Australia is defending its decision to join a tripartite alliance with the United States and Britain despite an angry reaction from France.

Australia said Sunday it “regrets” France’s decision to immediately recall its ambassadors to Canberra and Washington in response to a new deal that will make Australia only the seventh country to have nuclear-powered submarines. 

Australia scrapped a multibillion-dollar defense contract with France after joining the new AUKUS alliance with the U.S. and Britain.

It will, instead, build a new fleet of nuclear-powered submarines with help from the U.S. and the U.K. The pact is widely seen as an effort to counter China’s influence in the contested South China Sea.

Australian officials said they weren’t sure the Attack Class, diesel-powered submarines it had ordered from France were up to the job.

Prime minister Scott Morrison said it would have been “negligent” to go ahead with the deal, which was already reported to have been much delayed, against advice from Australia’s intelligence agencies and its military.

Australia’s new submarine fleet isn’t expected to be in service for decades, and it could lease or buy vessels from the United States or Britain in the meantime.

Morrison said the alliance would boost regional security. 

“This is seen as a positive move that contributes to peace and stability. All countries will invest in their own defense capabilities, and, indeed, China does in theirs and as we know they have invested heavily in those capabilities,” he said.

Australian Defense Minister Peter Dutton Sunday defended Canberra’s handling of the multibillion-dollar submarine contract with France, describing his government as “upfront, open and honest” in its dealings with Paris. 

France does not agree.

“It really is a stab in the back. We built a relationship of trust with Australia, and this trust was betrayed,” said French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian. 

The animosity could have wider implications. France said it would be unable to trust Australia in talks on forging a free trade agreement with the European Union, although EU officials have insisted negotiations will continue. 

Hervé Lemahieu, the director of research at the Lowy Institute, an independent think tank based in Sydney, says France’s response to the AUKUS alliance was unexpected, but he is urging French president Emmanuel Macron not to overreact. 

“It is quite unprecedented for France, or any country, to recall two ambassadors simultaneously from two different countries. France has to be careful not to overplay its hand. Their anger is legitimate and understandable but must not be allowed to take control of their foreign policy. It is not clear, for example, if [French president Emmanuel] Macron speaks for all of Europe given the silence of other EU capitals,” he said.

Lemahieu says that China’s military ambitions in the Indo-Pacific region could also face a greater challenge from the new AUKUS alliance.

“The Chinese will read it as an escalatory act. There’s no question it will escalate great power competition, and now the question is does it create more stability or less stability? And that will be a key question for other countries in the Indo-Pacific,” he said.

China has accused the new alliance partners of having a “Cold War mentality.” 

 
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A report in The Guardian says U.S. physicians treating unvaccinated patients are “succumbing to compassion fatigue” as a fourth surge of COVID-19 cases sweeps across the country.

Dr. Michelle Shu, a 29-year-old emergency medicine resident, said medical school did not prepare her to handle the misinformation unvaccinated patients believe about the vaccine, calling the experience “demoralizing.”

“There is a feeling,” Dr. Mona Masood, a psychiatrist in Philadelphia told The Guardian, “that ‘I’m risking my life, my family’s life, my own wellbeing for people who don’t care about me.’”

The U.S. has more COVID-19 cases than any other country, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, with over 42 million infections.

India’s health ministry said Sunday that it had recorded 30,773 new COVID-19 cases in the previous 24-hour period and 309 deaths. Johns Hopkins reports that only the U.S. has more infections than India, which has over 33 million.

Johns Hopkins has recorded more than 228 million global COVID-19 cases and 4.6 million global deaths. Almost 6 billion vaccines have been administered, according to Johns Hopkins.

Meanwhile, in the southern U.S. state of Alabama on Friday, Dr. Scott Harris, Alabama’s state health officer, said that 2020 was the first year in the history of the state that it had more deaths than births – 64,714 deaths and 57,641 births. The state “literally shrunk,” he said. Alabama is headed in the same direction for 2021, Harris said, with the current rate of COVID deaths.

