then kept going like a runaway sewage freight train with no brakes and a conductor who fell asleep sometime before the moon landing, which, incidentally, is about when they built this pipe.[11]

Now look, we all know our Founding Fathers relieved themselves in the Potomac. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, probably even Ben Franklin after one too many ales at the tavern. The Potomac has seen some things. But the whole point of the last 250 years of civilization was that we would stop doing that. We invented indoor plumbing. We built sewer systems. We created an entire government agency called the EPA specifically so that rivers wouldn't be full of human feces. And yet, here we are in 2026, with a pipe from the Kennedy era spewing waste into the same river where Washington once crossed the Delaware's bigger, more important cousin, and somehow we've managed to make it worse than when people were doing it on purpose.

OK But Surely They Caught It Quickly, Right?

No. No, they did not.

The majority of the sewage poured into the river during the first five days before DC Water managed to activate emergency bypass pumps. Five days. If you've ever wondered how long it takes to notice 40 million gallons per day of human waste erupting from the ground near a national park, the answer is: apparently longer than you'd think.

And here's where the story goes from "that's terrible" to "wait, what?" When DC Water finally started testing E. coli levels at the spill site and published the results, they reported the bacteria count at 2,420 MPN per 100 milliliters.[16]

Then they quietly corrected that number.

"Human error." That's a phrase you want to hear from your coffee order, not from the agency monitoring bacteria levels in a river that feeds the drinking water supply for the nation's capital. "Sorry, we gave you a latte instead of a cappuccino" is human error. Being wrong about fecal contamination by a factor of 100 is something else entirely.

And it gets worse. By February 9, DC Water's own monitoring at Swainson Island recorded E. coli levels of 730,000 MPN per 100 milliliters[16] about 1,780 times the EPA's Statistical Threshold Value of 410 MPN for safe recreational water contact.[21] Independent sampling by Potomac Riverkeeper Network recorded readings as high as 4.8 million MPN/100mL.[18]

Enter the Baby Wipes

By late January, DC Water had installed bypass pumps to reroute sewage around the collapsed section of pipe. A temporary fix, sure, but at least it was something. The pumps were working. The flow was being managed. Things were stabilizing. It was fine. Everything was fine.

Then, on Super Bowl Sunday, the pumps stopped working.

Why? Because people had been flushing so-called "flushable" wipes down their toilets, and those wipes created a massive clog that knocked two of the bypass pumps offline simultaneously. During a period of high sewage flow. On the biggest toilet-flushing day of the year.

The result? Another 600,000 gallons of raw sewage surging directly into the Potomac.[4] Because of baby wipes. Baby wipes took down a critical piece of emergency infrastructure during the largest sewage spill in American history.[5]

So to recap where we are: a pipe built during the Kennedy administration collapsed near a National Historic Park, released an amount of sewage roughly comparable to the volume of the Tidal Basin, the agency in charge got the contamination level wrong by two orders of magnitude, and then baby wipes defeated the backup plan. On Super Bowl Sunday.

You truly cannot write this stuff.

Oh, and There's a Boulder

When DC Water crews went to repair the collapsed pipe, they discovered a massive rock dam blocking the inside of the sewer line.[11] Not a small obstruction. Boulders. Large rocks. A geological formation inside a sewer pipe that now requires heavy machinery being transported to the site to remove. The estimated timeline for just the boulder removal? Four to six weeks. Total repair time? Months.[16]

Meanwhile, the pipe that collapsed had already been undergoing rehabilitation work since September 2025. Let that sink in. They were actively trying to fix this pipe when it blew up anyway.

This Is Not a Joke. (Even Though It Reads Like One.)

Here's where the tone shifts from absurdist comedy to something that should genuinely alarm you. Five million people depend on the Potomac for drinking water.[2] DC Water says the drinking water supply isn't affected because the treatment system is separate from the sewer system. And that may be true today. But the Potomac Riverkeeper Network has been direct about the risk: the river is not safe for any recreational contact.[18]

The University of Maryland's School of Public Health identified fecal-related bacteria and pathogens in the river and flagged this as one of the largest sewage spills in U.S. history.[20] Environmental groups have pointed out that if this had happened a few months later, during peak recreation season, the entire river could have been effectively closed.[19]

And the infrastructure problem isn't unique to this one pipe. According to EPA estimates, Washington, D.C. alone needs approximately $1.33 billion over the next 20 years to repair aging sewer systems. Nationally, the figure climbs into the hundreds of billions. (These figures are drawn from EPA infrastructure needs assessments; the exact dollar amount may vary as updated surveys are published.)

This pipe was built in the 1960s. It was already being rehabilitated when it failed. There are more pipes just like it across the system. This wasn't a freak accident. It was a predictable failure of infrastructure that everyone knew was deteriorating, and it happened anyway.