Democratic counterparts during an era of strong bipartisan political and public support for robust environmental protection in the early 1970s.
Enhancing wastewater treatment was the primary means by which the Potomac and other metropolitan rivers were cleaned up in the 1970s. Passage of the CWA in 1972 confronted political resistance to cleaning up water pollution by setting strict, nationally uniform technical limits on pollution from sources that directly, or as a conduit, dumped pollution into rivers or wetlands. The law employed permitting, monitoring, and reporting systems for facilities’ discharges and established deadlines for treatment plants to eliminate 85 percent of conventional pollutants. The CWA reflected a new mentality that pollution should be prohibited unless authorized and that the national government should lead in standard setting. For these reasons, many state officials opposed the command-and-control approach that took away control of an issue long under their purview. On the other hand, the policy recognized the financial impact on states and localities by authorizing a construction grant program of several billion dollars to build and upgrade wastewater treatment facilities.22
No single person was as important to this work in Greater Washington as Norman Cole. Born in South Carolina in 1933, Cole grew up in Florida, where he later worked as a nuclear engineer for the navy during the 1950s. He and his wife moved to Fairfax in 1959, buying a house overlooking the Potomac and near a sanctuary for bald eagles that later became the Mason Neck National Wildlife Refuge. Cole was impressed with the undeveloped beauty of the Potomac’s shoreline and took a professional interest in water treatment after a “mile-long stinking mat of dead yellow and brown algae … came floating down river and blew in on our shore” during a house party in the late 1960s.23 Cole then joined local citizens to publicize research that found Fairfax had overloaded its sewage treatment plants by supporting rampant growth. They persuaded the Virginia State Water Control Board in June 1970 to impose a moratorium on new sewer hookups for three plants, thereby halting new development. But Northern Virginia builders persuaded the courts to overturn the ban and force the county to expand the system’s capacity and implement new technologies to accelerate the removal of pollutants. The results were dramatic, as Fairfax turned the worst sewer overload in the state into an example of what state-of-the-art technologies and political management could do.24
Cole’s advocacy soon garnered the attention of Governor Linwood Holton. Holton was a moderate Republican and the first member of his party to occupy Virginia’s governorship since Reconstruction. Although he did not start out as an environmentalist, Holton quickly enhanced the state’s commitment to cleaning up polluted waterways after taking a helicopter ride to witness the pollution that bubbled out from the Georgetown gap. His single most important decision in this regard was appointing Cole, a fellow Republican, as head of the State Water Control Board. The board had significant powers to shape local development through the approval or veto of sewage treatment plants, but it had rarely exercised its powers to curb growth, which had strong support in law, policy, and culture in Virginia. As an avid out-doorsman and maturing environmentalist, Cole used the agency’s powers to dramatic effect to upgrade Blue Plains in order to clean up the municipal and industrial wastes polluting the Potomac.25
In the early 1970s, the most egregious issue facing Blue Plains was an overburdening of the facility caused by the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC), which had for years exceeded its allotted capacity by nearly 50 percent while the other users—Fairfax and Loudoun Counties and Washington, D.C.—stayed within their limits.26 Cole moved swiftly to pressure the WSSC to rectify the situation but encountered a rather blasé attitude from his counterparts. Indeed, one of the agency’s officials reportedly approached Cole during negotiations for an interim treatment facility for the Maryland agency and asked, “Why are you trying to clean it up. It’s nothing but a sewer. That’s the way it is, that’s what it always will be. Why kid yourself?”27 Cole remained undeterred, urging the other users of Blue Plains to sue the WSSC to comply with guidelines set by the Potomac Enforcement Conference, a voluntary group of officials from state and local water agencies.28 His colleagues were reluctant to be adversarial, preferring a more diplomatic approach. Cole had none of it, writing in a letter, “I believe polluters and people who overload sewage plants should be put in jail.”29 Cole pressed ahead against the WSSC. In October 1971, the agency agreed to restrict its treatment capacity; however, it soon exceeded its new threshold as it granted over five hundred exceptions to a sewer moratorium between March 1972 and January 1973.30
The violations of the WSSC, along with rising public frustrations with water pollution cleanup, pushed the other users of Blue Plains to sue the agency under the CWA. Nine months later, the parties reached an out-of-court settlement that allocated capacity at Blue Plains and required each jurisdiction to develop a plan for disposing of leftover sludge. The agreement was signed on June 14, 1974, at a public ceremony with Maryland governor Marvin Mandel, Washington mayor Walter Washington, and EPA administrator Russell Train. The consent decree was a major achievement for the region that made it easier for politicians to sell the expensive work of improving wastewater treatment infrastructure to their constituents.31
Between 1974 and 1983, Blue Plains was upgraded. Its capacity was increased from 240 mgd to 309 mgd and the usage apportioned according to the terms of the consent decree.32 Advanced treatment, the highest level at the time, was incorporated through a process known as biological nutrient removal that fed sewage to large masses of bacteria and other microorganisms. Upgrading Blue Plains was the most prominent action taken in the Washington area to clean up the Potomac during the 1970s and early 1980s, at a cost of $1 billion.33 Indeed, improving wastewater treatment was the primary means by which states and localities throughout the United States addressed water pollution through the mid-1980s to comply with the CWA.34
Norman Cole, the leading power broker behind the upgrades to Blue Plains, continued his environmental work into the 1980s. This included the construction of a major treatment plant in the Occoquan watershed that helped Fairfax reduce its dependence on Blue Plains. The facility, later named after Cole, has won numerous awards over the past twenty years.35 Cole also went on to serve as an investigator and advisor after nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. In retrospect, Cole’s commitment to cleaning up the Potomac portrayed a sense of stewardship that transcended his own “backyard.” As one commentator noted, “He did what he did out of a deep concern for the safety and pleasure of his own children and out of a love of the outdoor life and a special affection for the Potomac.”36
While Cole and other public officials upgraded Blue Plains to support development, civic activists sought to curb new growth in the metropolitan area. The most prominent were a group of women known as the “sewer ladies.” The sewer ladies were raised in families with a strong sense of civic duty. Most were college-educated housewives with children, who combined their intellect, time, and concern about the future to advocate for strong curbs on development in order to protect the environment. Finally, each used precipitating events in their own proverbial backyards as a springboard to engage with environmental issues at a regional level.37
Among the hundreds of sewer ladies, three stood out. The first was Charlotte Gannett, the de facto leader of the group. After living for a while in Germany, Gannett returned with her family to the United States in 1971 and settled in Montgomery County. She soon became worried about rampant development, which had led to overcrowding in the school system and provoked an expensive wave of school building. Now that her children were adults, Gannett could focus on her activism full-time, cofounding the Montgomery Environmental Coalition in 1972 to focus on development issues and water pollution.38
The second was Enid Miles. Miles grew up on Long Island, New York, and earned a degree from Cornell University before moving to Montgomery County. There she got involved in civic efforts to limit the development of the Friendship Heights neighborhood and later joined the leadership of the Montgomery County Civic Federation, whose members tended to support compact development and environmental stewardship measures.39
The
