By MICHAEL PHILLIS, REBECCA BOONE and GARY FIELDS, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A massive pipe that moves millions of gallons of sewage has ruptured and sent wastewater flowing into the Potomac River northwest of Washington, D.C., polluting it ahead of a major winter storm that has repair crews scrambling.

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DC Water, which operates the sewer system, is hooking up pumps to divert sewage around the rupture and allow crews to make repairs. It has cautioned people to stay out of the area and to wash their skin if exposed.

The spill was caused by a 72-inch diameter sewer pipe that collapsed late Monday, shooting sewage out of the ground and into the river. DC Water spokesperson John Lisle said the utility estimates the overflow at about 40 million gallons each day — enough to fill about 66 Olympic-size swimming pools — but it’s not clear exactly how much has spilled into the river since the overflow began.

Signs warn the public to stay away

“Oh, my god, the smell is horrific,” said Dean Naujoks, the Potomac Riverkeeper and part of an environmental nonprofit. “It’s such high concentrations of sewage that just grabbing a sample is a public health risk.”

Associated Press video from the scene showed signs posted near the river that read “DANGER” and “Raw Sewage” and warned people not to enter the area. Naujoks and another man donned protective gloves to take samples of water from the river to test for E. coli and other bacteria. Small bits of debris could be seen floating in some of the sample bottles.

The spill occurred in Montgomery County, Maryland, along Clara Barton Parkway, which hugs the northern edge of the Potomac River near Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historic Park.

Crews are removing lock gates on the C & O Canal and will set up pumps to divert the sewage into the canal, rerouting it away from the river and back into the sewage system downstream. The pumps have enough capacity to capture all of the sewage flow in dry weather, said Lisle, but they could be overwhelmed by a surge in stormwater. Crews will work through the weekend, when a bad winter storms is expected, Lisle said, and they hope to have the bypass set up by Monday.

The spill does not impact drinking water, which is a separate system, DC Water said.

Naujoks said the spill is happening at time when the river is low. He went out to look at it Wednesday and was “kind of stunned.”

“Sewage is just bubbling up like a small geyser, maybe 2, 3 feet into the air,” he said. “Sewage water is running in every direction.”

The District of Columbia Department of the Environment did not immediately respond to a request for comment, including whether it is testing the river’s water.

Damaged pipeline is one of several sections identified for repair

DC Water knew the pipeline was deteriorating, and rehabilitation work on the section surrounding the break began in September. It was expected to be completed in April. Repair work on additional “high priority” sections of the pipeline is expected to start later this year.

The pipeline, called the Potomac Interceptor, was first installed in the 1960s.

There’s a huge funding gap for water infrastructure in the U.S., said Gary Belan, a senior director with American Rivers, an environmental organization that advocates for clean waterways.

“I know a lot of the wastewater folks are trying to catch up as best they can, but this is something we see and will continue to see, where these pipes fail and these massive sewage dumps occur,” Belan said. “This is why we can’t defer maintenance of our wastewater infrastructure. Too often, we’re dependent on these disasters to prod us forward.”

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, speaking at a press conference declaring a snow emergency for the impending storm, said authorities there were aware of the sewage spill “but I can’t give you an intelligent response right now.” She said D.C. officials would be more forthcoming as soon as they could.

Kelly Offner, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson for the mid-Atlantic region, said the agency was coordinating with DC Water, the Maryland Department of the Environment and other federal, state and local authorities to assess the impact on the environment from the Potomac Interceptor sanitary sewer overflow. The federal agency oversees DC Water’s sewer operations under a 2015 federal consent decree.

“DC Water has provided daily updates since the overflow was discovered on January 19, 2026, and has been coordinating efforts to contain the overflow, monitor environmental impacts, and communicate with the public,” Offner said in an emailed response to questions.

An EPA survey of wastewater infrastructure needs from 2022 estimated that the District of Columbia needs roughly $1.33 billion to replace or rehabilitate structurally deteriorating sanitary or combined sewers within the next 20 years.

Nationally, hundreds of billions in infrastructure investment is needed over the next two decades for clean water problems like aging sewer pipes. In other places where sewer breaks are persistent, it can lead to backups into homes and regular flooding.

Boone reported from Boise, Idaho.

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. military said Friday that it has carried out a deadly strike on a vessel accused of trafficking drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, the first known attack since the raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro earlier this month.

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U.S. Southern Command said on social media that the boat was “engaged in narco-trafficking operations” and that the strike killed two people and left one survivor. It said it notified the Coast Guard to launch search and rescue operations for that person.

A video accompanying the post shows a boat moving through the water before exploding in flames. The U.S. military has focused lately on seizing sanctioned oil tankers with connections to Venezuela since the Trump administration launched an audacious raid to capture Maduro and bring him to New York to face drug trafficking charges.

The last boat strikes occurred in late December, when the military said it struck five alleged drug-smuggling boats over two days, killing a total of eight people while others jumped overboard. Days later, the Coast Guard suspended its search.

Longtime Minnesota Twins broadcaster Dick Bremer is joining the club’s Hall of Fame. The St. Paul native will be officially inducted before the Twins’ game against the Los Angeles Angels at Target Field on July 11.

