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The United States is currently witnessing its most significant liquid pollution event on record, as approximately 250 million gallons of raw sewage have leaked from Washington, D.C.’s sewer system into the Potomac River over the past month. This environmental disaster is a threat to the Chesapeake Bay and is expected to extend along the Eastern Seaboard via the Atlantic Ocean.
Surprisingly, the national media has largely overlooked this crisis unfolding in the nation’s capital. Despite the massive volume of sewage affecting densely populated areas and critical fisheries, the incident has not garnered widespread media attention. This is in stark contrast to the global outrage that followed the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, which released 11 million gallons of crude oil into a remote Alaskan region.
Similarly, the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which spilled an estimated 134 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, received extensive media coverage. News outlets reported on it continuously, even providing a live feed of the spill site. Yet, the current sewage spill, double in volume and occurring in an area of high population density, has not received comparable media focus.
More recently, when the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe resulted in the release of an estimated 134-million gallons of crude offshore in the then Gulf of Mexico—roughly one-half of the sewage volume pouring into the Potomac River in a dense population zone—news agencies covered it wall-to-wall, complete with a live spill camera streaming on site 24/7.