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Show Pollution Control Chapter 13 THERE WAS A TIME not so long ago when this land of ours was so wide and new and lightly settled that questions of water sanitation could be left to the individual or to the family group; and the consequences could be largely ignored. Where populations and habitations first formed in sizeable clusters in our East, however, trouble soon started; and agitation that reflected a pre- vious like unease in Old World cities, dwelling in fear of plague, arose. As settlement proceeded and population mounted, pollution began to take its toll in our West too; and by the turn of the present century public demand for clean water had become Nation-wide. More than 100 bills dealing with the problem of pollution have been introduced in Congress during the past 50 years, culminating in the passage of the Water Pollution Control Act of 1948. As the difficulty of solving the problem is realized, pollution has aroused almost as much concern as another item of news today-our water shortage. The two are accomplices in retarding progress. No informed person can fail to recog- nize the direct relation between water pollution and water scarcity, for polluted water is almost as bad as no water at all, and where it endangers life or health, momentarily worse. Our cities and industrial plants today discharge into our water- ways polluting materials equivalent to the raw sewage from 150 million people. The Public Health Service recently reviewed pollution conditions in 11 major river valleys representative of the country as a whole. They were the Connecticut, Delaware, Potomac, Ohio, Alabama-Coosa, Arkansas-White, Rio Grande, Missouri, Colorado, Central Valley of California, and the Columbia. The review proved conclusively that (1) even though not all streams are polluted, our major streams are gravely affected and the problem is Nation-wide, and (2) pollution is a factor that already affects or eventually will affect all water resources development, whether it be for flood control, irrigation, hydroelectric power, munici- pal and industrial use, or recreation. These 11 field surveys covered 4,409 munici- palities and 3,413 industrial plants. Of the cities studied, 1,912, or 43 percent, were discharging raw untreated waste into nearby water. Of the 3,413 factories, 1,967, or 57 percent, were dis- charging untreated waste. It was further found that 800 of the treatment works now in opera- tion throughout the country are overloaded or inadequate. The surveys reveal a predominance of pollu- tion in the heavily populated, highly indus- trialized East. Four of the river basins-the Connecticut, Delaware, Potomac, and Ohio- have 4,722 cities and factories-more than 67 percent of the total in the 11 basins studied. And nearly two-thirds of these eastern cities and fac- tories discharge their wastes wholly untreated. Some Case Histories The main stems of many of our major rivers, acting as trunks of their tributary streams and rivers, suffer under a heavy load of pollution. 185 |