823 - Special Episode—The Fight For A Swimmable Harbor in Baltimore
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 25 November 2024
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
About this episode:
Baltimore's iconic Inner Harbor is like a highway for massive ships. It's also been a dumping ground for chemicals and pollutants, and every time it rains, stormwater runoff brings sewage and trash from miles inland. But in 2010, a coalition announced the Healthy Harbor initiative—a plan to make Baltimore's famous waterfront swimmable and fishable by 2020. In June 2024, the city held its first public swim in the harbor in more than 40 years. It took nearly a decade and a half to pull it off—and some say, it's only the beginning. In this special episode of Public Health On Call, we look at four ways Baltimore activists, coalitions, agencies, scientists, and residents came together to fight for a swimmable and fishable harbor: getting people's attention, collecting data, mitigating sewage, and battling against trash.
Host:
Lindsay Smith Rogers, MA, is the producer of the Public Health On Call podcast, an editor for Expert Insights, and the director of content strategy for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Show links and related content:
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The Fight For A Swimmable Harbor in Baltimore City—Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Three, two, one! |
| 0:05.0 | They jumped in, there we go. |
| 0:11.0 | On June 23rd, 2024, a bunch of people jumped off of |
| 0:18.0 | a Bond Street wharf in Baltimore's Fells Point neighborhood |
| 0:21.1 | right into the city's harbor. |
| 0:23.8 | The Baltimore Banner News outlet ran a story later that day with the headline, |
| 0:27.7 | more than 150 people swam in the inner harbor today. |
| 0:30.9 | Everyone's okay. |
| 0:32.6 | For those of us who live in Baltimore, the idea of swimming in the harbor is a little absurd. |
| 0:38.4 | 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. |
| 0:44.2 | Earlier in 2024, the world saw just how impactful the harbor is when a cargo ship called the Dali |
| 0:49.7 | slammed into the keybridge killing six people and closing off access to the port for nearly three months. |
| 0:57.0 | There is a lot of ship traffic in and out of Baltimore's harbor. |
| 1:01.9 | It's also been seen as a kind of dumping ground. |
| 1:04.6 | Although regulations now prevent corporations from expelling chemicals into the water, |
| 1:08.9 | the city backs up to the harbor, and during rainstorms, |
| 1:12.3 | all the stuff that accumulates on city sidewalks and streets floods into the storm drains |
| 1:17.4 | and gets flushed directly into the water. Stuff like cigarette butts, plastic bottles, |
| 1:22.9 | oil that drips from cars, chemicals from lawns, a bunch of it ends up in the harbor. |
| 1:29.0 | Baltimore is also home to miles of very, very old sewer pipes. |
| 1:33.4 | Like many centuries old cities, its infrastructure is aging and now being stressed by climate |
| 1:38.4 | change with bigger and more frequent rain events. |
... |
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