The Fight For A Swimmable Harbor in Baltimore

The following is a transcript of Public Health On Call’s special episode, The Fight For a Swimmable Harbor in Baltimore.

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[Show Intro, Joshua Sharfstein: Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today’s leading health challenges. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to PublicHealthQuestion@jhu.edu. That’s PublicHealthQuestion@jhu.edu for future podcast episodes.]

[Archive clip, crowd cheering: Three… Two… One! <splash followed by underwater bubbling> Whoo! Whoo! <excited chatter>]

Lindsay Smith Rogers: On June 23, 2024, a bunch of people jumped off of Bond Street Wharf in Baltimore’s Fells Point neighborhood, right into the city’s harbor. The Baltimore Banner news outlet ran a story later that day with the headline, “More than 150 people swam in the Inner Harbor today. Everyone’s OK.”

For those of us who live in Baltimore, the idea of swimming in the Harbor is a little absurd. The Harbor is kind of like a highway for massive ships to bring goods in and out of one of the nation’s largest cargo ports. Earlier in 2024, the world saw just how impactful the Harbor is when a cargo ship called the Dali slammed into the Key Bridge killing six people and closing off access to the port for nearly three months. There is a lot of ship traffic in and out of Baltimore’s harbor.

It’s also been seen as kind of a dumping ground. Although regulations now prevent corporations from expelling chemicals into the water, the city backs up to the Harbor, and during rainstorms, all the stuff that accumulates on city sidewalks and streets floods into storm drains and gets flushed directly into the water. Stuff like cigarette butts, plastic bottles, oil that drips from cars, chemicals from lawns—a bunch of it ends up in the Harbor.

Baltimore is also home to miles of very, very old sewer pipes. Like many centuries-old cities, its infrastructure is aging and now being stressed by climate change with bigger and more frequent rain events. When pipes leak or even crack and burst, sewage flows directly into the Harbor. Let me just say that again: Sewage flows directly into the Harbor.

All of this to say: Baltimore is a city on the water, but its Inner Harbor has not been thought of as a place for recreational swimming or fishing or even boating if you’re not in a craft that sits well above the surface of the water. 

So, that Harbor Splash event in June was quite the spectacle. Elected officials, scientists, environmental activists, and Baltimore residents were among the 150-some people to participate. It was the city’s first public swim in the Harbor in more than 40 years, and it took nearly a decade and a half to pull off. The story of how Baltimore’s harbor became swimmable is one that’s uniquely Baltimore:  It involved a lot of people, a lot of big dreams, a little bit of quirk, and a whole lot of science.

I’m Lindsay Smith Rogers and in this special episode of Public Health On Call, we’re going to look at four ways Baltimore activists, coalitions, agencies, scientists, and civilians came together to fight for a swimmable and fishable harbor: Getting people’s attention, collecting data, mitigating sewage, and battling against trash. Let’s listen.

[boat horn blares]

Lindsay Smith Rogers: The Baltimore Harbor is actually part of the Patapsco River, which flows into Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. The Harbor is a confluence point of that brackish river and the Jones Falls, a fresh water source that starts nearly 18 miles inland and flows down into the Inner Harbor.

It’s a natural body of water, but in 1830 Congress approved funding to dredge the entrance channels. And in 1852, the channels were deepened to accommodate larger ships. And by the Civil War, the Harbor had a channel six miles long and averaging 23 and a half feet deep. This dredging, while transforming Baltimore into one of busiest port cities on the eastern seaboard, took its toll on the environment.

Christopher Streb: I’m Christopher Streb. I’m an ecological engineer and a practice lead at Biohabitats located here in Baltimore.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: It’s basically just a giant channel of water that backs up into, like, a sea wall, right?

Christopher Streb: In order to create a port, you needed to get your boats close to the, you know, the land. And so what they would do is, you know, they would dredge out the bottom sediments so they could bring bigger ships carrying more things in. And they would sidecast that sediment right into the marsh system. And then in order to hold that sediment in place, they built these vertical walls.

If you imagine, like the Inner Harbor, you know, like, by the Jones Falls, that was probably only ten to 12 feet deep back before it was developed. So it was shallower water. If you think about the volume, then really the Jones Falls is providing a lot more fresh water relative to the volume of that basin. But, you know, you triple the depth of the basin, it’s likely a saltier environment than it used to historically be.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Changing the natural architecture, and therefore the chemistry of the Harbor water, was disruptive for the ecosystem. Then you add in a couple of centuries’ worth of hazardous waste and trash dumping, pollution, and a general disregard for the Harbor as anything but a highway for boats and ships, and you wind up where we were in 2010, which is when the Healthy Harbor Initiative was first announced. More on that in a moment.