 

 

 
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Every night in yet another house in Afghanistan’s capital, a U.S. green card-holding couple from California take turns sleeping, with one always awake to watch over their three young children so they can flee if they hear the footsteps of the Taliban.

They’ve moved seven times in two weeks, relying on relatives to take them in and feed them. Their days are an uncomfortable mix of fear and boredom, restricted to a couple of rooms where they read, watch TV and play “The Telephone Game” in which they whisper secrets and pass them on, a diversion for the children that has the added benefit of keeping them quiet.

All of it goes on during the agonizing wait for a call from anybody who can help them get out. A U.S. State Department official contacted them several days ago to tell them they were being assigned a case worker, but they haven’t heard a word since. They tried and failed to get on a flight and now are talking to an international rescue organization.

“We are scared and keep hiding ourselves more and more,” the mother said in a text message to The Associated Press. “Whenever we feel breathless, I pray.”

Through messages, emails and phone conversations with loved ones and rescue groups, AP has pieced together what day-to-day life has been like for some of those left behind after the U.S. military’s chaotic withdrawal — that includes U.S. citizens, permanent U.S. resident green-card holders and visa applicants who aided U.S. troops during the 20-year war.

Those contacted by AP — who are not being identified for their own safety — described a fearful, furtive existence of hiding in houses for weeks, keeping the lights off at night, moving from place to place, and donning baggy clothing and burqas to avoid detection if they absolutely must venture out.

All say they are scared the ruling Taliban will find them, throw them in jail, perhaps even kill them because they are Americans or had worked for the U.S. government. And they are concerned that the Biden administration’s promised efforts to get them out have stalled.

When the phone rang in an apartment in Kabul a few weeks ago, the U.S. green card holder who answered — a truck driver from Texas visiting family — was hopeful it was the U.S. State Department finally responding to his pleas to get him and his parents on a flight out.

Instead, it was the Taliban.

“We won’t hurt you. Let’s meet. Nothing will happen,” the caller said, according to the truck driver’s brother, who lives with him in Texas and spoke to him afterwards. The call included a few ominous words: “We know where you are.”

 

That was enough to send the man fleeing from the Kabul apartment where he had been staying with his mother, his two teenage brothers and his father, who was in particular danger because he had worked for years for a U.S. contractor overseeing security guards.

“They are hopeless,” said the brother in Texas. “They think, ’We’re stuck in the apartment and no one is here to help us.′ They’ve been left behind.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified to Congress this past week that the U.S. government had urged U.S. citizens and green cards holders to leave Afghanistan since March, even offering to pay for their flights.

Blinken said the U.S. government does not track U.S. green card holders in Afghanistan but he estimated several thousand remain in the country, along with about 100 U.S. citizens. He said the U.S. government was still working to get them out.

As of Friday, at least 64 American citizens and 31 green card holders have been evacuated since the U.S. military left last month, according to the State Department. More were possibly aboard a flight from Mazar-e-Sharif on Friday, but the administration did not release figures.

Neither the U.S. nor the Taliban have offered a clear explanation why so few have been evacuated.

That is hardly encouraging to another green card holder from Texas, a grandmother who recently watched from a rooftop as militants pulled up in a half-dozen police cars and Humvees to take over the house across the street.

“The Taliban. The Taliban,” she whispered into the phone to her American son in a Dallas suburb, a conversation the woman recounted to the AP. “The women and kids are screaming. They’re dragging the men to the cars.”

She and her husband, who came to Kabul several months ago to visit relatives, are now terrified that the Taliban will not only uncover their American ties but those of their son back in Texas, who had worked for a U.S. military contractor for years.

Her son, who is also not being named, says he called U.S. embassy officials in Kabul several times before it shut down, filled out all the necessary paperwork, and even enlisted the help of a veteran’s group and members of Congress.

 

He doesn’t know what more he can do.

“What will we do if they knock on the door?” the 57-year-old mother asked on one of her daily calls. “What will we do?”

“Nothing is going to happen,” replied the son.

Asked in a recent interview if he believed that, the son shot back, exasperated, “What else am I supposed to tell her?”

