Fs and Ds On Baltimore's 'Healthy Harbor Report Card'

BALTIMORE (WJZ) -- The goal making Baltimore's harbor clean enough to go swimming in, still has a long way to go.

At least that's what the grades are showing in the annual Healthy Harbor Report Card.

Overall, the harbor is not safe to swim in. But backers of cleaner water are still seeing signs of improvement.

The harbor gets a grade of "F." Rivers feeding into the harbor, D minus.

The report grades the health of the Baltimore Harbor, the Patapsco River, the Jones Falls and the Gwynns Falls.

The Healthy Harbor Report Card for 2016 might not seem to contain much good news, but "we've seen less sewage in the Baltimore Harbor in 2016 than in previous years," says Healthy Harbor director Adam Lindquist. "Meaning the water was safer for human contact."

Raw sewage from broken lines are a focus of repairs.

"It's possible we're seeing the impacts of those repairs, but we also had less rainfall in 2016," Lindquist says.

2016 Healthy Harbor Report Card

And rain is a driver of sewage spills. You could see it today in the harbor. Along with the trash that washes off the streets. But that also reduced in 2016. At the Mr. Trash Wheel collection site, the amount collected dropped by 76 tons.

And then there is the silver lining across the harbor beyond Locust Point.

"Parts of the harbor, especially over by Fort McHenry, are swimmable a good part of the year, so that's exciting," says Laurie Schwartz, of Blue Water Baltimore. "Because it's often when it rains that bacteria flows into the harbor, so for areas that don't have outflows that bring in storm water, the harbor is pretty clean."

Blue Water Baltimore conducts the monitoring for the report card program. More than 300 volunteer hours were spent collecting 587 samples from 49 sites resulting in 15,353 individual data points, which experts then analyzed to produce the scores.

There is hope the harbor will get even cleaner when work is finished at the Back River Sewage Treatment Plant, where a dislodged underground pipe has created a 10-mile back up of sewage.

"We're in essence going to be reducing 80 percent plus of the sedentary sewer overflow volume," says Rudy Chow, Baltimore's Department of Public Works director. "It's going to make a huge difference.

That major repair won't be completed until 2021, however.

Those behind the Healthy Harbor Report Card have set 2020 as the date they hope to see water clean enough to swim in.

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