Restoring protection to all waters

Promising to restore protections stripped from small streams and wetlands in Oregon, at least 158 members of Congress have endorsed the Clean Water Restoration Act in recent months.

Over the past five years, the Bush administration and the U.S. Supreme Court have chipped away at protections for our waterways, especially smaller streams and wetlands, by defying years of precedent and narrowly defining the Clean Water Act to apply to only “navigable waterways.”

So far, Oregon Reps. Earl Blumenauer, Peter DeFazio, Darlene Hooley and David Wu have co-sponsored legislation that would overturn what we call the Bush administration’s “No Protection” policy.

“Failing to protect the small streams, ponds and wetlands that feed rivers like the Willamette is simply foolhardy,” says Environment Oregon’s Jeremiah Baumann. “Whatever goes in the stream ends up in the river. Pave over the wetlands and you lose the wetlands’ ability to filter pollutants before they reach larger waterways.”

Troubled Waters

On the 35th anniversary of the Clean Water Act’s passage, we released our “Troubled Waters” report. The report exposes facilities that exceeded their Clean Water Act permits during 2005 (the most recent year for which data is available).

Unfortunately, the report does not cover Oregon waterways. Oregon has not provided information to the EPA on water pollution. The EPA is currently working with the state to submit the data.

By revealing the type of pollutants that industrial facilities are discharging into waterways across the country and the extent to which these facilities are exceeding their permit levels, we wanted to shine a spotlight on the troubled state of waterways.

The goals of the 1972 Clean Water Act were to eliminate the discharge of pollutants into waterways and make all U.S. waters swimmable and fishable. But the report showed that more than 3,600 major facilities (57 percent) exceeded their Clean Water Act permit limits at least once, for a total of 24,400 exceedances in 2005.

Rep. James Oberstar (Minn.) joined our Federal Clean Water Advocate Christy Leavitt at the Washington, D.C., release of the report.  Rep. Oberstar is the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, the committee that will pass our bill to the full House of Representatives.

A long-time champion for clean water, Rep. Oberstar said, “We are at a turning point in history, and our responsibility to this generation and our legacy to future generations is to advance the cause of protecting the most precious of natural resources—clean water.”