WATER POLLUTION

WATER POLLUTION. Extensive water pollution in the United States began in the nineteenth century as a result of urbanization, industrial development, and modern agricultural practices. Although lumbering and mining despoiled individual lakes and rivers, the nation's cities were the sites of the most severe pollution. Early industrial by-products joined human sewage and animal waste to foul drinking water supplies. By the early 1800s, even horses declined New York City's public water, and one quarter of Boston's wells produced undrinkable water. Severe epidemics of the waterborne diseases cholera and typhoid fever swept through major cities, most notably New York in 1832.

The early response to such pollution was not so much to clean the water but rather to build reservoirs and aqueducts to import fresh water for direct delivery to neighborhoods and even some individual homes. Cities built large sewer systems to flush these waters away, usually either out to sea or down a near by river. Sewers thus spread the previously more localized pollution, often fouling the water sources of other cities.

In the 1890s, scientists decisively linked many diseases, including typhoid and cholera, to the presence of human waste in water supplies. Cities began to filter their drinking water with remarkable results. The national urban death rate from typhoid, 36 per 100,000 in 1900, dropped to only 3 per 100,000 by 1935 and was virtually nonexistent by the twentieth century's end. The urban water projects that combined filtration, delivery, and disposal ranked among the largest public works projects in the nation's history. Chicago, for example, reversed the direction of the Chicago and Calumet Rivers, so by 1900 they no longer carried the city's waste into Lake Michigan, its primary source of fresh water. By the end of the twentieth century, New York City moved about 1.5 billion gallons of fresh water through more than 300 miles of aqueducts and 27 artificial lakes.

The industrial pollution of bodies of water not used for drinking proved more difficult to control. In 1912, Congress charged the Public Health Service (PHS) with investigating water pollution. Two years later, the PHS established the first water quality standards. In the 1920s, the service investigated industrial pollution but with little effect. State governments retained the primary responsibility for water regulation. Following the lead of Pennsylvania, many states sought to balance environmental quality with the needs of industry by giving relatively high protection to waters used for drinking supplies while allowing others to be freely used for waste disposal. New Deal programs provided significant federal funds to water pollution control, and over the course of the 1930s the population served by sewage treatment nearly doubled. But those programs left pollution control in the hands of state governments.

After World War II, continued urban pollution and runoff from artificial fertilizers increasingly used in agriculture degraded the water quality of many lakes. Eutrophication occurs when plants and bacteria grow at abnormally high rates due to elevated quantities of nitrogen or phosphorus. The decomposition of this elevated biomass consumes much of the water's oxygen, often leading to a cascade of changes in aquatic ecosystems. Many species of fish grow scarce or die off altogether, and algae "blooms" can make water unsafe to swim in or to drink. Although small urban lakes suffered from eutrophication as early as the 1840s, after World War II, population growth, increasing nitrogen-rich agricultural runoff, and the addition of phosphates to detergents polluted even bodies of water as large as Lake Erie. By 1958, the bottom portion of a 2,600-square-mile portion of the lake was completely without oxygen, and algae grew in mats two feet thick over hundreds of square miles more. The nation's economic prosperity intensified problems, as pollution from heavy industry made some rivers and streams lifeless. In the 1960s, Cleveland authorities pronounced the Cuyahoga River a fire hazard, and at the end of the decade the river actually caught on fire. The more mobile and long-lasting industrial products polluted even waters remote from cities and industry. DDT, other pesticides and synthetic chemicals, mercury, and acid rain threatened numerous species and previously unaffected lakes and streams.

Such manifestations of a deepening pollution crisis prompted environmentalists and lawmakers to redouble pollution-control efforts. The major response, the 1972 Clean Water Act, shifted responsibility for the nation's waterways and water supply to the federal government. In the following decades, federal funds and regulations issued under the act's authority significantly raised standards for water purity. Repeatedly amended, the act halted the rate of water pollution, even in the face of decades of population and economic growth. Most industries and municipalities greatly reduced their pollution discharges, with the consequent reversal of the eutrophication of many bodies of water, including Lake Erie. Nevertheless, "non-point" pollution sources, such as agricultural runoff and vehicle exhaust, continued to degrade water quality. The act made virtually no progress in improving groundwater contamination. At the end of the twentieth century, regulating groundwater quality and grappling with nonpoint pollution remained the most formidable obstacles to those seeking to reverse water pollution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Elkind, Sarah S. Bay Cities and Water Politics: The Battle for Resources in Boston and Oakland. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998.

Melosi, Martin V. The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Outwater, Alice. Water: A Natural History. New York: Basic Books, 1996.

Benjamin H.Johnson

See alsoClean Water Act ; Conservation ; Sanitation, Environmental ; Waste Disposal ; Water Law ; Waterways, Inland .