The Taliban government has promised to let Americans and Afghans with proper travel documents leave the country and to not retaliate against those who helped the United States. But U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said there is evidence they are not keeping their word. She warned Monday that the country had entered a “new and perilous phase,” and cited credible reports of reprisal killings of Afghan military members and allegations of the Taliban hunting house-to-house for former government officials and people who cooperated with U.S. military and U.S. companies.

AP reporters in Afghanistan are not aware of any U.S. citizens or green card holders being picked up or arrested by the Taliban. But they have confirmed that several Afghans who worked for the previous government and military were taken in for questioning recently and released.

The California family, which includes a 9-year-old girl and two boys, ages 8 and 6, say they have been on the run for the past two weeks after the Taliban knocked on the door of their relative’s apartment asking about the Americans staying there.

The family moved to Sacramento four years ago after the mother got a special immigrant visa because she worked for U.S.-funded projects in Kabul promoting women’s rights. Now, the mother says both she and her daughter have been wearing burqas each time they move to their next “prison-home.”

The father, who worked as an Uber driver, has been having panic attacks as they wait for help.

“I don’t see the U.S. government stepping in and getting them out anytime soon,” said the children’s elementary school principal, Nate McGill, who has been exchanging daily texts with the family.

Distraction has become the mother’s go-to tool to shield her children from the stress. She quizzes them on what they want to do when they get back to California and what they want to be when they grow up.

Their daughter hopes to become a doctor someday, while their sons say they want to become teachers.

But distraction is not always enough. After a relative told the daughter that the Taliban were taking away small girls, she hid in a room and refused to come out until her dad puffed himself up and said he could beat the Taliban, making her laugh.

The mother smiled, hiding her fear from her daughter, but later texted her principal.

“This life is almost half-death.”

 
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Crews were watching the weather this weekend as they battled California wildfires that have burned into some groves of ancient sequoias as they try to protect the world’s largest tree. 

The National Weather Service issued a weather watch for critical fire conditions in Sequoia National Park in the Sierra Nevada, where two lightning-caused fires merged Friday. The fire reached the western tip of the Giant Forest, where it burned four sequoias known as the Four Guardsmen that flank the road into the grove of 2,000 sequoias. 

The extent of the fire’s damage to the trees has not been determined.

Firefighters have wrapped the base of the General Sherman Tree, along with other trees in the Giant Forest, in fire-resistant aluminum of the type used in wildland firefighter emergency shelters and to protect historic wooden buildings, fire spokeswoman Katy Hooper said. 

The General Sherman Tree is the largest in the world by volume, at 1,487 cubic meters (52,508 cubic feet), according to the National Park Service. It towers 84 meters (275 feet) high and has a circumference of 31 meters (103 feet) at ground level. 

The fires, known together as the KNP Complex, burned 72 square kilometers (28 square miles) of forest land after making a significant run Friday. Low-hanging smoke that had choked off air and limited the fire’s growth in recent days lifted, and gusts increased fire activity, particularly near the Giant Forest, Hooper said. 

Crews scramble

The flames chased away firefighters who were wrapping the sequoias in aluminum and clearing vegetation on the forest floor that would intensify fire close to the trees, Hooper said. A hotshot crew was assessing conditions near the Four Guardsmen on Saturday morning to determine whether firefighters could safely go back and continue the work, she said. 

The fires forced the evacuation of the park this week, and parts of Three Rivers, a foothill community of about 2,500 people outside the park’s main entrance. Crews have been bulldozing a line between the fire and the community. 

The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning through Sunday, saying some gusts and lower humidity could create conditions for rapid wildfire spread. 

However, fire officials weren’t expecting the kinds of explosive, wind-driven growth that in recent months turned Sierra Nevada blazes into monsters that devoured hundreds of homes.

Giant sequoias are adapted to fire, which can help them thrive by releasing seeds from their cones and creating clearings that allow young sequoias to grow. But the extraordinary intensity of fires — fueled by climate change — can overwhelm the trees. 

