The Dilemma of Water in the City - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 8

that natural waters were self-purifying and that the discharge of sewage
into waterways was thus a form of wastewater treatment. When this
disease etiology was debunked in the late nineteenth century, engineers
embraced the dilution principle—“dilution is the solution to pollution”—
which used a mass balance argument to justify the deposit of untreated
sewage into receiving waters. 36 In effect, natural waterbodies became im-
plicated in the hydrologic metabolism of the contemporary city not only
as a means of conveyance but as a form of passive wastewater treatment.
By 1905, most U.S. states had laws regarding water pollution, but these
were intended to reduce local nuisances rather than prevent contamina-
tion of drinking water for downstream communities. Furthermore, only
a handful of these states had adequate enforcement provisions in place. 37
There was frequent disagreement among sanitary experts over the need
for wastewater treatment. Engineers advocated for water-treatment tech-
niques for potable water supplies while arguing that dilution provided
adequate treatment for wastewater volumes. Public health offi cials were
quick to embrace germ theory when it was fi rst proposed in the late nine-
teenth century and called for wastewater treatment to protect downstream
cities and towns from waterborne diseases. 38 The growing recognition of
bacteria as the primary disease-causing mechanism—along with litigation
by downstream cities and towns over deteriorating water quality condi-
tions—would eventually lead to the adoption of treatment strategies for
sanitary and combined sewer discharges. By World War II, the majority
of populations in large U.S. cities were served by sewage treatment, and
today, both water treatment and wastewater treatment are standard prac-
tices in almost all communities. 39
The Environmental Era as a Challenge to the Promethean Project
With respect to urban drainage, the third phase of the Promethean Project
began in the 1960s as biologists and ecologists recognized that urban
runoff had signifi cant amounts of pollutants that were detrimental to
environmental and human health. Stormwater had traditionally been re-
ferred to as “whitewater” because it was assumed to be as clean as rain,
but there was growing recognition among scientists, engineers, and public
health offi cials that urban runoff was polluted and would require treat-
ment. 40 As early as the 1930s, biologists and ecologists in Northern Europe
and North America identifi ed signifi cant concentrations of contaminants
in urban runoff, recognizing that rain falling through the atmosphere
scrubbed airborne pollutants and picked up contaminants from surfaces