Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
overrode Nixon's veto to enact the Clean Water Act (CWA)—which limits pollution,
sets water quality standards, and penalizes violators—into law. The CWA established
federal water quality standards that, for the first time, aimed to eliminate toxins and en-
sure that waters were pure enough to be “fishable and swimmable.” In 1974, the CWA
was supplemented by the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), which requires communit-
ies to deliver clean tap water to residents.
William Ruckelshaus was named the first administrator of the EPA, and one of the
first things he did was to fine three large cities—Atlanta, Cleveland, and Detroit—for
violating the Clean Water Act; he quickly followed that by prosecuting a number of
high-profile industrial polluters, such as Dow Chemical. “I knew that the job of the EPA
would be far more contentious in the future if we didn't establish its credibility and its
willingness to take forceful—and symbolic—action right from the start,” Ruckelshaus
recalled forty years later. “The American people had to know we were serious.”
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter declared a federal health emergency in the neigh-
borhood of Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, when it was discovered that twenty-
one thousand pounds of industrial waste had been buried under land on which a school
and homes were built. The toxins in Love Canal, which included 248 chemicals such as
benzene and dioxin, resulted in miscarriages, birth defects, epilepsy, and retardation.
The federal government eventually removed or reburied much of the toxic waste, relo-
cated more than eight hundred families, leveled houses, and sealed the most polluted
sections with a barbed-wire fence.
In response to Love Canal, in 1980 Congress passed CERCLA, the Comprehensive
Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act—commonly known as the
Superfund law—to clean up hazardous-waste sites and hold polluters responsible for
the damage. (Using this law, the EPA sued Occidental Petroleum, a subsidiary of which
had been responsible for contamination in Love Canal, and in 1995 Occidental paid
$129 million in restitution.)
While celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the SDWA in 1999, then EPA ad-
ministrator Carol Browner announced that , for the first time, municipal water suppli-
ers were required to provide consumer confidence reports, which explained where con-
sumers' water was drawn from and what was in it. This was hailed as a major victory
for consumer groups. But a year later, the EPA revealed that 45 percent of the nation's
lakes and 39 percent of streams and rivers were “impaired,” meaning they were unsafe
for drinking, fishing, or even, in some cases, swimming.
The turn of the twenty-first century saw a shift in the US economy, from dirty In-
dustrial Age works to relatively clean businesses such as information technology. Yet
many of the nation's waterways remained haunted by their rusty, chemically tainted
past. Legacy contaminants from the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries have persis-
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