Oil sheen spotted in Baltimore Inner Harbor during Sail250 arrival
Oil shimmered in the Inner Harbor at 5:30 a.m. as Sail250 ships arrived, sending state and Coast Guard crews scrambling to trace the source.
Oil shimmered across Baltimore’s Inner Harbor Friday morning as Sail250 ships arrived, sending state and federal crews to trace the source and gauge how much cleanup the water would need. The Maryland Department of the Environment was working with the U.S. Coast Guard, and the sheen was visible on Harbor Cam around 5:30 a.m., before most of the waterfront was fully active.
The spill came as Sail250 Maryland and Airshow Baltimore were underway. Festival activities were scheduled June 24 through July 1 at the Inner Harbor, Fells Point, North Locust Point, Baltimore Peninsula and Martin State Airport, with the Inner Harbor festival set for June 26 through June 28. The event was expected to feature 14 tall ships and the U.S. Navy Blue Angels, and a preview put attendance at roughly 200,000 visitors. The city had already posted traffic changes and transit adjustments tied to the weeklong waterfront draw.
A June 4, 2025 diesel release from Johns Hopkins University’s East Fayette Street campus grew from an initial estimate of 200 gallons to 2,000 and then 5,000 gallons after a contractor overfilled emergency generator tanks during a routine fuel delivery. About 26 hours after the spill, crews had sucked out roughly 18,000 gallons of oil-and-water mixture, and the release stayed contained in the marina at the South Central Avenue Bridge in Harbor East. Johns Hopkins would pay for the cleanup.
That incident involved about 50 gallons of red-dyed No. 2 fuel oil near the Jones Falls outfall at President and Pratt streets, where Coast Guard contractors used a vacuum truck to recover some of the fuel.
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