Adam Lindquist: I grew up in upstate New York, in an area around the Finger Lakes which was just full of the most beautiful waterfalls and swimming holes. And so when I moved away from my hometown and moved to new places like Baltimore, it really struck me that the waterway was really seen as off limits or toxic. Like, even if you touched it, it would melt the flesh off of your hand. People literally believe that. It’s not true, but people believe it to this day that the water is so polluted you can’t touch it.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: That’s Adam Lindquist, the vice president of the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore.

Adam Lindquist: The Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore is a phenomenal organization that works in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, really taking care of and promoting our waterfront. So, we provide core services like landscaping, cleaning, and hospitality services, but we even go above and beyond those core services to things like our Healthy Harbor Initiative, which is working to clean up the Baltimore Harbor to make it safe for swimming and fishing.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Lindquist joined the Partnership in 2011, about a year after the city and a coalition of groups made an announcement that their goal was to make the Harbor swimmable and fishable by 2020. It was a moonshot. 

[Archive clip, first documentary narrator: Baltimore…located on the Patapsco River is the largest city in Maryland and one of the oldest cities in the United States. Baltimore Town was founded in 1729…]

Lindsay Smith Rogers: This is from the Healthy Harbor documentary, a 30-minute video that Lindquist produced in 2012 with a nonprofit called the Living Classrooms Foundation about the Healthy Harbor movement.

[Archive clip, second documentary narrator: The Healthy Harbor Initiative is a plan to make the water fishable and swimmable by the year 2020. It is also a way to have a community, better environment, and a better place to live for all of us.]

Lindsay Smith Rogers: When Lindquist first started working with the Waterfront Partnership, a big part of the initiative was just getting people’s attention. So they started looking for ecological projects that could involve the Baltimore community and help people reenvision what a healthy harbor might look like.

Adam Lindquist: I think, early, early days, we were really looking at how are we, a comparatively, like, small nonprofit—what are we going to do to really improve water quality? So I actually helped write the Healthy Harbor plan, because I had this experience in environmental planning, and then we were looking for things we might try. The first thing we tried were a floating wetlands. So the Baltimore Harbor has no natural shoreline anymore. So if you want to bring back wetlands, you have to get creative.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Christopher Streb, the ecological engineer, was one of the people who spearheaded that project. 

Christopher Streb: This was really early on in that technology. We were creating these little floating platforms that were very DIY, and the buoyancy of those platforms was from plastic bottles collected from the Harbor itself—think of that as the inner core. And then we put kind of a really high surface area of PET, polyethylene. It was made out of recycled plastic bottles. It’s a panel. And there was a panel on the top and the bottom. And then we had, like, netting that we then pinched around the perimeter with cedar one by one—or two by two, I can’t remember what size the material was—and we just screwed it together. So it’s like a sandwich, or maybe like a Hot Pocket of plastic bottles. And then we just cut holes in, and then the plants are grown just hydroponically.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Streb and his team at Biohabitats worked with students from Living Classrooms, a local nonprofit, to build the wetlands. Not only were the youth learning about trash in the Harbor, they were learning about the natural environment, like what native plants might have been here centuries ago.

Christopher Streb: This is a brackish environment, you know, so we have pretty limited plant palette. So primarily we were using Spartina flora and we also planted some Spartina patens, Hibiscus—one of the only flowering plants in a brackish environment.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Streb said that the floating wetlands were only about 2,000 square feet. But they thrived.

Christopher Streb: That deep water, that dredged channel condition, you know, what we’re missing in the Harbor complex are really areas for smaller fish and smaller organisms that represent kind of the base of the food web. It becomes like a little reef. And all the roots begin to suspend down into the water column. And on those roots, you end up getting various invertebrates, and mussels and barnacles and whatnot will begin to attach to the bottom of the structure, and they’re providing some water quality benefit, you know, so doing a little filter feeding.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: The project ended in 2016 because all those barnacles and mussels were actually pulling the structure down too far underwater by that time. But Streb said it was a great proof of concept, and groups like the National Aquarium are now replicating it in other areas around the Harbor. But by themselves, the wetlands weren’t enough. The footprint of the floating wetlands was minuscule in this massive harbor.

