Headed Downstream

Indiana’s very own White River State Park sits atop a river dyed brown by pollution. Credit: Geoff Livingston via Wikimedia Commons

By Gabe Lareau

“Don’t splash any water into my mouth,” I said. “I don’t wanna get sick.” 

“Do you think I’ll need Dramamine?” my girlfriend asked. “I might throw up.” 

“If you do,” I replied, “you’d be doing the White River a favor.” 

We were at Frank’s Paddlesport Livery in Indianapolis to canoe the city’s sole body of water, at our own risk. Owned and operated by experienced paddle-sporter Peter Bloomquist — “Frank’s my dog,” he said — the livery is hidden by trees, sandwiched between the Central White River Trail and the White River itself. Across the water, Bloomquist pointed out Herron-Riverside High, which looks more like a fortress than a school. D-Day was planned there. And like Eisenhower’s soldiers, I thought, I’ll also be saying my prayers in the water today. 

Bloomquist was quick to reassure us. “Things are definitely looking up for the White River,” he said. “As an experienced rafter, looking at comparable rivers around the country, I’d rather be in the White River. Moving water is good.” 

Bloomquist’s boathand, a local high-schooler named Cameron, wasn’t so sure. “I told my mom I got a job here and she was like, ‘You’re really gonna work on the White River?’” 

It was not too far away from Frank’s Livery when, in May of 2022, author John Green took out his phone to record a TikTok that brought White River pollution home to a wide audience. In his sweat-soaked Indy 500 ballcap, Green panned his camera to a gently flowing brown stream surrounded by greenery. “Never before did so many fecal coliform bacteria come together to form such a beautiful river,” Green said. Under his narration, a closeup of a shoe insole appeared, gently bobbing in the murky effluvia. 

In May of 2023, one year after Green posted his video, a team of organizations — the White River Alliance, the Nature Conservancy, and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science among them — finalized the first ever “White River Report Card.” The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science has compiled multiple such River Report Cards which grade individual aspects that culminate in a final score. Across different categories assessing its health, the White River watershed earned the surprising, if not remarkable, grade of C.

“I would say Cs are pretty typical,” Brown said, referencing Maryland’s other river report cards. “[The White has] some indicators that are doing well. We have some categories earning a B or B+” — the Wildlife Diversity, Aquatic Life, Sediment, and Education categories. “And then we have a couple that scored a D” — Bacteria and Environmental Burden. The Wetland Change category sits at an F. But even averaged out at a C, the White River is fundamentally unsafe. For those wanting to take a dip, “feet, not face” is advised.  

Consisting of two forks, the White River basin covers 11,350 square miles of west and central Indiana, home to over 2 million people. In its 362-mile span, just 15 city blocks meet EPA standards as swimmable: from 67th Street to 82nd Street in Indianapolis. Eating its fish is unadvisable in most cases. Drinking the water is out of the question. After kayaking on the White for five years, Green gleefully reported that he’s “only gotten giardia twice.” 

When you look at what the White River has tolerated, its C grade is borderline miraculous. E. coli from human waste have plagued the White since industrialization. Toxic waste, like coal ash, packed with heavy metals, occasionally finds its way into the river. Agricultural runoff, rich in phosphorus and nitrogen, makes the White’s stagnant portions a breeding ground for harmful varieties of cyanobacteria. And then there’s the governmental problem. The Indiana state government has a notorious history of neglecting the state’s aquatic resources. Seventy-three percent of Hoosier rivers and streams fail to meet federal swimming standards, more than any other state in the United States. Such a lackluster governmental approach signals to industries they can dump whatever they please into the White with little consequence. It took the Guide Corp., a subsidiary of General Motors, to knowingly discharge thousands of gallons of toxic wastewater into the river in 1990 — killing over 4 million fish and contaminating the drinking water for hundreds of thousands — for the State to sue. 

The ecosystem known today as the White River resembles its former self in name only. That name translates the Miami-Illinois moniker for the West Fork, waapikaminki — “on the white water, at the white water.” The “white” referent: frothy suds atop a healthy, flowing river. Now the murky color of greasy cardboard, this contaminated river-sewer is only known as the “White” because its name would be too difficult to change. For 150 years, until the Clean Water Act of 1972, Indiana’s industrial magnates, and everyone else on the river, shat where they drank. 

