June Community Updates

June 2019 Community Updates

Watts up?

Watts Branch -- a drinking water source in crisis

Environmental leaders and public officials tour the degraded Watts Branch watershed

To the naked eye, Watts Branch is a quiet stream that meanders from Rockville, through Potomac and eventually joins the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay. But to environmentalists and local officials, it’s much more. It enters the Potomac River at the WSSC water filtration plant on River Road., making it the major source of drinking water for Montgomery and Prince Georges Counties. Millions of residents drink from the Watts Branch.

In late May, more than two dozen members of green groups, the County Executive, the Mayor of Rockville, the Department of Environmental Protection Director and staff, and the director and staff from the Montgomery Parks Department boarded a bus to tour Watts Branch and explore the challenges of protecting our drinking water from sediment pollution carried by stormwater runoff. The tour was sponsored by the Watts Branch Watershed Alliance, Conservation Montgomery, and the Montgomery County Group of the Sierra Club. About 38 people attended, including County Executive Marc Elrich, Rockville Mayor Bridget Newton. Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Director Adam Ortiz, Parks Director Mike Riley, and members of their staffs. Also in attendance was the Deputy Chief of Staff for Councilmember Tom Hucker; Chair of the Council Transportation and Environment Committee. Leaders from many environmental and other organizations were aboard the bus as part of a recently formed Green Environmental Network.

“Every drop of runoff from Watts Branch goes to the Potomac,” said Sylvia Tognetti of the Sierra Club Group of Montgomery County, who was part of the committee that organized the tour. “And everything we do in our Up County watersheds adds to our water treatment costs.”

Tour guide Ken Bawer, from the Watts Branch Watershed Alliance and the West Montgomery County Citizens Association, led the group to examples of various types of stormwater management facilities and problem areas. Watts Branch flows across jurisdictions and through various public, private, commercial and residential properties, under roads, through school sites and parks demonstrating the need to use all available tools to address runoff as well as to engage all sectors.

“Every stormwater source, including lawns, parking lots, and roads, provides opportunities for partnership to implement collaborative solutions,” said Diane Cameron, who worked with Bawer to map out a list of 29 sites that started at the vacant Rockville Village Center and ended at Glen Road in Potomac.

The Washington Suburban Sanitation Commission (WSSC) had a proposal, now on hold, to spend approximately $83 million to move their River Road intake pipe to the middle of the Potomac River (known as the proposed mid-river intake). The new intake had been recommended in a 2002 Source Water Assessment (SWA) to avoid runoff and high variability of water quality from the Watts Branch during storm events that present challenges for treatment, requiring increased use of chemicals to provide safe drinking water.

However, the runoff is not on hold, and the mid-river intake would not have addressed the increases in sediment loads from Seneca Creek watershed which enters the Potomac a few miles upstream. The SWA had recommended source water protection in addition to the new intake. It is of note that, years earlier, an important justification for establishing the Agricultural Reserve and maintaining rural low-density zoning in the Up County was to protect the public water supply.

“I hear more concern about Watts Branch than any other watershed these days, besides Sligo Creek,” said Elrich. “Looking at the map of Watts Branch, I see tentacles that lead to developed parts of the county where the problems are found.”

Sediment loads from all Up County watersheds as well as from the Monocacy River in Frederick require the addition of treatment chemicals at the Water Filtration Plant resulting in discharges much greater than the loads entering the facility, and in excess of the plant’s discharge permit under the Clean Water Act. A consent decree reached because of a lawsuit originally brought by the Potomac Riverkeepers, joined by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Maryland Department of the Environment requires WSSC to upgrade the capacity of the plant to handle solids, at an estimated cost of $157 million.

The group viewed a small portion of the Watts Branch watershed to observe the extent of the management challenge. The sites visited were generic examples of stormwater runoff problems since it is impossible to cover the entire watershed in just a few hours. Bawer pointed out sources of uncontrolled runoff between jurisdictions (City of Rockville and Montgomery County) and from various sites such as Public Schools, County Parks, private clubs, public roads, townhouse developments, and single-family lots. Many of the examples illustrated the need to break down departmental silos in order to more effectively address runoff problems.

For example, upstream of where the Watts Branch stream intersects with Ambleside Drive, erosion and lateral movement of the stream has exposed two sewer manholes. To stabilize these two short stretches of the stream and install liners in the pipes to prevent sewage leaks, , WSSC has built over half a mile of access road at an approximate cost of $750 million, and installed a temporary bridge. In between the exposed manholes there is approximately 2,000’ of eroded stream channel, which also expose Pepco power poles to the stream channel. Addressing these areas in between would reduce ongoing erosion and avoid significant future costs to repair aging infrastructure as well as reduce sediment at the drinking water intake, all of which is paid for on our water bills if not through the Water Quality Protection Charge. But WSSC only has a mandate to address exposed pipes to prevent or repair Sanitary Sewer Overflows (SSOs), which is required under a consent decree.

To stabilize Watts Branch, it will also be necessary to capture and treat stormwater runoff from the source, i.e., upstream roads and land areas that are the primary cause of stream erosion and sediment loads at the water intake. This will require the Montgomery County Departments of Environmental Protection, Parks, Transportation, as well as WSSC, the State Highway Administration and property owners to work together. An example of the results of this kind of collaboration is in the Breewood Tributary to Sligo Creek restoration project in Wheaton, which the County highlighted as part of the Chesapeake Bay Awareness Week celebrations.

Above: Group photo from the tour

Above: Andy Frank from the Montgomery Parks Department explains remediation taking place at the Glen Road section of Watts Branch.

