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 public health question at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hey listeners, it's Nancy Smith-Rogers.

Today, the January 26th sewage spill in the Potomac River. Environmental scientist Natalie Exam

returns to the podcast to talk about one of the largest sewage spills in history, how the

impacts may continue long into the spring and summer, and the larger public health story of

aging infrastructure and how we live alongside these fragile bodies of water. Let's listen.

Natalie Exum, welcome back to public health on call. How are you? Great. Good to be with you,

Lindsay. So today we are talking about a sewage spill in the Potomac River. So first of all,

just so our audience remembers who you are, tell us a little bit about you and what you do.

Yeah. Happy to share that. I am an assistant professor here in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering, and I have both training in environmental engineering and so hydrology and how water moves the environment.

But my focus really is on public health outcomes and

waterborne infections and how pathogenic material in our environment can get into us and get us sick.

And so my real passion is combining those two areas.

We are going to talk about all of that today.

Could you first start out by telling us where this sewage spill was located and what happened?

Yeah, so this is the Potomac River.

It borders between Maryland, Virginia, and D.C.

So this is basically three separate state and local governments.

And it was right below, if you know, the area of the 495 bridge. So lots of traffic going through there,

...