Rio's 2016 Olympics Have a Sewage Problem

Somewhere around 1996 I found myself in a very long, very skinny boat on the Occoquan Reservoir, a 2,100-acre drinking water impoundment in the relatively fancy pants Northern Virginia suburbs/exurbs of Washington, D.C. It was some or another national rowing championship and that was my thing in early-high school: traveling around the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic and going to battle—vomit-scale aerobic, physically agonizing battle—against collections of rich kid rowing teams from places like, say, the Northern Virginia suburbs. It was weird.

What made this event especially weird was that we were forbidden to touch the water. There'd be no celebatory dunkings and if you did get ejected from a boat, a real thing that happened sometimes, you weren't to take it lightly. Don't put your hands into the water and, for love of god, don't even think about putting the stuff around your mouth or any open wounds. Feathering my oar back and forth through the first couple inches of water as we waited our turn to race I had to note that the water was red, a perplexingly pure shade of drying-blood red.

Occoquan Reservoir still has problems a decade and a half later, and it points well enough toward the larger water problems of most any urban and near-urban area. What with our cars and sewers and lawn chemicals, people are very dirty, dirty enough that runoff from human population centers is an endemic environmental problem. You can see it in the chemical foam crowning the Potomac's Great Falls, the oxygen-bereft Gowanus Canal, or the leaked toxic solvent that's left the Charleston, WV metropolitan area paranoid of its faucets for likely years to come.

Meanwhile, Rio de Janeiro's Guanabara Bay, set to host a share of the 2016 Olympics on-water events, including (gah) marathon swimming, remains something of an open sewer, recieving daily over two-thirds of the city's untreated sewage. On Friday, IOC co-ordination commission chair Nawal el Moutawakel attempted to set some athlete anxiety to rest, assuring that the city will have major new sewage treatment investments in place by next year, and the water, described as "absolutely disgusting" by sailing Olympian Ian Barker, will be fully safe by 2016.

According to the Associated Press, one sailor experienced with the water reported seeing an entire horse carcass floating through the area, an island in a steady stream of wooden debris, plastic, and things less immediately visible, like high-levels fecal coliform bacteria. It's that last bit that's the calling card of untreated sewage, which in Rio tumbles unfettered into a lagoon bordering Olympic Park.

Nonetheless, Olympic officials have promises in hand. The water will be safe. It should be comforting, but it's not, for the simple reason that it took a huge worldwide sporting event to make it happen (if it does). It did not take a surrounding city of 6.3 million full-time citizens or an ecosystem effectively in exile. In one way it points to the effectiveness of an advocacy strategy centered around public shaming, but also to the ecological problems of economies and industries just now reaching (and hopefully reaching past) the "flaming river" stage of their industrial and urban development.