David Heighway, the resident historian of Hamilton County, north of Indianapolis, reports that industry first arrived at the White River’s banks in 1830 with a small animal hide tannery. In the following decades, water quality declined as industry grew. “By the 1870s, there were already complaints about the quality of the water,” Heighway writes. “The long-feared event” occurred on May 30, 1896, when a levee separating refuse ponds brimming with waste from the American Strawboard Co. burst into the White River. “From Noblesville to Broad Ripple, the shore was lined with dead fish.” And they weren’t the only animals floating down the White. “In the late 1800s, early 1900s,” Kelly Brown told me, “meat processing plants were disposing of so many pigs you could literally see animal carcasses floating down the White River.” The American Strawboard Co., after being sued by the Indianapolis Water Co., was found guilty. The court imposed a fine of $250. 

Author Gabe Lareau canoes along the White with a can of “genuine Indy water” at his feet. Credit: Karen Kopecki

“You want some water?” Bloomquist asked me, before launching the canoe. I said sure, thinking it might help with the nausea. Soon enough, I was holding “genuine Indy water” in a sky blue can emblazoned with the logo of the Citizens Energy Group — the company in charge of the new DigIndy sewer system. Its mission, to keep poop away from the White River, seemed especially urgent when I tasted the water. Even treated, it had an odor. 

Indy’s 19th-century sewer was not constructed for a growing population. That’s why, today, a rainfall of a quarter of an inch is enough to overflow its capacity and discharge feces into the White. Called “combined sewer overflows” (CSOs), these events have long plagued the White River and rendered it an extension of Indy’s sewer.  

DigIndy aims to remedy this problem with the same solution as London’s original modern sewer: If you don’t have enough space to hold the poop, you make more space by expanding the sewers. Its solution is coming at the hefty cost of $2 billion. 

That’s partially because at DigIndy’s 250 million gallons of added storage to Indianapolis’ sewer — six 18-foot tunnels totaling 28 miles in length — are 200 feet underground. Four tunnels are already in use. “We’re set to have everything online next summer,” Bloomquist told me, with genuine excitement. 

“Will it be enough?” I asked, feeling bad seeing Bloomquist’s joy evaporate as soon as it had appeared. 

A few problems persist with the “Big Dig,” as Brown put it. Yes, DigIndy will significantly allay the amount of E. coli making their way into the White River with every quarter-inch rain event. But “they have engineered the tunnels based on data from the late 1990s,” Brown said. “It will collect 95% to 97% of illicit discharge. And, due to climate change [causing increased rainfall], there’s a lot of anxiety we won’t even reach that capture rate.” Make no mistake, a 95% to 97% crap capture rate would be a good thing — and one of the first “A”s the White River has ever earned — but it may not be enough. 

To swim recreationally in Indiana, state standards require no more than 235 Colony Forming Units (CFUs), or fecal bacteria colonies, present per 100mL of water. Based off data collected by White River Alliance River Assessment Field Teams — volunteer squads enlisted by the White River Alliance to make up for the state government’s refusal to consistently fund water sampling — the White River has averaged 1,112.25 CFUs per 100mL since June 2020. If the “Big Dig” removes 90% of illicit discharge, the number of CFUs per 100mL would slide under the state standard at 111.2 CFUs. However, if the “Big Dig” allows “even just six or eight overflows,” writes Indianapolis Star journalist Sarah Bowman, quoting Dr. Gabe Filippelli, the director of IUPUI’s Center for Urban Health, “[it] could create a breeding ground for E. coli bacteria.” 

If Indiana is indeed set to receive 6% to 8% more annual precipitation by midcentury, as reported by Purdue University’s Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment, then the Big Dig’s shallow safety margin over the projected amount of discharge will quickly evaporate. As severe storms become more frequent, so will more intense urban flooding events; not only will E. coli make their way into Indy’s drinking water, but also its basements. 