Christopher Streb: We’re not going to restore the nutrient balance of the Harbor by uptaking all of the available nitrogen and phosphorus with these floating wetlands. But, you know, we are definitely providing a habitat that’s been missing.

I call them ecological prosthetics. They don’t really perform all the functions that a true marsh does, but they provide some of the functions of a marsh system.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: They did serve a vital purpose: they got people’s attention. They were these beautiful little floating islands with birds and grasses, and they were parked in areas of the waterfront that received a lot of foot traffic.

Another one of Waterfront Partnership’s early projects involved oysters. Here’s Adam Lindquist again.

Adam Lindquist: We started something with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation—we call it the Great Baltimore Oyster Partnership—to grow oysters off of piers and docks all around the Baltimore waterfront. And oysters, we get them from a lab and they’re little baby oysters known as spat, and we grow them in cages for nine months, and that gives them a huge head start on life.

When we designed that program, we said, “we’re going to maximize volunteer engagement.” So we make sure that our cages are all adopted by different companies around the waterfront. And on the weekends, we have big volunteer events where people have to come out and help us take care of these baby oysters. We call it oyster gardening, but really, we’re not gardening these oysters for eating. They’re for restoration purposes. They’re really out there to provide habitat and filter pollution.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Projects like floating wetlands and baby oyster nurseries are great opportunities to call attention to water restoration. While they may not by themselves be transforming the entire Harbor’s water quality, they galvanize science, people, and technology, and they’re great moments for education. What’s also important to a giant restoration effort like this? Data. Lots and lots of data.

Alice Volpitta: My name is Alice Volpitta, and I’m your Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper with Blue Harbor Baltimore.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Can you tell us a bit about what a waterkeeper does?

Alice Volpitta: A waterkeeper is sort of like a water watchdog. The international Waterkeeper Alliance spans over 300 different water bodies throughout the world. On behalf of our membership, I enforce the Clean Water Act to protect and restore our local waterways. And then Blue Water Baltimore is the organization that houses the Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: The Clean Water Act was enacted by Congress in 1972. It’s the piece of legislation that made it illegal to dump pollutants into bodies of water. As Waterkeeper, Volpitta works with Blue Water Baltimore to monitor the health of the Patapsco River.

Alice Volpitta: Since 2010, Blue Water Baltimore has been operating a water quality monitoring program in our local waterways to figure out how sick or healthy our waterways are. So we take measurements of things like nutrient content, dissolved oxygen levels, bacteria, and we score those measurements according to the Mid-Atlantic Tributary Assessment Coalition’s protocols.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Volpitta and her team not only take regular measurements, they translate those data points into recommended actions for organizations and agencies including Baltimore City.

Alice Volpitta: It’s something called the eco-check mechanism. And we can use that set of parameters to figure out, ok, what does a five-milligram-per-liter dissolved oxygen level really mean for water health? How can we translate these numbers into actionable indicators to tell us where we’ve gone wrong and where we’re moving in the right direction. So we take all of that information, all of those scores, and then we advocate for the policies and solutions on land that will measurably improve water quality.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: The overall health of a body of water is made up of a lot of different measurements. But there are a few that stand out.

Alice Volpitta: People will get hung up on the most obvious metric of water health, the one that is most closely related to human health, and that’s bacteria.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: This is something you’ll hear again and again: that the quality of water in the Harbor is closely linked with bacteria levels. Before we talk about why there’s certain bacteria in the Harbor, it’s important to explain exactly what we mean when we say there’s bacteria in the Harbor.

Eric Schott: I’m Eric Schott. I’m an associate research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. I work at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology right down on the Inner Harbor in Baltimore.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: When we talk about the health of the Baltimore Harbor, a lot of people tend to use bacteria levels as an indicator. So what are we talking about when we talk about bacteria?

Eric Schott: Bacteria, they sort of run the world. They’re the thing we don’t see that actually makes everything work. Bacteria are the things that recycle carbon and nitrogen from waste products to what we can use. They are the foundation of ecology, in fact. They’re just… They’re kind of amazing. When people say bacteria, we usually think of bacteria in the context of an infection or something that makes you sick, but most bacteria are incredibly beneficial. In the Harbor, when people talk about bacteria, they’re really talking about what’s called a fecal indicator bacteria. These are bacteria associated with sewage that don’t actually hurt you but their presence tells you that there’s probably sewage there.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: So, to be clear, it’s not the bacteria itself that can be so harmful to humans.

