About this episode:

Baltimore’s iconic Inner Harbor is like a highway for massive ships. It’s also been a dumping ground for chemicals and pollutants, and every time it rains, stormwater runoff brings sewage and trash from miles inland. But in 2010, a coalition announced the Healthy Harbor initiative—a plan to make Baltimore’s famous waterfront swimmable and fishable by 2020. In June 2024, the city held its first public swim in the harbor in more than 40 years. It took nearly a decade and a half to pull it off—and some say, it’s only the beginning. In this special episode of Public Health On Call, we look at four ways Baltimore activists, coalitions, agencies, scientists, and residents came together to fight for a swimmable and fishable harbor: getting people’s attention, collecting data, mitigating sewage, and battling against trash.

Host:

Lindsay Smith Rogers, MA, is the producer of the Public Health On Call podcast, an editor for Expert Insights, and the director of content strategy for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Show links and related content:

• The Fight For A Swimmable Harbor in Baltimore City—Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

• Episode transcript

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