Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
diseases such as dysentery, typhoid, and yellow fever. Water supplies became contam-
inated with sewage and garbage, or bacterial disease; in some cases, the contamination
was so severe that wells and pipes had to be excavated and replaced.
As cities rose, engineers became obsessed with building efficient waterworks to sup-
ply them. Chicago, for example , was established on the shore of Lake Michigan and
grew rapidly, but contaminated water collected beneath its streets, while the city's efflu-
ent was dumped into the lake, which was also its drinking supply. Typhoid fever and
dysentery broke out, and in 1854 a cholera epidemic wiped out 6 percent of the city's
population. (Cholera is a bacterial disease caused by feces in water.) The crisis forced a
major overhaul. Municipal leaders installed water pumps, built a new sewer system, and
reversed the flow of the Chicago River to carry waste out of Lake Michigan, and the city
was much healthier for it.
By 1920, most American cities had efficient water systems, and by 1940 outbreaks
of naturally occurring waterborne diseases had sharply fallen. But man-made pollution
was another matter, and there were few quality standards to protect people.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Americans, consumed with sending rockets to the moon
and coping with the social turmoil of the Vietnam War, paid little attention to what
they were pouring into waterways. Twenty-eight chemicals were banned from tap water
by federal guidelines in the 1960s, but environmental regulation was mostly left to the
states, which were more interested in attracting jobs than in policing agricultural, in-
dustrial, and municipal polluters. Between 1961 and 1970, according to the EPA , one
community a month suffered from waterborne disease: forty-six thousand people were
sickened, and twenty died.
Even so, it took a series of dramatic environmental disasters to focus the nation's at-
tention on water pollution. Among these, the most notorious was the day the Cuyahoga
River, near Cleveland, Ohio, burst into flames. The Cuyahoga had grown so polluted
with oil and trash that it was lifeless in sections: it “ oozes rather than lows , ” Time
magazine reported; it was a toxic sump where a person who falls in “does not drown.
He decays.” he river's surface became coated with a film of industrial waste, which, on
June 22, 1969, ignited. The flames rose five stories high and burned out of control until
fireboats from Lake Erie doused them.
This was not the first time that a Rust Belt river had ignited, but the Cuyahoga fire
galvanized scientists, legislators, and citizens to push Washington to clean up American
waters.
By 1970, studies showed that almost half of US drinking water was contaminated.
Shocked, millions of citizens demanded the nation's water supplies be protected on the
first Earth Day, April 22, 1970. A few months later, Congress and President Richard
Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In 1972, Congress
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