A fire on the oil-polluted Cuyahoga River in Ohio in 1952 was one of several US environmental crises that triggered the creation of the Clean Water Act of 1972.
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When the United States’ landmark Clean Water Act (CWA) was signed into law in 1972, the nation's waterways and coastlines were in crisis. Oily debris in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, had notoriously caught fire several times. The southernmost of North America's Great Lakes, Lake Erie, had been pronounced dead or dying. Fish in Californian coastal waters were so laced with the pesticide DDT that it disrupted the reproductive systems of brown pelicans, threatening them with extinction.
Forty years and billions of dollars later, rivers no longer burn, Lake Erie is much healthier and pelicans are off the endangered species list. But much remains to be done, scientists said yesterday at the North American meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry in Long Beach, California.
In part, that is because many of today's water problems, such as sea-level rise and ocean acidification, were not known in 1972. "That's going to require other legislation," said Gerald McGowen, manager of a wastewater treatment lab for the City of Los Angeles in California.
But even within the scope of the CWA — which is often described in terms of achieving “swimmable, fishable” waters — progress has been mixed. On the plus side, McGowen said at the meeting, sewage-related pollutants in southern California's coastal waters have been greatly reduced, even though the region's human population has nearly doubled since 1970, and DDT levels in fish have fallen to the point at which most are safe for human (and bird) consumption.
Slow progress
Farther north, California's San Francisco Bay isn't faring so well. "In the past 20 years, progress has slowed," said Jay Davis, an environmental scientist at the San Francisco Estuary Institute in Richmond, California. Partly, the problem has been invasive species that cause harm to the environment, economy or health — another concern not covered by the original CWA. But conventional pollutants remain an issue. "We've attained the goals for many things — dissolved oxygen, silver, priority pollutants like arsenic and cadmium," Davis said in his presentation. "But there are many others that are likely to be problems."
Two are methylmercury and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. "There's a huge reservoir of these contaminants in the Bay," Davis said.
When the CWA was passed, the primary concerns were 'point sources' of pollution: sewage plants and other easily recognizable sources such as industrial facilities. "They dominated in almost everything," McGowen said. Now, the main concern is runoff water that drains from urban and agricultural sources. "We have not made the progress there," he said.
Runoff risk
One way of attempting to deal with such pollution is to pipe storm water farther out to sea before discharging it. But when the resort town of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, tried just that early this century, there was essentially no improvement in beach conditions, said Marc Verhougstraete, a postdoctoral fellow and water-quality expert at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Instead, pollutants including human and animal fecal bacteria simply washed back towards the beach.
A better approach, scientists suggest, is to prevent polluted storm water from reaching the ocean in the first place. In California, McGowen said, this is done using 'low-flow diversions' in which, during the dry season, runoff is diverted to wastewater treatment plants. "Ninety-five percent of beaches in southern California are safe to swim at in those periods," McGowen said.
During the wet season, such diversions are not practical because they would overload the treatment plants. Instead, storm water can be diverted into catch basins: “someplace where it can percolate into the ground”, McGowen explained. That can be done by holding the water in cisterns or using planted 'rain gardens' that slow runoff and let water filter into soil — even small ones, such as planted areas on pavements, can help. “It's cheaper than trying to collect all of that water at the end of the stream,” Verhougstraete said.
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on November 14, 2012.
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11 Comments
Add CommentWhere is the sea water rising? The waters I've been fishing in for over 36 years are still at the same level they were when I installed anchor bolts in an old bridge near Dauphin Island, 12" above the waterline, still 12" above the waterline?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnyone, Anyone??????
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/epoch_datum_check.shtml?stnid=8735180
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJerry: So do you remember if you measured the anchor bolt height during high tide or low tide? I read a report saying the sea has risen 8 inches over the past 100 years along the Georgia coast.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUm...to clarify...Cleveland and the Cuyahoga river are LIGHTYEARS beyond the bad old days. Salmon, trout, bluegill, bass, Muskie, Walleye, et al are thriving. The Clean Water Act was a godsend to Cleveland. Also, re the myth of the Cuyahoga burning, it was a raft of debris hit by a welders spark from a bridge above, that caused that fire. Water doesn't burn, sorry.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEr...when there's oil on top of the water, rivers burn just fine. You're correct to say that the CWA was a godsend, though.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is no myth that the Cuyahoga river (and many others) was so badly polluted with oil and other debris that it was for a long time considered flammable. Welding sparks may have been the source of ignition in the 1952 fire, but there have been at least a dozen other fires on that river since 1868. (See the Wikipedia article and the paper cited in Reference 12 - you can download it for free.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Where is the sea water rising? The waters I've been fishing in for over 36 years are still at the same level they were when I installed anchor bolts in an old bridge near Dauphin Island, 12" above the waterline, still 12" above the waterline?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe seas don't rise everywhere equally. Dauphin Island is part of Alabama, which has among the lower rates of sea level rise.
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1244
I think the point was about what we had dumped into the river.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThreats, threats - always some threats.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBig friggin' deal.
Back in the day, like, 500 years ago, more people died and died more frequently. Horrible deaths, too.
Today's people are a bunch of mincing nancys benefiting from the sweat and toil of prior generations of real men and their women.
As serious or more is the fact that the northern boreal forest is dying. It's not on the radar screen yet, but it will be. I grow trees for a living and I live in Palmer Alaska. This past summer they all went crispy tho we had nothing but rain. All species were affected, but some more than others. Birch looked bad by end of July. Browned instead of yellowed in the fall. Spruce were brown on top three feet all the way to mid Canada, with little exception. Gardeners in fort Nelson reported their plants burning tho they were wet. If entire northern boreal dies its 703 Pg of carbon, or 200 yrs of emissions or enough to launch us to about 800 ppm. And look what 400 is doing. It won't be survivable except maybe bacteria, and...they will be decomposing in... Five years. Look up ozone hole , arctic oz hole going from 40 to 80. % in just six summer months when it's not supposed to degrade. Bbc news Richard black.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisjerryhamilt : To see climate change effects on sea level, just look at New Orleans or the recent New York storm surges.
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