Given the impact of Watts Branch on county drinking water, one suggestion was that the entire Watts Branch watershed become a Special Protection Area (SPA), like the Piney Branch Watershed (a subwatershed of Watts). But SPA’s require strict limits on impervious levels. Ginny Barnes, a long time Watts Branch activist who played a key role in the Piney Branch SPA designation and helped develop the Audubon Naturalist Society water quality monitoring program, has struggled for years to bring attention to the plight of this large and complex watershed.

“Watts Branch is a study in neglect” she said. “How can we treat our drinking water supply with such disregard and expect a healthy ecosystem or clean drinking water.”

“Trees are important for absorbing and dispersing stormwater, so we need to reign in PEPCO,” said Bawer. “They have cut down thousands of trees. We need a law that protects trees on small lots not covered by the Tree Canopy Law which are vital in absorbing stormwater.”

On the tour, it was suggested that a requirement that landowners control stormwater on their property is vital. A law exists to regulate grass height since it is considered a public nuisance if too high, so it could be argued that drinking water protection is a higher priority. The group saw large lawns with no stormwater treatment.

A need to change the County Code allowing conversion of lawns to naturalized areas was mentioned by Conservation Montgomery Board Member Diane Cameron. Organic lawn care can include a practice called Compost Amendment to Turf (CAT). CAT can turn an ordinary lawn essentially into a sponge able to capture 100% of a one-inch storm and infiltrate it. Unfortunately, CAT is now virtually illegal under Maryland's anti-phosphorus laws, which wrongly assumes that phosphorous in the compost will become mobilized in stormwater runoff. One expert on the tour noted that this is not true since soil becomes spongier and therefore will absorb more water. At several locations and with some coordination, DOT street work and the Green Streets rain gardens program or bioretention projects could done at the same time if equipment was already on site.

The group visited the Fallsreach Restoration Project by DEP which became ground zero for a debate on in-stream restorations and up-stream restorations (that is, keeping stormwater out of the stream to begin with). There were differences of opinion on the benefits of wet ponds vs. dry ponds. The group witnessed a natural stream valley with soil structure destroyed by running heavy equipment over it, thus altering important natural hydrology. Native plants had been killed, and in some areas topsoil had been removed along with stream invertebrates and the native seed bank. Non-native invasive plants that thrive in disturbed areas will take over as was certainly the case in the Upper Watts Branch restoration area in Rockville where Japanese stilt grass is invading quickly.

There is inadequate funding to monitor water quality in order to determine the effectiveness of this $2.6 million DEP project. Though the Green Streets program was not part of any alternative, the approach would keep stormwater out of the stream in the first place, or possibly reduce the footprint of such a project. Bawer said there is an increasing body of science that shows that in-stream restorations are ineffective.

Members of the group expressed appreciation for the valuable insight, discussion, exchange of ideas, and differing views during the tour, especially at the two "walking" sites where Doug Marshall from DEP and Andy Frank from the Parks Department shared their expertise.

The effort to apply stormwater solutions in the future builds on the work done over the decades by DEP staff and contractors, Parks Stewardship staff, and the City of Rockville, along with citizen scientists and advocates. One goal is to continue the community dialogue and planning based on the combined experience of advocates and public officials. “With a common goal of watershed health in mind, the respectful exchange of different ideas, strategies, and priorities will be key to our success,” said Bawer.

Climate change predictions for our area are already producing more intense storm events with larger precipitation amounts. There is no time to waste in capturing stormwater runoff at its source before it reaches the stream and tributaries. Although it may be too late to avoid the cost of upgrading the Water Filtration Plant, we need to ask: what would $240 million, or even just $83 million would buy if invested in nature-based solutions that provide multiple benefits? In addition to protecting and preventing further degradation of water quality, these would sequester carbon, increase resilience to climate change by reducing floods from the increases in intense storms, reduce the urban heat island affect, and improve quality of life.

Watts Branch is a historical legacy. Much of our knowledge about rivers and streams comes from Luna Leopold, a pioneer in the field of fluvial geomorphology, (how water shapes and is shaped by the landscape). He lived nearby and over a 41-year period beginning in 1953, he and colleagues began to record changes in a tributary of Watts Branch, as it transitioned from primarily agriculture to a residential and urbanized watershed. In summarizing three decades of observations he noted that overbank flows increased from two to seven per year as the number of houses increased from 140 to 2060. He observed a widening of stream beds and changes in composition of the materials transported by stream water.

As erosion and flooding has carried away trees used as markers, sewer manholes became benchmarks for observing the movement of stream channels. Given the existence of this long-term data set, Tognetti suggested it would be an ideal watershed in which to develop new, effective restoration practices, and demonstrate what can be done in a deteriorating urban watershed. In other words, as suggested by Bawer, “a total Watts Branch watershed remediation project could become a national model, just as the Ag Reserve is a national model for protecting farmland.”

Article compiled by Ken Bawer, Sylvia Tognetti and Ginny Barnes. Special thanks to the Watts Branch Tour Committee: Ken Bawer, Sylvia Tognetti, Ginny Barnes, Diane Cameron, Annita Seckinger and Caren Madsen

Find a full set of photos of the Watts Branch Watershed Tour at this link. Photos by Alan Bowser.

Clockwise from left:

Tour leader Ken Bawer
DEP's Doug Marshall (center) speaks at the Fallsreach restoration project
Rockville Mayor Bridget Newman and Scott Fosler from the Audubon Naturalist Society look at the Glen Road section of the watershed.
Along the tour, a sign of remediation for an ailing stream.

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