Eric Schott: It’s the other things that you have to worry about that comes along with them if they’re sewage, like viruses or parasites or, you know, disease-causing microbes. There are so many possible human pathogens that could come out in sewage that you can’t test for them all. So you find something that’s a good proxy, find something that’s a good marker for the likelihood that you have something else going on.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: So how does so much sewage wind up in our waterways?

Natalie Exum: My name is Natalie Exum, I’m an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. My work focuses on the nexus between these two fields—between environment and how water moves through our environment and through our pipes, and connecting that to public health and how that infrastructure is actually public health infrastructure, and it’s actively keeping us healthy and safe on a regular basis, even though we may not appreciate that every time we go to turn on our taps in the morning.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Exum has done a lot of work in Baltimore. Like many older cities, its infrastructure is struggling to keep up with modern demands and climate change.

Natalie Exum: If we could take a slice of our road, what you would see—there’s a lot of things under there—but you should be putting these sewer lines on the very bottom, because yeah, they crack. We certainly have very old ones. Sometimes they’re made of wood because that’s how they were first laid in the early 1900s.

When we talk about sanitary sewer overflows or combined sewer overflows, what we’re talking about is, there are always separate pipes, pipes that take your flushed toilet water or the water that’s coming out of your home or apartment, down under the street to a wastewater treatment plant. That is always in place. The challenge is when there is potential inflows from stormwater. And these systems sometimes have had that mixing, right? And they usually don’t mix when there’s not a lot of rain, for example. But if there is more inputs into those sewer lines, then what you do have is you kind of have these outflows that are designed to prevent backflows into your basement, but then they just kind of shoot off into creeks or into water bodies like the Harbor.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Sanitary sewer overflows, which can occur when there are big rain events, are happening more and more often with these very old pipes and with climate change bringing larger storms. They don’t just overflow into the rivers and creeks that feed the Baltimore Harbor—they can also occur throughout the city, even into people’s homes, which is incredibly dangerous. Sewage water, as we’ve learned, contains all sorts of pathogens.

To fix this requires replacing the piping, inch by inch. Which is a traffic and logistical nightmare that many city dwellers are familiar with.

Natalie Exum: There is a lot of infrastructure work going on. The improvements that are needed are, you know, putting up lots of orange cones, digging up the ground, replacing those very small sanitary sewers with larger ones that are disconnected from the storm water system. And that is not just a Baltimore problem. Every old city is kind of clawing its way back from that.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: It’s also incredibly expensive.

Natalie Exum: The challenge here is, people don’t like to pay for wastewater, right? I’m kind of happy to pay for clean water coming into my house, like I know I need that; it’s nice to shower in that and drink it. But people really don’t like to pay for wastewater infrastructure. So this is such expensive work, and oftentimes get deprioritized over the years just with cash shortages.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: It’s important to note here that the city is currently under a consent decree with the Environmental Protection Agency that started back in 2002. Protecting the Harbor is a key benefit of replacing all of this infrastructure but, importantly, so is preventing sewage from backing up into people’s homes.

We reached out to the city and the Department of Public Works several times and got no response. But according to a 2024 Healthy Harbor report by the Waterfront Partnership, the city and the county deserve some credit. The report states that DPW has been, quote, repairing and upgrading key portions of the city’s sewer infrastructure, end quote, and has built two storage tanks at one of Baltimore’s main treatment plants. The tanks help keep sewage and rainwater from flowing into the waterways that lead to the Harbor. As a result, the report states, quote, sewer overflows into the Baltimore Harbor have dropped by 84% or more than 240 million gallons over the last four years, end quote. 

Waterkeeper Alice Volpitta says that water quality samples have notably improved.

Alice Volpitta: Over the course of the past 13 years, since we’ve been taking monitoring samples from our different locations throughout the tidal and nontidal waterways around Baltimore, we’ve seen a really encouraging trend, which is that bacteria levels in general are getting better in our local waterways. And at the spots where they’re not actually getting better, they’re pretty much staying the same because they’re already good.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: In addition to bacteria levels, there are many other data points that Volpitta and her team look to to determine the health of the waterways, including nitrogen, phosphorus and chlorophyll levels, and other indicators. 