Overflow sewage discharge site that drains directly into the White River. Credit: Gabe Lareau

The greatest aid that Indianapolis could provide the Big Dig, aside from more tunnels for the already $2 billion project, is a well-known environmental hero: green infrastructure. By making Indianapolis more permeable, less liquid crap will make its way into the White. Rain gardens, green areas, and more porous cement all reduce flooding by absorbing stormwater runoff. 

However, “green infrastructure is expensive to initially install and is expensive to maintain if you do it properly,” Brown conceded. “But compared to the cost of water just being held, pumped to a wastewater treatment plant, getting cleaned and then discharged, it’s something that [the White River Alliance] has been interested in talking about. But I would say green infrastructure hasn’t been widely adopted by the city yet.” Indeed, as Bowman points out, “roughly 34% of Marion County” — where Indianapolis is located — “is impervious, and that number is expected to grow by as much as 5% over the coming decades.”  

The Harding Street Coal and Natural Gas power plant in south Indianapolis is one of the last remaining visual indicators of how Indiana industry has treated the White River. Its position on the river’s banks carried with it easy access to barges and trains carrying coal but also easy access to the plant’s nearby dumpster. Pre-Clean Water Act, not only was it easy to dump industrial waste into the river, but Indiana statute required industry to discharge its waste into the water. Before the crime was a crime, it was a law.  

Today, the Harding Street facility is operated by Indianapolis Power & Light Co. — a subsidiary of the AES Corp. that, in its words, “sustainably” transitioned Harding Street from coal to natural gas in 2015. After 57 years of burning coal, the leftover ash is stored in ponds, an outdated practice most states have phased out but Indiana refuses to ban. These four coal ash ponds situated next to the river are unlined, uncontained, and leak continually. In 2019, 88% of groundwater testing sites near the Harding Street ponds contained pollutants — like antimony, sulfate, and arsenic — above federal advisory levels, which will seep into the White. 

In some cases, coal ash ponds fail altogether. In 2007 and 2008, the ponds at the Eagle Valley power station — another AES site several miles downstream of Harding Street — burst. Those ponds, covering 82 acres and containing 2.9 million cubic yards of waste, spilled 60 million gallons of coal ash into the White River. Because of accidents like these, it’s now federal law for companies to provide plans to close their coal ash ponds. AES Indiana submitted a plan to do so with Harding Street by 2021. And yet, Harding Street’s four ponds — along with 82 others across the state — will remain out in the open until October 2024 when a new EPA rule will take effect. 

One option for managing these toxic pits, as other states have done, is to drain them, ship the contents out, and deposit the refuse into a lined landfill that doesn’t lie in a floodplain. Instead, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) has renewed Eagle Valley’s permit, one which the Hoosier Environmental Council and Conservation Law Center are challenging. Their claim: The state is aiding and abetting AES Indiana to dump 1 million gallons of contaminated water into the White River every day. 

Brown says Indiana state government’s environmental record is the result of its politics and geography that focuses on economic development over natural resource protection. Where other red states like Wyoming or Idaho have an interest in protecting natural settings where the deer, antelope, and cash-dispensing tourists play, Indiana has no such incentive. “It’s a very rural-focused Senate and House of Representatives,” she says. “There is a huge focus on developers and their wishes over environmental quality.”  

Not that the government will know the extent of the damage it has allowed. According to Brown, the state used to sample the White’s water quality every three years, until IDEM lost funding. “Now [IDEM] only has enough money to come back and conduct detailed water quality analysis every nine years.” Instead, it’s the aforementioned White River Alliance volunteer RAFT Program that consistently provides monthly water quality data. “The White River Alliance also does four river cleanups a year,” Bloomquist says, an effective morale-boosting and awareness-raising community event during a time when it’s “hard to celebrate progress.” Even so, the White River volunteer fleet would likely be a sight that General Eisenhower, planning the Normandy invasion, would regard as needing backup. Or even congressional support. 

