More than wo months after jet fuel contaminated Piscataway Creek at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, questions remain. It is still unclear how at least 22,000 gallons of the toxic liquid leaked from the sprawling air base near the District of Columbia, why it wasn’t caught sooner and where it may have gone.
Maryland officials, including the state’s congressional delegation, are pressing for answers. Its two U.S. senators and seven of its eight House members wrote to Air Force Secretary Troy Meink complaining of a lack of transparency about the incident. They contended there had been a “critical delay” by the base in providing full information to the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE).
“The Air Force only came clean about [the] fuel spill at Joint Base Andrews after it was detected in and around Piscataway Creek,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), “and even then they failed to inform state officials of the full extent of the spill’s impact until … weeks later.”
The base reported the jet fuel leak to federal and state authorities on March 23 after someone driving by the creek, which has its headwaters inside the base’s fenceline, smelled fuel and spotted an oily sheen on the water. The tidal portion of the 18.6-mile Potomac River tributary is popular for fishing and boating.
It wasn’t until April 8, though, that the base provided regulators an estimate of how much had escaped from its underground fuel storage and dispensing system.
Even then, there were conflicting figures. An April 13 news release by MDE — the first public disclosure of the problem — said “roughly” 32,000 gallons had leaked. The base then issued its own release, saying 22,000 gallons had been lost.
MDE is still investigating the incident but has faulted the base for not reporting the leak sooner and for not doing enough early on to stop or contain it.
The leak has cast a harsh spotlight on the 7,400-acre airbase in Prince George’s County, which is home to the presidential plane, Air Force One.
Like most military bases, Andrews has a history of serious pollution problems. Petroleum and hazardous chemicals spilled or buried there have contaminated soil, groundwater and local streams. It has been on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund priority cleanup list since 1999.
“The base is taking this issue very seriously,” said Air Force Col. Marie Harnly, who as civil engineer squadron commander for the 316th Wing oversees the base’s environmental compliance efforts. The Air Force is working closely with MDE and the EPA to address the fuel release, she added.
Testing is to begin in early June to find and fix the suspected leak, she said. And work is already under way to track down where fuel has contaminated soil and groundwater so that it can be cleaned up.
About 37,000 gallons of fuel-tainted water have been pumped out of a stormwater outfall along the creek and taken off base to be properly disposed of, Harnly said. It isn’t known yet, she added, what fraction of that removed liquid was jet fuel.
Meanwhile, the question remains: Could the leak have been spotted sooner and prevented or at least minimized?
In December, according to MDE, the base’s fuel system failed a “tightness test” — a procedure for checking the underground storage tanks and pipelines that’s usually capable of detecting even minor seepage.
State law requires facilities that store fuel to report promptly any indication of a release, the agency said, including failed system tests, inventory losses and any evidence of fuel in the soil or surrounding water.
That pressure test failure raised no alarms, though, Harnly said, because base officials knew they had a faulty valve in the fuel system.
Then in January and February, MDE said, the base’s monthly fuel system reports showed inventory losses.
But Harnly said those didn’t raise concerns either, because measurements of the volume of fuel in the base’s underground storage system vary naturally with the temperature. Liquids expand when heated and contract when chilled, Harnly said, and the losses seen in those bitterly cold months were “within our tolerance.”
The base’s fuel system has leak detectors, but they’re stationed beneath the storage tanks, not along the pipelines that deliver the fuel to the flight line — which is the suspected location of the leak.
It’s still unclear whether the base had other chances to catch the leak early. Pressure tests are conducted weekly, Harnly said, but she declined to say what those tests showed in the weeks leading up to the leak’s discovery. They are at least one focus of an internal investigation, she said.
“We are looking into it and as soon as we get fidelity out of that investigation, we will inform the community,” a base spokesperson said.
Sampling in the creek in mid-April detected jet fuel constituents such as naphthalene and benzene, with some results exceeding action levels, according to MDE. Officials said they are sampling weekly; results through May 4 are posted on MDE’s website.
“There’s a lot of potentially harmful stuff” in jet fuel, said Natalie Exum, assistant professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins University. She contributed to a study of another large jet fuel spill in Hawaii that contaminated drinking water.
Piscataway Creek is not a drinking water source – the base and surrounding community are served by DC Water, which draws from the Potomac well upriver of the creek. But Exum said, “The ecological damage is still to be determined.”
State officials urged the public to avoid swimming, wading or otherwise recreating in areas of the creek where a sheen or odor is present or where there are containment booms across the water.
Since 2021, though, recreational anglers have been warned to limit or avoid eating certain fish from there. They are contaminated with perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOS, a toxic “forever chemical” that was discovered in the creek after a 2020 fish kill. MDE learned that there had been a large spill on the base of fire-fighting foam containing PFOS.
“This jet fuel is just highlighting the problems with the river,” said Potomac Riverkeeper Dean Naujok, who lives along Piscataway Creek. “People want answers and accountability.”
