On January 19, 2026, “a broken sewer main poured more than 240 million gallons of waste into the Potomac River just outside of Washington, D.C.,” A month later, The New York Times headline read: “A sewage spill pollutes the D.C. area.” I couldn’t resist posting it on Facebook with the caption: “My Congress runneth over.” But it took a month to report this story? Wow! Slow news day, I guess. All of a sudden, I want to stop worrying about Iowa’s polluted waterways and have some empathy for those in our nation’s capital.
There are too many jokes to go with this unfortunate dilemma. It’s as if the Times invited jokesters and obscure writers to begin the flow of memes and gifs.
“Local officials have been working for weeks to stop the flow and assess the damage.” If this isn’t the epitome of government in action, I couldn’t describe what is. It has taken one month for the government to stop this “crap?”
But the highlight of this slow to do-nothing fiasco is another government example: “FEMA said today that it was monitoring the situation.”
The Times published another article on April 23 with the headline: A Huge Sewage Spill Is Over, but Contamination Lingers in the Potomac. Nowhere in the article was there a mention that Congress was the source of the contamination. However, what else could have been the cause?
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