Some of these are what are called resiliency factors. Whenever it rains, anywhere, stuff gets washed from land into the water, whether it’s a harbor or a river or a lake or an ocean. For 24-48 hours after a big rain, stormwater runoff can disrupt the level of chemicals and compounds depending on what’s been flushed in. How quickly a body of water can return to a healthy state after a big rainfall is a big part of understanding not only the overall health of that water body, but the health of the surrounding environment.

Alice Volpitta: We still have a long way to go to create a greener, spongier city that isn’t so heavily impacted every time it rains.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Another thing that winds up in the Harbor after it rains? Trash. Lots and lots and lots of trash.

John Kellett: My name is John Kellett. I am the inventor for the water wheel-powered trash interceptor, which is commonly known as the trash wheel, and the iconic one is Mr. Trash Wheel.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Mr. Trash Wheel is a self-proclaimed social media celebrity and a Baltimore landmark. He kind of looks like a snail with very large water wheels and a gaping mouth, and huge, googly eyes. The googly eyes, by the way, are not actually necessary for the technology… Adam Lindquist, ever charged with getting people’s attention, added them for flair.

Adam Lindquist: I named the device Mr. Trash Wheel and with a set of giant googly eyes that I built in my basement, we brought John Kellet’s invention to life, giving it a personality on social media and creating kind of a massive cult following of thousands of fans out there now.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Mr. Trash Wheel was installed in the spring of 2014 and he is such a Baltimore thing. He’s part quirky art installation, part advocacy piece, and—most importantly—an incredibly hardworking piece of technology. John Kellett invented the trash wheel interceptors after years of walking to work along the Baltimore Harbor and being discouraged by what he saw.

John Kellett: Particularly after it rained, you’d have all the trash that’s on the streets, the alleys, the parking lots, the highways, all got washed down into the storm drains and into the small waterways, and then into the main tributaries to Baltimore Harbor. And it would come down and make a huge mess out of the Harbor. At some points, it looked like you could literally walk across the Harbor on the trash. It was hard to see the water for the trash.

You know, I’d be walking to work and I’d hear the visitors go, “Ugh, this harbor is disgusting.” It was always the same words: “Ugh, this harbor is disgusting.”

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Kellett is an environmental scientist. He isn’t an engineer, by the way.

John Kellett: I grew up on a farm, so engineering was sort of a, you know, necessity. Always needed to problem solve, always needed to fix equipment, always needed to come up with new ideas to address things that came up.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: The trash wheel technology was actually inspired by a historic piece of Baltimore machinery: The water wheel.

John Kellett: One of the reasons Baltimore was created where it was, is because it had a source of power from the rivers flowing into the Harbor. It had a good natural harbor, but it also had flowing waterways that were used to power mills. Mills made everything from textiles to lumber to flour and grain, so those mills used the flow of the river to turn water wheels that power their factories. So it wasn’t a new idea to harness that power to do some work. It’s just a new application to pick up trash.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: There’s actually a fleet of four trash wheel interceptors located at key points in the Harbor.

John Kellett: They’re positioned strategically at the mouths of the waterways, the tributaries that flow into the Harbor. And all the trash that’s being washed down by the stormwater runoff has to pass that spot before it scatters around the Harbor. So having the trash wheel positioned at that location is sort of like a gate on the barn door. You know, it keeps the animals in and keeps the trash in.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: The current washes trash into a sort of floating funnel created by containment nets. The water wheels on the sides of the interceptor power large rakes that then pull the trash up out of the water and onto a conveyor belt. From there, the trash is dumped into a waiting receptacle. The river flow helps push the water wheels to power the interceptor, but there are also solar panels installed on top.

John Kellett: It doesn’t move fast, but it’s got an incredible amount of power which allows it to lift even big logs from the river and allows it to lift a lot of trash at a time. It can pick up so much trash that it can fill a big dumpster, a big roll-off dumpster, in about an hour and a half.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: When there hasn’t been rain, the flow of trash is more like a trickle and it can take a while to fill up a dumpster. Kellett says there’s video monitoring to alert the team when one dumpster gets full and it’s time for a swap. But in big rain events, the trash is more like a deluge.

John Kellett: When we have a big, hard rain we’re going to be changing dumpsters a lot of the time, so our crew will be out there doing the work. We’ve filled as many as 12 dumpsters in one day. 

Lindsay Smith Rogers: The volume of trash can say a lot about the overall litter problem of the city. But the content is important too.

