MY STORY BEHIND THE STORY
“Something in the Water”
The Story of the Polluted Anacostia River and Surrounding D.C. Neighborhood

By Brentin Mock
IJJ Environmental Justice Fellow, 2009

 My idea for the project was to tell the story of how the Anacostia River and Anacostia neighborhood in Washington, D.C., both became symbols of pollution, blight, poverty and poor health. And also, to show how new green jobs policy proposals are – or are not – addressing the needs of both the river and the community.

What I found was that after decades of numerous plans produced by dozens of environmental groups for how to clean up the Anacostia River, the implementation of those plans are only now getting started, mostly aided by the promise of stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. There are two major causes of the river’s poor conditions: trash from humans, and pollution from storm runoff. The ARRA’s financial provisions will help D.C. adopt new technologies and land-use policies that will stave off polluted storm runoff in the future, and also give resources for better anti-trash pollution enforcement and environmental groups’ community outreach to urge people to stop throwing trash in the river.

However, many people I interviewed in the Anacostia neighborhood questioned whether ARRA money would benefit the actual residents and organizations who live in the affected communities. There were concerns that the green jobs training that comes with ARRA financing may not actually lead to sustainable, career-track jobs for the Anacostia people. And there were huge concerns that if the Anacostia river and neighborhood were finally cleaned up, if that then would clear the way for the kinds of gentrification that would displace indigenous Anacostia residents. When I spoke with D.C. government officials, I found that there were few controls in the policy to ensure that Anacostia residents and organizations would be priorities for receiving ARRA funds (contractors can use funds to hire people from outside of Anacostia, or even from outside of D.C.), or that would ensure that the newer, cleaner Anacostia would still be affordable and accommodating for natives.

There were a few obstacles encountered, which led to many delays in the final story. The main obstacle was that I moved away from Washington D.C. at a certain point and so was not able to access the river and the neighborhood when going through revisions of the draft. Also, much of the story was hinged on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus package, particularly funds for green jobs. When I began reporting and writing the story, that money had not begun to touch ground in D.C., and I only had the proposals and budget plans to work off of. Delays in publishing the story led to a period in which ARRA funds had begun to be dispersed and distributed, and so I had to make changes in the story to reflect that. Also, one of my sources, George Hawkins, switched positions amidst my story. When I started, he was head of D.C.’s Department of Environment, but he then resigned and took the position of the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority while going through revisions.

More than anything, I learned how to track federal grants and funds from federal department and agency sources down to their local receivers. This is a valuable skill and tool for journalists, and one that is necessary for helping readers understand how government works as far as making resources accessible for communities. Given my time with this, I’d be able to give advice on how to read federal government websites and track data from places like the Environmental Protection Agency, the White House’s recovery.gov, Department of Labor, and also local (city/municipal/county) Web sites of the same nature. 

The IJJ Fellowship helped me tremendously in doing this story. The workshops in Chicago and Los Angeles, most especially in Los Angeles, were helpful in getting the right kind of research and data searching needed for this story. The sessions on how to explore and extract data from federal department/agency Web sites were propitious to getting the most up-to-date information needed for the story – even if that information changed over the course of the reporting. Also, the sessions explaining the various types of pollutants in the air and water and what kinds of public health risks they pose helped formulate for the story why readers should be aware of the toxins in their environment and what threat they pose. 

 I believe I covered my subject matter comprehensively and provided ample information about how a vulnerable community and river were made unsuitable for living and whether green jobs policies are going far enough to alleviate the problems posed to both.