Annie Quinn knows about the Monongahela River and its tributaries; she’s spent her career on them. Quinn trained in conservation biology and is a water resource manager who worked along Jacob’s Creek in Fayette and Westmoreland Counties. It’s a tributary of the Youghiogheny River, which flows into the Mon.
“Some of the most treasured places that I hold dear are within the watershed,” Quinn said.
Now Quinn is the founder and director of the Mon Water Project, which advocates for the river, its watershed and residents. The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple spoke with her about the Monongahela River and some of the issues it faces.
LISTEN to the interview
Kara Holsopple: From your perspective, what makes the Monongahela River special?
Annie Quinn: The Monongahela is definitely a river that feels very forgotten. It’s our working river. So if you’re looking at the rivers as they flow through Pittsburgh, people think of the Allegheny as the Allegheny National Forest. But the Mon is where we had a lot of our industry. And historically, it was the center of development for the Industrial Revolution in the city of Pittsburgh. So the river has weathered the consequences of that.
There’s this famous photo from above the city of Pittsburgh, where you see the Allegheny flowing and the Mon flowing, and the Mon is this muddy, soppy brown mess flowing into the Allegheny, looking quite clean. The word Monongahela actually stands for muddy banks. The river itself flows through an actual lot of natural silt, but also the silt we contribute to it. And so it’s just had this working river, forgotten background kind of history that leaves us needing to know more and also needing to better understand it to protect it.
Kara Holsopple: For people who don’t know the river, can you say a little bit about what it’s like?
Annie Quinn: The Mon is a curious river, even just its direction of flow. We don’t have that many rivers that flow north, and the Mon flows from West Virginia up to Pittsburgh. One of its tributaries the Youghiogheny, is actually curls around to its east. The idea that the river is quite muddy is that even on its banks, back before we all developed them, it was flowing through mostly sedimentary rock. And it was eroding the banks quite easily because it is a very large river. Just in general, it’s always had kind of a bigger, wider river ecology. As a result, it means it’s a warm-water fishery. So you’re going to get lots of the warm-water fish. So that’s different than even the Allegheny, where up in its upper sections, you might even find brook trout and all sorts of interesting cold water fishes. Monongahela is where we get our slow-moving mud-loving fish ecology.
Kara Holsopple: What are some of the critters that call it home?
Annie Quinn: We’ve had a couple of really fun ones that have been short-term visitors recently. There has been a river otter spotted in the Mon at the base of Nine Mile Run, so that would be the Duck Hollow area, in the city of Pittsburgh. It’s very elusive. There are several people out hoping to snag photos and also collect the understanding of where its habitat is.
There was an urban beaver. That lived up in Nine Mile Run as well, although they’re not there anymore. Those are the types of animals you would expect way out in the middle of nowhere, and we have them right here in the city, and I think that’s special.
But my favorite animal to talk about that specifically loves the Mon because of its ability to have a lot of sunlight, which means there’s a lot of plankton, is the paddlefish. Paddlefish is this goofy swordfish, but the sword is actually just a spoon. It swims with its mouth open; it looks super goofy, but it’s also an incredibly beautiful fish that needs really long stretches of river. We’ve re-inhabited the paddlefish, and we hope that they’re there. They do suffer from some of the development we’ve had on the river. Then you have all of the bugs, which is actually the science that I spent a lot of time in prior to this role. You have mayflies and stoneflies and all the nymphs of the bugs, and when I say bugs, I don’t even mean the ones that bother us. Some of these are just fish food in the end.
Kara Holsopple: What are some of the biggest environmental problems on the Mon and in its watershed?
Annie Quinn: You have a couple of major industries for sure. But for me, my professional overlap is with the amount of sewage that flows to the Mon. So from Braddock all the way up the river, Braddock, Rankin, you’re getting into Swissvale and Edgewood, and you’re traveling along and you get to Pittsburgh, there are huge pipes. Those pipes are big holes out into the river and those are the combined sewer overflows for those neighborhoods, as well as the city of Pittsburgh. The one I live in is called M-29. Just means the Monongahela 29th hole. And that overflow is the largest on the Mon, and sometimes per year, it can be open for 400 hours, spewing millions and millions of gallons of raw sewage directly into the river.
Kara Holsopple: How have the river and the people who live along it been impacted by these issues? The Mon is a source of drinking water for some people.
Annie Quinn: Yes, it’s important to remember that. One thing I think is tricky about our rivers is that their pollution levels kind of coincide with the development along their stream banks of industry, as well as railroads. There’s just an incredible amount of disconnection between communities and the river. There’s also an incredible amount of inaccessible areas where people aren’t allowed to fish. There is an inability for people to access it, even for recreation. It’s just one of those rivers that people have forgotten about, literally, because they’re unable to access it.
I would say one of the other big harms that our residents are experiencing from the Mon itself is that because of the pollution level that is flowing through the river, we are affecting others downstream. What we do here affects people downstream on the Ohio River Basin. And it’s important for us to know that the Mon River, all that sewage, just because we’re lucky, it’s not a part of our drinking water source. It is a part of many others as it flows from the city. So when we think about us as a bigger community, a community of the Ohio, it starts to look a little bit more dire how we treat the Mon.
Kara Holsopple: What are some of the emerging threats along the river?
Annie Quinn: Pittsburgh is not going to have a lot of the more popular climate concerns like the hurricanes, which only hit us as arms. But we are going to have a lot of water. We’re going to have too much water. When those rainstorms happen, they’re happening in increased frequency and they’re with an increased amount of water that comes down in a short period of time. Which means that the combined sewer overflows system that overflows in a 10th of an inch of rain is going to overflow more often.
Kara Holsopple: What about flooding?
Annie Quinn: The Mon itself is interesting. It’s the source of the flooding that happens in “the bathtub.” It’s a famous section of the parkway right in downtown Pittsburgh, where the road is actually at the river level.
Some of the flooding on the Mon that’s most concerning is actually happening in its tributary land area. So in my neighborhood in Greenfield, the surface flow, the stormwater flow that’s flowing over the land as it’s trying to get to the river, going downhill, is ending up in neighborhoods that are kind of their own bathtubs and their own bowls of flooding. One of those is in Greenfield, a neighborhood in the city of Pittsburgh, where we have a lot of flooding when it rains. There are other areas all along the river where that kind of river community gets flooded based on the uphill community’s flow.
Kara Holsopple: What are some of the solutions to these threats that are underway or that you think should be?
Annie Quinn: So there are some really, really big projects coming, and those are mostly what we refer to as gray infrastructure, which just means we’re building additional pipes to handle water and sewage.
Looking at the smaller level, the solutions that we need are what I like to refer to as distributed infrastructure. We need to think about how we can create a stepped and staged infrastructure system that captures as much of the rainwater as possible in each of the small land watersheds. We need to be thinking about maybe there’s a small green space, maybe there is a park, and we are able to transition that to being a stormwater detention base. We can put those underground. There are all sorts of great technologies like our tanks, and we store that water so that we’re capturing some rain there. Maybe we capture some rain over in some of the other areas of the same headwaters, which means that as we’re pulling out that rain from multiple different areas and they’re stepped and staged above each other, we’re overall creating a more climate-resilient solution. If we put all those in place and we restore some of the natural areas, we can create a truly climate-resilient sewer shed.
Annie Quinn is the founder and director of the Mon Water Project.