John Kellett: One of the things we saw was when we first put it in was there was a huge amount of styrofoam coming down the river. Restaurants were using takeout containers that were Styrofoam. They were using Styrofoam cups. You know, after a rain in front of the machine, it looks like a glacier of white styrofoam coming down.

People used the data—the number of Styrofoam pieces that we’re picking up—to lobby and garner support for a styrofoam ban in Baltimore City and then in the state of Maryland. It’s reduced the amount of Styrofoam by like 80%.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Now, Kellett says, plastic bottles and cigarette butts make up much of the trash piles.

John Kellett: It looks like mulch when it’s coming up the conveyer, but when you dig your hands into it, you realize it’s just thousands and thousands of cigarette butts coming down the river.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Kellett says the trash wheel data has been a big asset in creating upstream change—literally.

John Kellett: So now we’re working on a bottle bill so that we don’t have as many plastic bottles coming down. And the state of Maryland has used that trash wheel data to advocate for anti-smoking littering. We’re able to use the machine to inform policy and legislation. I don’t think that stopping and collecting this trash from the stormwater outfalls is the ultimate answer. The ultimate answer is to do upstream efforts that keep it from getting in the water to begin with.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Floating wetlands and oyster nurseries, collecting and reporting on data, replacing miles of old sewer pipes, and inventing quirky machines that scoop trash out of the Harbor have all been pieces of this larger effort to make the Harbor swimmable and fishable. So, where are we now?

[Archive clip, first newscaster: Well this summer, 150 people jumped into the Inner Harbor for the first Harbor Splash, remember that?

Second newscaster: Yeah, oh I saw them do it! The Waterfront Partnership’s Healthy Harbor report shows that many areas of the Harbor are indeed safe for swimming.]

Lindsay Smith Rogers: In October 2024, the Waterfront Partnership released its annual Healthy Harbor report card. Here’s Adam Lindquist at that event.

[Archive clip: <crowd applauding> Adam Lindquist: I am so excited to be here today to release the 2024 Healthy Harbor report card. This has been a long time in the making. For the past 15 years, the Waterfront Partnership has talked about creating a swimmable and fishable Baltimore Harbor. And this year with Harbor Splash and Katie Pumphrey’s swim, that vision is starting to turn into a reality. 

So, how did the Harbor do? Let’s take a look. What you’ll notice right away is that ecosystem health stays pretty consistent throughout the Harbor. It’s nearly all C’s. That’s because ecosystem health indicators that we monitor change very slowly over months or even over years. Bacteria levels, on the other hand, which are what we monitor for recreational health are highly variable. You’ll see scores ranging from F all the way up to A-plus, and that’s because bacteria levels are also highly localized and can fluctuate dramatically from day to day.

Because bacteria levels change so frequently, the University of Maryland does not recommend providing an overall grade for bacteria in the Baltimore Harbor. However, for ecosystem health, we do have an overall grade, which is a C. That means the Harbor can and does support a diverse array of wildlife, including fish, crabs, and oysters and more, but it lacks resiliency. That’s why it’s critical we continue to reduce stormwater runoff, upgrade our wastewater treatment plants, and improve water quality in our neighborhoods and our streams so that we can have a more resilient Baltimore Harbor. The good news is that many of our indicators are on the right track.]

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Lindquist goes on to say that some of those indicators, like nitrogen, have gone from an F-grade to a C just in the last five years. But while there’s definite progress, and while a C may be a passing grade elsewhere, there’s still a lot of work to be done. It’s also important to point out that while parts of the Harbor may be getting As most of the time in terms of recreational safety, it’s not enough for some organizations to sign off on the term “swimmable harbor.”

While almost everyone we talked to for this podcast jumped in during the Harbor Splash event, Blue Water Baltimore did not. Here’s Alice Volpitta again.

Alice Volpitta: Blue Water Baltimore doesn’t make specific recommendations about whether or not the Harbor is swimmable on any given day. Part of the reason why we don’t do that is because the current state of technology to help us understand bacteria levels is not yet at the point where we can say with assurance, like, yes, go swim today, right now, or no, don’t swim. And part of that is that, you know, swimming in an urban waterway is an inherently risky activity, and sometimes it’s very low risk and sometimes it’s higher risk. But the reason why I say it’s inherently risky is because you never know when one of those pipes may burst upstream, one of those pipes carrying sewage.

