The Potomac Conservancy is right now releasing its second annual “State of the Nation’s River” report. Not that there’s tons of suspense on the tenor of the nonprofit’s findings:

Pollution from a hardened landscape has become the Potomac region’s fastest-growing water quality problem, threatening the health of the waters from which 86 percent of the region’s residents get their drinking water.

That hardened landscape, of course, comes from paving over our region. Everywhere you look, someone’s got a steamroller, a fleet of heavy machinery, and tons and tons of asphalt. They shovel the asphalt onto the ground and then steamroll it all, creating pavement. Eventually it rains, and unfiltered stormwater runs off the pavement and into our streams and rivers, screwing up everything.

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This doesn’t sound good.

WASA just put out a press release about a possible rupture in a 60-inch sewer line underneath the Anacostia River. The pipe runs from the O Street pumping station on the west bank of the river (near the baseball stadium) down to the Blue Plains treatment plant in the city’s southern corner.

Press release after jump.

UPDATE, 8:12 P.M.: Latest from a WASA release:

The leaking pipeline is one of three that cross the river carrying sewage from WASA’s Main Pumping Station on O Street S.E. to the Blue Plains wastewater treatment plant. The problem was discovered around 2 p.m. Monday by workers who were drilling in the area to stabilize a 40-foot stretch of seawall along the Anacostia waterfront near the Southeast Federal Center.

Tonight, divers will determine the exact nature of the problem. Until repairs can be made, WASA is protecting the river with the installation of a bypass pipeline that will divert the sewage flow to an adjacent pipe.

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Every year since 2002, the Anacostia Watershed Society (AWS) has posted daily water-quality notices at two locations along its namesake river from June through October. If a blue flag is flying, fecal coliform levels are below the boating standard (good); a yellow flag means levels are above the standard (potentially bad). Last year, the Bladensburg Waterfront Park site violated the boating standard in 17 out of 37 tests, the downstream Anacostia Community Boathouse eight times.

But the AWS has decided not to resume its flagging program for the 2006 season, leaving river users to rely on their schnozzles to figure out what’s in the water. AWS President Robert Boone says the program was primarily intended to raise awareness of lawsuits the organization filed against the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority and the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. Now that both lawsuits have been settled, the AWS will retire the flags and redirect its resources. “The personnel is limited,” says Boone. “And most people know that right after a rainstorm, it’s going to be funky.”

Christina Galligan, a 23-year-old rower with the Capital Rowing Club, isn’t too discomfited by the missing flags. The boats she rows don’t put her in much contact with the water, and she’s seen enough trash and dead fish in the river to know how dirty it is. “I just figured either someone wasn’t changing [the flag],” she says, “or [the water] was so bad they didn’t have a color for it.”