ESSEX, Md. — When you see little bugs called midges swarming around your home every night, it's a problem that's impossible to ignore. But people who live in Essex near the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant (BRWWTP) are even more concerned about what they can't see - what the plant is dumping into the water.
“The midges wouldn't be here if they hadn't start dumping and polluting our river in the first place. Midges are a product of them contaminating our waterway,” Mary Taylor said in a Wednesday interview with WMAR-2 News.
The plant has given residents like Mary Taylor and Janis Gillespie grief for years, and as the midges population exploded this past spring, they’ve pointed the finger at BRWWTP as the source.
WATCH: Midges and mistrust: Back River community's concerns with sewage treatment plant
Anywhere with high levels of nutrient-rich waste, like a sewage treatment plant, can be a breeding ground for the bugs. But the Baltimore City Department of Public Works (DPW), which operates the plant, said it's made "significant progress" in reducing nutrient levels, and actively treats its process streams with the same pesticide that Baltimore County uses to spray the river and kill midge larvae.
The DPW said in an email to WMAR-2 News, "Therefore, infestations observed in downstream areas are highly likely to originate from other point sources outside the plant."
Taylor and Gillespie aren't buying it, and say the problem goes well beyond bugs.
“It is an issue for all six states that are part of that Chesapeake Bay watershed,” Gillespie said. “And if we at the top of the Chesapeake watershed do not take care of that river, then the entire Chesapeake Bay is going to be contaminated.”
“The bottom line is there's no accountability or transparency and then sometimes even when they are we're not sure they're even giving us the full truth,” Taylor told WMAR-2 News.
Their trust issues with the plant date back years. In 2023, DPW settled a lawsuit with the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) and Blue Water Baltimore. It started in 2021 with state inspectors finding excessive contamination flowing into the river, and ended with officials discovering systemic failures throughout pretty much the entire plant.
DPW mostly blamed the problems on staffing shortages from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That plant failed and for two years the Maryland Department of Environment had no clue because they were getting reports that indicated it was functioning,” Gillespie said. “And it wasn't until the water testing showed differently that they actually went in and inspected and ended up taking it over. It was a catastrophic failure.”
The plant is still under a court-ordered consent decree, which mandates continued improvements to maintenance and operation. The DPW tells WMAR-2 News the plant has been fully compliant with all regulatory requirements since June 2022, adding that its improvement efforts have led to the lowest wastewater nutrient levels in the plant's history. You can read the latest consent decree quarterly report from February to May 2025 here.
“It has significantly cleaned up its waste outputs in the last few years,” Gussie Maguire, staff scientist for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, told WMAR-2 News. “That's not to say that it's not part of the problem, but I think that it's really interesting to see that there's such a reported increase in nuisance midges, while we have this juxtaposition of - they have done some clean up.”
Maguire says there are plenty of factors that could be contributing to the current midges outbreak.
“So, unfortunately, in an urbanized watershed, there's a lot of potential places that you can get nutrient pollution. We have increased development as well, so anywhere that you're digging, burying the soil, and allowing the sediment to come off, that's gonna be adding to your problem.”
She adds: “Because they are so short-lived and they reproduce so quickly, they adapt very quickly to changing conditions. So we have higher temperatures, we have more rain, and we have a very obnoxious little bug that's able to respond very quickly and reproduce very quickly. So that's part of it. There's also um a pretty large fishing industry, seining industry that pulls gizzard shad and carp fish, and when those predator species are removed from the water, you don't have anything that's getting after the little larval midges that are in the water. It's an ecosystem that's out of balance and has been for a long time.”
Regardless of where the midges come from, residents like Taylor and Gillespie are looking for more answers on how officials plan to combat the problem long-term, and more data on what exactly is being dumped in their waterways every day.
The most recent inspection report available on the MDE website is from October 2024. Another concerned resident, Sherry McGurrin, requested a copy of the the report from the most recently conducted inspection. She received a report from March 2025, which you can read below.
“What I can tell you based on looking at that report, that we still have at least 25% of the equipment either out of service completely or it was shut down during inspection for cleaning.”
McGurrin adds, “Midges are a huge problem. Not only because huge swarms make it nearly impossible to enjoy the outdoors and the waterfront life style you invested in, but they are known to clog pipes, filters, and other equipment, hindering wastewater treatment processes - an added risk to other failures at the BRWWTP, creating this vicious cycle.”