Blue Water Baltimore’s position is that what we really need to be doing is acting quicker to give us more swimmable days that are disconnected from whether or not it’s rained. So the idea of a swimmable harbor is incredible, and we’re all striving for that same thing. I think the swim event was a call to action. So instead of seeing it as the finish line, I would love for people to see it as a vision of what can be, more days than not.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: People may have jumped into the Harbor at the Splash event and kicked around for a few minutes. But no one was spending hours and hours in the water. In fact, there’s only one person last summer who did.

Katie Pumphrey is a visual artist and an ultramarathon open water swimmer, and in June 2024, she became the first person to swim from the Bay Bridge in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay to the Inner Harbor of Baltimore—a distance of 24 miles. Pumphrey has swum ultramarathons around the world. She’s done the English Channel twice, she’s done the Catalina Channel and around the island of Manhattan. But her Baltimore swim was something truly special.

Katie Pumphrey: My big goal in the swim was to spread that message that we are reaching a swimmable harbor, and that milestone should be celebrated and acknowledged.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Pumphrey has to consider a lot of variables in open water swimming, from weather to air and water temperatures, currents and tide, boat traffic, and, of course, water quality.

Katie Pumphrey: Waterfront Partnership has been testing the water more than any other organization and testing the water also more often than any swimming area in Maryland. And, you know, they’re working with organizations that are studying this data. And I am an open water swimmer. I trust their data, and I trust science and I trust experts in water quality.

Lindsay Smith Rogers: Pumphrey completed her swim in 13 hours and 54 minutes. She finished when her hand touched the seawall at the Harborplace Ampitheater in the Inner Harbor.

[Archive clip: <crowd cheering> First newscaster: Mission accomplished for a marathon swimmer and Baltimore native, Katie Pumphrey, the first person to ever swim from Sandy Point State Park to the Inner Harbor. What an accomplishment!

Second Newscaster: It is just incredible.

Katie Pumphrey: I’m gonna drink a lot of water <Katie laughs> and celebrate more with my crew and my family. <crowd cheering>]

Lindsay Smith Rogers: All along the shoreline were friends, family, news outlets, organizations like the Waterfront Partnership—even Mr. Trash Wheel was there. It was a major moment both for Pumphrey and for the city.

[Recording clip, Lindsay Smith Rogers: And what, what is the message that you gave that day?]

Katie Pumphrey: I think that change is, change is a good thing, right? And progress is possible. I think that’s kind of the big message. Also that Baltimore is an awesome city. And let’s not underestimate what we can do. I think that goes for our water, that goes for our city, that goes for our community, and that goes for the human body, right? What can we do in sports? What can we do in science? And what can we do all together? And how does that message get bigger and bigger and more inspiring? I think when you have the more voices behind it and the more people celebrating.

The way that Baltimore came out and cheered for me and my team was incredible, but I think that was also people rooting for Baltimore, which is really great. And Baltimore should be rooted for. It’s not a finish line by any means. We still have more to go but Baltimore deserves to celebrate that huge win.

[triumphant music]

Lindsay Smith Rogers: It will take many more years of concerted efforts to truly restore Baltimore’s waterways. And while we probably can’t fully restore the Harbor to its natural state, we can do better. And then we have to remember that this work takes decades, and that protection and vigilance will be required in perpetuity. But it is possible. It requires people who believe it’s possible, and who are relentlessly applying science, activism, political will, and a little bit of Baltimore magic to the problem.

I’m Lindsay Smith Rogers, thanks for listening to this special episode of Public Health On Call.

[waves lapping, children playing]

This episode was written and produced by Lindsay Smith Rogers and mixed by JB Arbogast. Special thanks to Josh Sharfstein, Lymari Morales, and Melissa Hartman.

[Podcast Credits, Joshua Sharfstein: Public Health On Call is a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, produced by Joshua Sharfstein, Lindsay Smith Rogers, Stephanie Desmon, and Grace Fernandez Cecere. Audio production by JB Arbogast, Holly Cardinell, Spencer Greer, Matthew Martin, and Phillip Porter, with support from Chip Hickey. Distribution by Nick Moran. Production management by Catherine Ricardo. Social media run by Grace Fernandez Cecere. Analytics by Aliza Rosen. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send us an email to PublicHealthQuestion@jhu.edu. That's PublicHealthQuestion@jhu.edu for future podcast episodes. Thank you for listening.]