Bremer will be the 42nd member of the team’s hall, which includes players, managers coaches and front office personnel that “contributed to the organization’s growth and success since Minnesota broke into the major leagues in 1961,” the team said in a release.

“For 40 seasons Dick Bremer wasn’t just the voice of Twins baseball, he was woven into the fabric of it,” Twins president of baseball and business operations Derek Falvey said in a statement. “His love for the game, this team, and his home state of Minnesota came through every night in a way fans could feel.”

Bremer began his Twins play-by-play career with Spectrum Sports from 1983-85. He rejoined the club’s broadcast team in 1987 and was the Twins’ television play-by-play voice through the 2023 season.

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By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

As much of the United States faces numbing cold, treacherous ice and heavy snow from an enormous winter storm, President Donald Trump used social media to dispute that the world is warming.

In a 25-word post on his Truth Social account, the president Friday questioned how the world can be warming when it is so cold, and called the temperatures nearly unprecedented. He also called advocates and scientists “environmental insurrectionists.”

More than a dozen scientists Friday told The Associated Press the president’s claims were wrong. They point out that even in a warmer world, winter and cold occur, and they never said otherwise. They note that even as it is cold in the eastern United States, more of the world is warmer than average. They also stressed the difference between daily and local weather and long-term, planetwide climate change.

Meteorologists also said that global warming over the past couple of decades may make this cold seem unprecedented and record-smashing. But government records show it has been much colder in the past.

“This social media post crams a remarkable amount of inflammatory language and factually inaccurate assertions into a very short statement,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain of the California Institute for Water Resources. “First of all, global warming continues —and has in fact been progressing at an increased rate in recent years.”

Here’s a closer look at the facts:

Climate change is still here

TRUMP: “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???”

US President Donald Trump attends the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

THE FACTS: “Global warming hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s here,” Princeton University climate scientist Gabriel Vecchi said.

The last three years have been the warmest on record, increasing at significantly faster rate than they had been, data shows.

Globally, winter temperatures — December, January and February — have increased by 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1995, with the previous two winters the warmest on record, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration records. The United States has warmed slower than the rest of the world, about half a degree Fahrenheit since 1995. Last month was the fifth-hottest December on record globally and in the United States.

Local cold differs from longer, global warming

Scientists note they talk about “global” when it comes to warming. The United States is only 2% of Earth’s area — and west of the Rockies isn’t that cold for this time of year. Global temperature maps show two-thirds of the United States is many degrees colder than normal and same for Russia. But Australia, Africa, the Arctic, Antarctica, Asia, Canada, much of Europe and even Greenland are warmer than normal.

“Even as the Earth warms, cold days and cold winters are not projected to disappear, just become fewer in number,” said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer. “In addition, what happens in the U.S. during a brief period of days is not an indication of what’s happening to the U.S. as a whole or the Earth as a whole over the long term.”

There is even a theory among many scientists — but it is not yet a consensus — that the American East is getting more extreme winter outbreaks because of a warming Arctic, which is part of climate change.

“This is an active research area with uncertainty,” said Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini. “One hypothesis is that Arctic warming reduces the temperature contrast between the pole and mid-latitudes, which can sometimes weaken or distort the jet stream and allow cold Arctic air to spill south. That said, not every cold outbreak can or should be attributed to climate change. Weather still has large natural variability.”

It has been colder in the past

TRUMP: “Record Cold Wave expected to hit 40 States. Rarely seen anything like it before.”

THE FACTS: Yes we have.

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The National Weather Service forecasts Minneapolis to be minus-11 degrees on Saturday and minus-13  on Sunday, but that is nowhere near the records of minus-33 and minus-31 set in 1904 there. Chicago is supposed to drop to 2 degrees Saturday and 8 degrees Sunday, but the record for those days are minus-15 and minus-20 from 1897 and as recently as Jan. 30, 2019 it hit minus-23 in Chicago. Fargo, North Dakota and Washington, D.C. are forecast to not come within a dozen degrees of the coldest day on record.

“Truly historic cold waves, like those in 1978–79, 1983–85, or earlier decades, were often colder and more persistent over large regions,” Gensini said. “We are also less accustomed to severe cold now because winters overall are warmer than they were several decades ago.”

Don’t expect too many broken records

Kristina Dahl, vice president of science at Climate Central, said a check of U.S. weather stations with at least 50 years of data finds 45 record lows set in January of this year — compared to 1,092 record highs.

While some daily records may fall, especially in the Plains, Texas and Louisiana, it will be “very hard to break long-period (100 years+) records with this cold blast,” said Ryan Maue, who was NOAA’s chief scientist in the end of Trump’s first term. Maue forecast that on Monday the Lower 48 states will average a low of 10 degrees Fahrenheit with more than 90% of the country below freezing. But in January 1985, the Lower 48 averaged a low of 4.1 degrees, Maue tweeted.

Maue lauded Trump for “appropriately raising alarm about the impending severe cold. In a roundabout way, while he is trolling about global warming it seems to be on his mind.”

Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.