https://dcist.com/story/21/04/27/dc-water-finishes-digging-tunnel-stop-flooding-sewage-overflow-anacostia-river/



Chris has been underground since 2018, diligently digging, starting at RFK Stadium and slowly moving northwest. Now, Chris’s work is complete — a 5-mile long, 23-ft. wide tunnel that will soon prevent sewage overflows into the Anacostia River and stop flooding in low-lying neighborhoods, including Le Droit Park and Bloomingdale.

Chris is a massive tunnel boring machine, longer than a football field, that simultaneously digs the tunnel and constructs its concrete walls, all 100 feet below ground. The tunnel runs underneath Metro’s tunnels (and everything else humans have built underground) and is wider than a Metro tunnel, too.

“It’s amazing accomplishment,” says Carlton Ray, vice president of DC Water’s Clean Rivers Project. The project aims to build 18 miles of such tunnels, capturing sewage overflow that would otherwise flow into the Anacostia, the Potomac, and Rock Creek. This sewage overflow is a result of D.C.’s antiquated sewer system, and one of the major reasons the city’s water bodies are too polluted to swim or fish in.

“The federal government left D.C. this undersized sewer system that basically when it rains, we have raw sewage or combined sewage overflows into the river,” Ray says. “We’re capturing that that sewage and ultimately are going to make the Anacostia River fishable and swimmable.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/indianapolis-shooter-was-former-fedex-employee-had-had-gun-seized-by-police-authorities-say/2021/04/16/5b9b6038-9ef3-11eb-8a83-3bc1fa69c2e8_story.html

Authorities said they were investigating what might have motivated the killer, whom they identified as Brandon Hole. He appeared to have fired his rifle at “random,” officials said, and the entire attack lasted no more than a couple of minutes. For hours afterward, relatives of those who had been at work at FedEx waited to learn whether their loved ones had lived or died.

Authorities identified the victims as Matthew R. Alexander, 32; Samaria Blackwell, 19; Amarjeet Johal, 66; Jaswinder Kaur, 64; Jaswinder Singh, 68; Amarjit Sekhon, 48; Karli Smith, 19; and John Weisert, 74. A family member gave a different age for Sekhon — 49 — and a different age and name spelling for Jasvinder Kaur, age 50.

At least four of those killed were members of the Sikh community in Indianapolis, according to the Sikh Coalition, a national advocacy group. Among them was Johal — a hard worker who took night shifts at the FedEx facility to support her family, including at least three grandchildren, according to Gurpreet Singh, the president of her temple.

Johal’s granddaughter, Komal Chohan, said that she is “heartbroken” and that several other family members who work at the FedEx facility are “traumatized.”

“My nani, my family and our families should not feel unsafe at work, at their place of worship or anywhere,” Chohan said. “Enough is enough — our community has been through enough trauma.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/04/01/cicadas-come-out-2021-brood-x/?itid=hp-top-table-main

Sometime this spring, billions of cicadas that have been underground since 2004 will emerge en masse and blanket parts of the Eastern United States with their song and, eventually, their carcasses.

If you’re in the right location, they will be impossible to ignore.

That depends on the weather. This brood has been quietly rummaging around underground for the past 17 years and will not emerge until the soil temperature about a foot below ground reaches 64 degrees. Most will wait for a humid (but not stormy) evening to pop out of the tunnels they’ve been building for weeks.

They don’t all appear at once, but it may seem like it.

Where will the cicadas emerge in 2021?
If you live in the D.C. area, lucky you! You’ll be in the middle of cicada-Palooza, where huge concentrations will emerge simultaneously.