“Once you get fire burning inside the tree, that will result in mortality,” said Jon Wallace, the operations section chief for the KNP Complex. 

The fires have burned into several groves containing trees as tall as 61 meters (200 feet) and 2,000 years old. 

To the south, the Windy Fire grew to 50 square kilometers (19 square miles) on the Tule River Indian Reservation and in Giant Sequoia National Monument, where it has burned into the Peyrone grove of sequoias and threatens others. 

The fire also had reached Long Meadow Grove, where two decades ago then-President Bill Clinton signed a proclamation establishing its Trail of 100 Giant Sequoias as a national monument. 

Fire officials haven’t yet been able to determine how much damage was done to the groves, which are in remote areas. They said crews were “doing everything they can” to protect the trail by removing needles, leaves and other fuels from around the base of the trees.

Thousands lost in 2020

Last year, the Castle Fire killed an estimated 7,500 to 10,600 large sequoias, according to the National Park Service. That was an estimated 10% to 14% of all the sequoias in the world. 

The current fires are eating through tinder-dry timber, grass and brush.

In far Northern California, an early-season rain was a welcome sign for firefighters battling a cluster of wildfires ignited by lightning in the Klamath National Forest in late July. Fire officials say it won’t extinguish the nearly 772-square-kilometer (300-square-mile) blaze but will help crews reach their goal. 

Light rain is expected in the coastal area north of San Francisco over the weekend, but forecasters say conditions are likely to dry out by early next week, prompting a fire weather watch that may lead to power shutoffs in Napa, Sonoma and Solano counties. 

Historic drought tied to climate change is making wildfires harder to fight. It has killed millions of trees in California alone. Scientists say climate change has made the West much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive. 

More than 7,000 wildfires in California this year have damaged or destroyed more than 3,000 homes and other buildings and torched well over 3,000 square miles (7,770 square kilometers) of land, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. 
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As China spreads its influence across Asia with its Belt and Road infrastructure projects, the United States is striking back with a major development project right in China’s backyard: Mongolia.

 

U.S. Ambassador Michael Klecheski and Mongolian President Ukhnaagiin Khurelsukh presided last month over the groundbreaking ceremony for a U.S.-funded water purification plant program. The $93 million program is part of a $350-million grant aimed at addressing a growing water shortage in the rapidly expanding Mongolian capital, Ulaanbaatar.

 

“Today marks a new chapter in the United States’ partnership with the people of Mongolia,” said Alexia Latortue, deputy chief of the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation, or MCC, the U.S. government agency providing the funding.  

 

“Once operational, this purification plant will help … provide the critical water resources needed to support the everyday wellness and economic growth of Mongolians,” she told ceremony participants.

 

Ties to US

 

Sandwiched between America’s two largest geopolitical rivals, China and Russia, Mongolia might seem an unlikely target for U.S. diplomatic and economic outreach.

 

But, Klecheski told VOA in a telephone interview, decades of educational exchanges have laid the groundwork for warm relations between the two countries.

 

“A lot of people in [Mongolia’s] government are educated in the United States,” he said, adding that “the prime minister is a Harvard University alumnus.” About one-third of Mongolia’s parliament is composed of U.S. alumni, according to the State Department’s account.

 

“This is a young country. There’s a great deal of interest in the United States, in our system and in learning English!” Klecheski said.

 

And there is more to the relationship than personal ties, according to Sodontogos Erdenetsogt, the Mongolian government official in charge of MCC projects in the country.

 

“I love working with the Americans because of their adherence to rules, their abiding by the system. That’s the beauty of the Americans,” she said by telephone from Ulaanbaatar.

 

She said she is impressed by her American counterparts’ loyalty to their “values,” including “transparency, accountability, responsibility, objectivity and the goodwill of the American people to help others.”

 

Sodontogos said Mongolia’s goal “is to abide by the same values” as the Americans, even though there are differences, such as in the handling of human relationships. “But these differences will never undermine our strong collaboration.”

Support through grants

 

Another sweetener for the Mongolians is that the MCC project — unlike many Chinese infrastructure projects, which leave countries with varying degrees of debt — will be paid for entirely by the U.S., with some contribution from the Mongolian government.

