Clean Water Acts and the Environmental Protection Agency

Who owns the water on your land? And who gets to decide what you do with that water? A new law being pushed through committee in the US Senate takes up these questions and more. The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works approved six water-related bills yesterday, including one that is causing lots of public controversy, the Clean Water Restoration Act, S. 787.

The bill would amend the Clean Water Act of previous administrations, dating back to the original Nixon bill in 1972.

For those of us old enough to remember the 1960's, we remember that clean water and air was an important topic for discussion in government and in homes. We saw brought to light the earlier environmental abuses that had caused acid rain, laid waste to forests and streams polluted by unregulated dumping of chemicals.

The history of Love Canal and the horror stories we learned about environmental pollution spurred the creation of the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and the birth of the modern environmental movement. There were other factors but all of them coincided at a time when Americans became increasingly aware of the damage being done to their air and water by chemical pollutants all around them. Love Canal became a symbol of that pollution.

From 1942 to 1953 a landfill in New York was contaminated by the Hooker Chemical Company and then sold to the city after being covered up by layers of dirt. The city then proceeded to build homes and schools over the landfill and soon the people living there began to fall ill and die from the hazardous waste they were living on. But it wasn't just the chemicals from Hooker Chemical that lay in wait in the grounds of Love Canal landfill.

Love Canal initially was conceived in the late 18^th century by a businessman named William T. Love as a canal that would connect the two levels of the Niagara River which are separated by Niagara Falls. Canals were the vogue transportation method of the time, with canals being built all through the east. His plan would not only provide canal transportation, but would attempt to provide hydroelectric power to the area. The plan failed after the economic depression of 1892 with only 1 mile of canal dug.

Love's Canal was sold in 1920 to the city of Niagara and a public landfill for chemical waste disposal was put in place, with the U.S. Army eventually burying waste from Chemical Warfare there. That's right...chemical warfare waste buried in Love Canal.

And here's where Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation enters the Love Canal picture. They purchased the Canal in 1947 and began to use it to bury 21,000 tons of toxic waste during a five year period. It was then closed, covered with a copper shield, with dirt added on top of the shield and declared ready for use.

With a growing population, the city of Niagara went looking for land and were able to purchase the Love Canal for $1.00. One American Dollar. The Hooker Company sold the land for this wonderfully low price, but did point out to the city how the site had been used. Homes and even a school began to be built on the site. People moved in to newly constructed lovely suburban homes without the slightest bit of what lay below them, lurking less than 10 feet below in some spots. It certainly wasn't clean water.

During the construction of a public school, a copier barrier between the waste and the land above it, was punctured, allowing the toxic waste to seep into the land and water of the area. Strange odors and increasing number of health problems began to be reported from area citizens and finally Lois Gibbs, the President of the Love Canal Homebuilders Association began to investigate on her own.

She soon uncovered the history of Love Canal land and representing the home owners brought a suit against both Hooker Chemical and the town of Niagara. Both fought the homeowners suit for many years and it was not until national media attention on the Love Canal suit focused the issue that progress began to be made.

In 1978, President Jimmy Carter declared Love Canal a national emergency and the newly formed EPA began a thorough investigation, determining that chemicals dumped there had seeped into basements and groundwater and into the air inside the homes. Over 800 families were relocated and the Environmental Protection Agency sued Hooker Chemicals parent company, Occidental Petroleum, for $129 million.

The clean-up of Love Canal became the flagship project for the EPA's new Superfund program with 21 tons of toxic chemicals being removed from the 16 acre site. With Love Canal, the general public began to be aware of the dangers lying underneath them, in unregulated landfills, in their drinking water and the air they breathed.

Love Canal was only one of many other SuperFund programs that the EPA found and cleaned up, but it was the most visible and the most shocking. It put the EPA in the hero's spot for many years, a champion of the ordinary man and woman seeking clean water and clean air.

The Clean Water Act that the Nixon administration had put in place in 1972 was furthered strengthed by Jimmy Carter with new funding and new regulations in 1978, a true bi-partisan belief in the right of Americans to have clean water and clean air. But slowly, businesses and corporations and even ordinary land owners intent on using their land and water as they choose, whittled away at the power of the Environmental Protection Agency.

http://www.earthjustice.org/news/press/001/bush_administration_proposes_to_weaken_vital_clean_water_act_permitting_program.html

In 2001, the administration of President George W. Bush announced changes that weakened the power of the Clean Water Act protecting our wetlands and streams, which provide the run off for our drinking groundwater. It changed the Clean Water Act to permit many programs prohibited before and seriously weakened the protections put in place by previous presidents and their administrations, including President George H. Bush in 1992.

Now, the Democratic Senate is proposing new changes to the Clean Water Act, and the discussion has been strong and partisan, but leaves many Americans wondering who has the right approach to protecting Americans.

We can look at the history of unregulated water and air protection and know without a doubt that we would not want to return to those times. But how do we find a balance between complete government control of private water and land use? And whose standards do we use in that governance?

These are serious questions and ones that we must consider as we move forward into an environmentally challenging era where more and more protections may need to be put into place to help us survive as a species. The balance between private rights and public good is always at the core of every debate on government.

We hear the cries from the right that this Obama administration intends for us to become a Socialist country and the conspiracy theories abound across the internet. Yet who is going to protect the next Love Canal but our government. While we would hope that corporations and governments would act in our best interests, we know that they do not.

The shifting governments of men and women and the profit driven leadership of corporations will not protect our water and air. But good laws that can be used as the basis of protection can. While many of us have an innate distrust of politics and government, there is truth in law, in good laws. It is the basis of a free society to have laws that protect and defend its basic rights.

Resources

Clean Water Act of 2009

History of the Clean Water Act

Love Canal

Earth Justice

http://books.google.com/books?id=SfXY7OiClfkC&pg=PA56&lpg=PA56&dq=Jimmy+carter/+Clean+Water+Act+of+the+1970's&source=bl&ots=XZFCFEpcLo&sig=h6SMudKdKbf8jCKWe1s0L_fl9Ro&hl=en&ei=63FgSriSNeCBtgf9sv3fDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4