Indiana’s crop-dominated landscape is a major contributor to White River algae pollution. Maize and soybean fertilizer — rich in nitrogen and phosphorus — infiltrates the water cycle, providing a steady food supply for cyanobacteria. When introduced to stagnant freshwater, these elements sink to the bottom and supply nutrients to plants that grow alongside the bacteria. The plants and bacteria reproduce at astonishing speed until there’s no room for anything else. Once the stagnant pool reaches maximum plant- and nutrient-density, the body of water becomes eutrophic — all the oxygen gets sucked out, killing every aquatic lifeform that hasn’t evolved to breathe bacteria soup. That is, all of them.  

Like its other issues, the White’s cyanobacteria problem is preventable. In this case, there is consensus in the agricultural and scientific community that planting cover crops in every farm across Central Indiana is the solution. These plants, seeded in the offseason, act in much the same way as green infrastructure — filtering out contaminants, reducing soil erosion, and recharging groundwater. By keeping cover crops as offseason wards, the soil stays loose and permeable.  

“Farmers get less surface water flow from storms, and therefore less flooding,” Brown said. “Depending on what type of cover crop you’re using, you’ll have healthier soil and won’t have to use as much fertilizer the next growing season.” 

Getting farmers to actually use cover crops is a challenge. The Nature Conservancy, operating out of Indiana, is hard at work trying to convince farmers to use them. But because change can seem challenging and scary, the work faces an uphill battle — fewer than 10% of Indiana farmers plant cover crops. 

While canoeing on the White River, we spotted a great blue heron. Attempting to sneak up on a bird as tall as a 7-year-old was a fool’s errand. Zig-zagging from bank to bank, we tried to snap a picture, but it always flew away in time — at one point gliding inches from the water. After telling Bloomquist about our encounter, he smiled. “Sometimes we even get white egrets up here,” he said. “You see them and think you’re down in Florida.” 

One could be forgiven thinking that the White River would be a lifeless stream of sludge devoid of any creature who found itself unfortunate enough to swim in its waters. And yet, the “Aquatic Life” and “Wildlife Diversity” categories are among the highest scoring in the White River Report Card; they’re both B minuses. 

“If the animals are okay,” I can imagine many thinking, “just don’t go in the water. Who cares if humans can’t swim in it for a few warm months out of the year?” 

“Well, uh, 60% of Indianapolis’ drinking water comes from this river,” Brown replied a little incredulously when asked this question. “The cleaner it is initially, the cheaper it is to treat. You have to think long-term, too. As the climate changes … there might not be enough water and we could start to see things like what happens out West.” 

For now, the White River’s health is looking up. DigIndy will take care of most of the E. coli, coal plants have long been on their way out, cover crops are slowly starting to take root. And, amazingly, the White River still teems with life. We rowed under a canopy of birdsong, outplaying the din of the highway above. If the water were clearer, we’d have seen fish swimming alongside us. 

The White’s biggest benefactor, and polluter, is Indianapolis. In its diversity and size and location, Indy calls itself a “little America.” It is so thoroughly unremarkable, an exact average of every American locale. John Green himself has even described his home city as “spectacular in our ordinariness.” That comparison extends to its river, too. The White is a C student. It’s just America’s average, polluted, neglected, brown, dirty river. Because the White’s problems are not unique, its solutions are well-known and widely applicable. If Indiana can revitalize the White, every other river restoration of comparable size looks not just doable, but plausible.  

And it’s worth saving for its own sake. Every Hoosier I spoke to expressed how much they depend on the White River, and also how much they revered it. Just on a short canoe trip — finding a few moments of solace near Indy’s urban epicenter filled with the grind of a million daily lives not seeing a single hint of human-built structure — the river and its birds and its trees went on existing and then persisting and then daring to be beautiful, despite what’s been wrought upon them. 

At that thought, I couldn’t help but smile. But not too big, in case any water splashed up into my mouth. 

About the Author …

Gabe Lareau graduated from the University of Illinois with his B.A. in English in May 2024. Originally from Moline, Ill., Gabe currently works as a Communications Associate at iSEE and as a freelance writer.

This piece was written for ESE 477, Advanced Environmental Writing, in Fall 2023. Gabe’s trip to Indiana was sponsored by a generous donation from Janelle Joseph.