 

“The U.S. government is supporting Mongolia’s economic growth, using grant financing, when possible,” Klecheski said at the groundbreaking, “because we believe that growing democracies benefit from programs that do not lead to too much debt.”  

 

Sodontogos said that for a developing country such as Mongolia, aid in the form of a grant is “very, very valuable.”

 

The water project is a big deal for Ulaanbaatar, which faces a burgeoning water crisis as its population explodes. The city now accounts for almost half of the country’s roughly 3.3 million people.

 

When completed, the project is expected to increase the city’s water supply by 65%, making up the bulk of a larger plan to increase the supply by 80%. [[https://www.mcc.gov/news-and-events/release/release-082021-mcc-and-mongolia-break-ground-on-93-million-infrastructure-project]]

 

“Because it is water, everybody cares — because water is our main source of life,” Sodontogos said. “Mongolian people are very much aware of this program. They support, they’re grateful, they’re willing to work with the U.S. government to successfully implement it,”  

 

But for Klecheski, there is no less satisfaction in smaller projects, such as the groundbreaking ceremony he attended two weeks ago for a U.S.-funded kindergarten in Ulaangom, 1,290 kilometers (800 miles) west of the capital. It will be the eighth such U.S.-funded kindergarten to date.

 

“We are honored to have the opportunity to work with our Mongolian partners to provide safe and comfortable education environments for school-age children in Mongolia, one school at a time,” read a statement on the website of the U.S. Embassy in Ulaanbaatar. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is supervising the construction to ensure the highest quality, the statement adds.  

 

U.S. and Mongolian armed forces have also forged close ties in recent years, including in the training of Mongolia’s peacekeeping force and the latter’s contribution in U.S. and NATO efforts in Afghanistan over the past two decades.

 

U.S. and Mongolia entered into a strategic partnership in July 2019 during a meeting between then-Mongolian President Khaltmaa Battulga and President Donald Trump in Washington. In a sign of continued U.S. commitment, Wendy Sherman, Deputy Secretary of State in the Biden administration, visited Mongolia in July this year as part of an East Asia tour that also included Japan and South Korea and a last-minute stop in China.

 

Klecheski says the U.S. values the fact that Mongolia is the first country in Asia that has made the successful transition from a communist-led country to a free, democratic nation following the fall of the Soviet empire. “Obviously Mongolia is in an important part of the world,” he said.

 

Nevertheless, Klecheski told VOA, the United States has much to do if it hopes to compete for economic influence with China, which receives 90% of Mongolia’s exports — mainly minerals — and provides one-third of its imports. Russia also plays a major role in Mongolia’s energy sector.

 

“Let’s just say the embassy is very much anxious to see the expansion of cooperation in more areas,” Klecheski said.

 

Americans don’t know a lot about Mongolia, he acknowledged, and the market of 3 million people may be too small for some businesses. But, he said, Mongolia’s mining and agricultural industries, IT sector, and other areas offer great potential for American investment.  

 

Mongolia’s people take pride in a heritage that dates back to the 13th-century conquests of Genghis Khan (Chinggis Khan), Klecheski said, but there is also “a strong sense of modernity here.” He said he has observed a strong desire to “integrate with the world.”

 
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Unless Congress votes to increase the amount of money the U.S. Treasury is allowed to borrow above its current debt of $28.5 trillion, the United States will default on its financial obligations sometime in the next several weeks, experts warn.

Few experts consider that likely to happen, but if it did, it could trigger an economic catastrophe with effects far beyond America’s shores.

In a letter to members of Congress last week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned of the damage that would result if the U.S. is unable, even for a short time, to pay its bills.

“A delay that calls into question the federal government’s ability to meet all its obligations would likely cause irreparable damage to the U.S. economy and global financial markets,” wrote Yellen, the former chair of the Federal Reserve Board. “At a time when American families, communities, and businesses are still suffering from the effects of the ongoing global pandemic, it would be particularly irresponsible to put the full faith and credit of the United States at risk.”

