A river runs through it

The Anacostia River is dirty, smelly and flows almost like molasses down from Northeast Washington, but D.C. officials are betting that in time it will attract area residents and spur redevelopment.

Efforts to refurbish 5 square miles of land along the Anacostia are meshing with long-standing campaigns to clean the river.

Officials outlined a framework plan of the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative to the general public last month and will next week give a tour of the waterfront to planners and architects who have worked on water-based development in other cities.

District planners acknowledge that the success of the waterfront initiatives hinges, at least partially, on whether the river can shed its reputation as one of the most polluted urban waterways in the nation.

And environmental groups, which have lamented the Anacostia’s condition for decades, say they are gratified that the river may finally be getting the attention it deserves.

“A lot of people in Washington don’t even know where the river is,” said Linda Howard, executive director of the Summit Fund of Washington, a nonprofit group that has funded efforts to restore the Anacostia Watershed. “What this plan does is create a context for a clean, restored river.”

Within the plan, which calls for more than 5 million square feet of housing, office and retail space, are provisions designed to make the river cleaner and more attractive.

Planners hope to bring several Anacostia tributaries out from underground, restore nearly 5,000 acres of wetlands and reintroduce plant species. The District has also begun redeveloping “brownfield” sites, or plots of land that have been contaminated.

Perhaps the most pivotal aspect of the District’s plan is the Anacostia Watershed Initiative Act, a federal bill proposed last month to help the District, Maryland and Virginia collaborate on a 10-year plan to clean the river and its watershed.

Previous efforts to clean the Anacostia have been slowed, environmentalists say, because the river runs through land controlled by the federal government, two states and the District.

Currently “there is no comprehensive cleanup strategy for the whole watershed,” said Uwe Brandes, the District’s project manager for the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative. “The new legislation takes a much more significant step forward.”

The Anacostia’s environmental problems are massive. Over the years, chemicals from sewage, toxic waste and runoff from buildings and highways have seeped into the river, flowing south from Maryland and settling in the slow-moving waters that cut through the District. Chemicals left over from wartime manufacturing in the 1940s still lie in the riverbed.

In addition, the Anacostia is victimized by the District’s combined sewer system, which pumps 1.5 billion gallons of overflow into the river each year. As many as 80 times each year the system overflows after heavy rain, forcing the majority of the sewage produced in the city into the Anacostia or other nearby bodies of water.

“The capacity is just not up to the job,” said Doug Siglin, director of the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “It was built for the late 1800s.”

All of this has left the Anacostia’s water nearly uninhabitable for wildlife and totally unsuitable for swimming. According to one study, as many as two-thirds of all brown bullhead fish found in the Anacostia were discovered to have tumors caused by excessive chemicals in the water.

The D.C. Water and Sewer Authority addressed sewage problem in July of 2002 by announcing a multibillion-dollar long-term improvement plan designed to reduce sewage overflows by 98 percent by 2015. It also agreed in July of last year to fund $2 million worth of storm-water pollution prevention to settle a lawsuit brought by the Environmental Protection Agency and a host of environmental groups.

But environmentalists say cleaning the river will require more than an sewer-system upgrade. Because more than 80 percent of storm-water pollution in the Anacostia originates in Maryland, District officials and environmentalists have pushed for awareness of the environmental problems farther north.

The Anacostia River is “low on [Marylands] food chain in terms of appropriations and allocation,” Ms. Howard said. “There’s not an army of citizens banging down doors of their delegates demanding the Anacostia be cleaned up.”

Environmentalists have campaigned for tax incentives and even mandates for developers to build more “green-friendly” projects, including buildings with vegetated roofs and lots featuring grassy areas that filter pollutants out of water before it reaches streams. But such efforts have been controversial, because many businesses are reluctant to take on increased costs associated with such construction.

Undaunted, D.C. officials say the demand for redevelopment along the Anacostia is great enough that the project can continue even if the river remains in its current state.

“It’s not that the environment is dragging economic development, it’s that cleaning the environment will have a huge benefit,” Mr. Brandes said. “Any recreational activity that involves contact with the water is not advisable. But from an economic development point of view, that’s not going to stop anything.”