Selected Water Quality Processes in Rivers and Streams - Hydro-Environmental Analysis: Freshwater Environments - page 129

5 Selected Water Quality

Processes in Rivers
and Streams

5.1 INTRODUCTION
A major issue for many rivers and streams is water quantity. However, it is not just the quantity of
water that is important, for both human use and aquatic organisms, but also the water quality. Water
quality has long been an issue in our streams and rivers. Some of the earlier concerns regarding
water quality had more to do with navigation rather than aquatic health. For example, the Rivers
and Harbors Act of 1899 was established to protect navigation by banning the dumping of refuse
matter into waterways. This law led to a federal permitting process that is still used today by the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (the Corps) to protect navigable waterways. Of course, implementa-
tion also requires a deinition of “navigable waters.” For example, one deinition from the Corps (the
legal deinition of “traditional navigable waters”) is

A water body qualiies as a 'navigable water of the United States' if it is (a) subject to the ebb and low of
the tide, and/or (b) the water body is presently used, or has been used in the past, or may be susceptible
for use (with or without reasonable improvements) to transport interstate or foreign commerce.

An alternative deinition of a navigable waterbody is any waterbody that the courts have deter-
mined to be navigable. The deinition of what is a navigable waterway is of particular recent impor-
tance with regard to the protection of wetlands, subject to them being directly connected to a
navigable waterway, as will be discussed in a later chapter.
In addition to the impacts on navigation, other water quality problems (e.g., hypoxia and contam-
ination by toxicants) have also long been an issue in the United States. However, only in relatively
recent decades has water quality been enough of a concern that effective laws and regulations have
been promulgated to protect not only human uses but also aquatic health.
During the early development of the United States and during the Industrial Revolution beginning
in the mid-1800s, rivers were often used as a waste conduit, and raw wastewater from cities and towns
and untreated industrial waste were often directly discharged into rivers and streams. An example is
the Nashua River, Massachusetts. During the 1800s, mill cities such as Gardner, Fitchburg, Leominster,
and Nashua rose up around the centers of industrial production. Paper, shoe, and textile factories along
the river discharged untreated waste into the river with the result that the river changed color almost
daily, due to the dyes released from paper production. By 1965, the Nashua was declared one of the most
grossly polluted rivers in the nation. In other areas, river ires were becoming increasingly common.
Some of the most famous were the ires on the Cuyahoga River. In 1936, 1952, and again in 1969, loat-
ing oil and debris caught ire on the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland, Ohio (Figure 5.1).
It was not until the 1940s and 1950s that water quality became of such national concern that
federal legislation was passed to protect water quality. Some of the early acts included the Federal
Water Pollution Control Act of 1948, the 1965 Water Quality Act, and the 1966 Clean Water Act
(CWA). However, these early laws often lacked standards or methods to assess the extent of the
pollution, methods or allocations of funds to reduce the pollution, and methods or means to enforce
that pollution reduction.