With that crisis looming, Democrats and Republicans in Washington are battling over who should take responsibility for the politically unpopular task of raising the cap on borrowing, commonly known as the debt limit. Republicans, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have vowed that not a single one of them will vote to raise the limit.

For their part, Democrats say that much of the spending the increased debt would finance is the result of policies passed by a Republican-led Congress and signed by a Republican president, Donald Trump. Therefore, they argue, the GOP should participate in raising the limit.

‘America must never default’

The strange thing about the current debate is that there is absolutely no disagreement between the parties about what should happen. In an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal in his home state of Kentucky last week, McConnell was explicit, saying that “America must never default” and “the debt ceiling needs to be raised.”

However, McConnell said, Republicans will not provide any votes to make that happen. What he is demanding the Democrats do is raise the debt limit unilaterally, using a process called “budget reconciliation,” which would make it impossible for Senate Republicans to block a vote on the measure.

McConnell’s stance has angered Democrats, who point out that enforcement of the debt ceiling was suspended three times during the four years of the Trump presidency, each time with Democratic support for allowing the debt to rise.

Possible House vote next week 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, has ruled out the possibility of including a debt ceiling increase in a reconciliation package, creating what appears to be an impasse on Capitol Hill.

On Friday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, said the House would vote on a measure to raise the debt ceiling next week. House Democrats could opt to tie the debt limit measure to a must-pass spending bill that would avert a government shutdown when the fiscal year ends on September 30, upping the significance of Republican opposition.

If the House bill passes, it would move to the 50-50 Senate, where Democrats have a bare majority because Vice President Kamala Harris can cast a tiebreaking vote. Such a measure, however, would be susceptible to a Republican filibuster if GOP lawmakers choose to block it.

‘Who blinks first?’ 

Many in Washington believe the debt ceiling will be raised before the U.S. defaults, but they aren’t sure of the mechanism. Yet lawmakers have come dangerously close to defaulting in the past. In 2011, when House Republicans battled with Democratic President Barack Obama over the federal debt, the bond rating firm Standard & Poor’s issued the first-ever downgrade of U.S. sovereign debt, sparking a major stock market sell-off.

“We know what’s going to happen, but we don’t know how it’s going to happen,” said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a government spending watchdog. “At the end of the day, one way or another, politicians will raise or suspend the debt limit. The United States cannot and will not default on its obligations. And so somebody is going to budge. But the question is, who blinks first?”

There are multiple ways this could play out, said Richard Kogan, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

“Congress could enact a debt limit increase or a new suspension, and the amount of that increase or the duration of the suspension could be debatable,” he said. “Congress could choose to add other conditions, but doing so has not been the standard in recent years, for good reason. And it is possible that for political reasons Republicans in Congress will allow this to be done, but only with Democratic votes.”

New borrowing necessary

Until August 2, the country had been operating under the latest of a series of suspensions of the debt ceiling that allowed the Treasury to issue new debt without restrictions. When the suspension was lifted, the government’s debt stood at an estimated $28.5 trillion.

That represented an increase of about $6.5 trillion since 2019, the last time the limit was suspended, and about $8.6 trillion since a suspension that took effect in the first months of the Trump administration.

Most of the increase in federal debt since 2017 happened under the Trump administration, but a significant part of it, mainly in pandemic relief legislation, was signed into law by President Joe Biden.

Since August, the Treasury Department has engaged in a series of “extraordinary measures” to avoid defaulting on obligations without additional borrowing. However, Treasury officials have said those measures will become unsustainable sometime next month.

Pressure campaign 

The Biden administration has been trying to increase the political pressure on McConnell and congressional Republicans to force them to participate in a debt limit increase.

On Wednesday, Yellen spoke with McConnell on the phone. The White House said the purpose of the call was to “convey what the enormous dangers of default would be.” But a spokesperson for McConnell made it clear that the conversation had not moved the Republican.

“The leader repeated to Secretary Yellen what he has said publicly since July,” the spokesperson said. “They will have to raise the debt ceiling on their own, and they have the tools to do it.”

On Friday, The Associated Press reported that the administration had been reaching out to state and local government leaders to warn them about interruptions in federal funding that could result if the limit wasn’t raised.

Debt limit history 

The debt limit was not designed to be used as a political cudgel. Its origins go back to World War I, when Congress pre-authorized a certain level of debt so the Treasury would not have to seek congressional authorization every time it needed to issue new bonds.

Since 1917, when it was created, the debt limit has been raised many times. According to the Treasury Department, since 1960, Congress has acted to “raise, temporarily extend, or revise the definition of the debt limit” 78 times.

It is only in recent decades, as federal borrowing has accelerated, that raising the debt limit has become a political weapon.

 
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Emily Franc lifts a round basket out of the Potomac River at National Harbor in Oxen Hill, Maryland, just outside Washington. Inside are freshwater mussels, a shellfish that used to be plentiful in the Potomac River a century ago.

But not anymore.

“Millions of mussels were in these waters when they started dying off sometime over the past century, but we are not sure why,” said Franc, vice president of development and philanthropy for the Potomac Riverkeeper Network, an environmental organization working to protect the water quality of the river.

“What we do know is that that the mussels were being overharvested for their shells which were made into buttons,” she told VOA.

Now, a project is underway to restore native freshwater mussels to the Potomac to improve water quality. The river provides drinking water for 6 million people.

“The aim is to restore 50 million mussels to the river by 2030,” Franc said.

Currently, the project is in the early stages.

 

“A couple of dozen mussels are being suspended in baskets above the river bottom – a kind of mussel nursery where we can monitor them and better ensure their survival,” Franc said.

“The long-term goal is to begin getting the mussels to breed on their own,” added Dean Naujoks, the riverkeeper who keeps watch over the Potomac river.

The scenic 650-kilometer-long Potomac river flows through Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington, D.C.

Despite its beauty, the river has been experiencing environmental degradation for years.

Once considered one of the dirtiest rivers in the country, cleanup efforts, public education and laws to protect the country’s waterways, have helped to improve water quality.

However, pesticide runoff from farms and lawns continues to make its way into the river. In addition, in the Washington area, contaminates from streets get in the waterway, as does sewage after heavy rainstorms due to an aging water and sewer infrastructure.

The pollutants that are bad for the river are some of the very things mussels use to get their nutrition.

The shellfish removes harmful algae and bacteria, as well as toxins and sediment from the water.

“They like nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous, so they are helping to remove excess chemicals, like fertilizer on our lawns, that run off into the river,” Franc said.

If the program is successful, the water quality in the Potomac is expected to greatly improve in the future.

“These mussels alone should filter about 18 million gallons [68 million liters] of water over a single year,” Washington’s water utility, DC Water, said on its website.

The Potomac River Network keeps tabs on the water quality. Volunteers take water samples in various places along the river.

As 16-year-old Emma Carter fills a small bottle with water in Alexandria, Virginia, told VOA, “what surprises me if how different the water samples are depending on where they were taken. You would think they would all be the same, but they aren’t.”

 

The samples are analyzed for E.coli, bacteria from fecal contamination in the water.

“Our data showed dangerous levels of E.coli in areas near combined sewer overflows that discharge raw sewage when it rains,” a report from the riverkeeper network said.

Besides gauging the health of the river water, the information is used to let people know where it may be safe to swim in the Potomac.

Another initiative to help keep the river clean is encouraging volunteers to come to trash pickup events.

Nadia Coleman searches for floating garbage from a kayak in Alexandria.

“Every time I come out here I find cans, plastic water bottles and take-home food containers — and even came across someone’s boot today.”

 

Franc is especially concerned about pollution from the water bottles.

“They break down into very small pieces and the birds, fish, and other animals eat it thinking it is food,” she said. “Their stomachs get full and they starve to death. The chemicals in the plastic gets into our drinking water supply.”

Naujoks said he would like to see “trash traps installed in Potomac tributaries, to keep the garbage from getting into the river that so many people enjoy for recreational activities like boating and fishing.”

 
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