Death of the Sweet Waters: The Politics of Pollution

by Donald E. Carr

THE United States is the biggest water hog in the world. Poor tropical countries use less than 5 gallons of water per person per day. Large commercial towns in England use about 50 gallons a day, while the daily average for such towns in the United States is close to 200 gallons per person. The highest water consumption of any city in the world is that of Beverly Hills, California — over 500 gallons per person per day where in an arid climate immense lawns are sprinkled the year around and countless swimming pools are filled and refilled.

Modern manufacturing processes also use enormous quantities of water. It takes 18 barrels of water to refine a barrel of oil, 300 gallons to make a barrel of beer, 600 to 1000 tons of water for each ton of coal burned in a steam-power plant, and 250 tons of water to produce a ton of paper. A large paper mill will use more water than a city of 50,000 people.

Industries are located near water for three cogent reasons: manufacturing plants use lots of water, they must have a place to dispose of the dirty water which is not consumed in the manufacturing process (a very large percentage), and they can often save money by delivering their products by barge rather than by truck or railroad. Industrially polluted water is rarely fit to drink; it is dangerous to swim in, lethal for fish, and often spoiled for manufacturing processes of other plants downstream. The water of a big industrial river such as the Ohio may be reused a dozen times before it reaches its rendezvous with the Mississippi. Twenty-six rivers in the United States are so badly polluted that the federal government has intervened. Dozens of others are dangerously polluted, but the federal agencies have not had time or opportunity to start any action in regard to them. By law the Public Health Service can act on its own in pollution emergencies involving two or more states, but within a single state it must await the invitation of the governor.

In general, private industrialists are united to a man against federal regulation of water pollution. They prefer state control, if any. As it is now, each state has its own set of standards for water cleanliness, most of them very tolerant. The fact that states along the same river basin may have quite widely varying standards makes it difficult for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to handle interstate pollution. This is the chief justification for the Water Pollution Bill of 1965, which called for setting up federal standards and guidelines. The reason for the clamor against this bill on the part of private water-using industries is easy to perceive. For many years the differences between states in standards of water cleanliness have given industrialists a powerful club which they have not hesitated to use. They can threaten to move a plant downriver where the requirements aren’t so tough. Or they can threaten to move from a Northern state grown more particular to some Southern state with a more relaxed altitude.

Cries of anguish greeted the requirement in the 1965 pollution bill that waste water from riverside plants should be rendered as “clean as possible.” It was contended that the phrase should be “as clean as economically possible.”

Many industrialists base their argument on a book by Richard B. Engdahl and Frank C. Croxton, Pollution: A Problem in Economics, in which the key statement is this: “To completely solve the problems involved, though it were technically feasible at this time, would probably so increase the cost of industrial operations as to endanger our ability to compete in world markets.”

Let us examine this piece of bald-headed sophistry. Our rivers have to be filthy so that we can compete with whom? The West Germans, for example? The Ruhr river basin contains nearly half of West Germany’s industrial capacity and has only a skinny streamflow, much punier than the lowest flow ever recorded in the Potomac. With such a small amount of water, one would expect the highly competitive West Germans to have on their hands a smelly, septic, barely liquid ditch. In fact, the Ruhr River is clean enough to swim in and to grow fish in, and with only mild treatment, it provides perfectly good drinking water.

The antipollution program that accomplished what to American eyes would appear to be an “uneconomical” miracle was carried out by the Ruhr Associations — Genossenschaften, semigovernmental organizations. Instead of establishing treatment requirements or purification standards and trying to enforce them, the Ruhr Associations simply charge every town and every industrial plant a stiff levy proportional to the amount of pollution they deliver to the river. As a result the Ruhr Basin has been cleaned up. The water is used and reused, but it is also treated and retreated. In some cases, as at Essen, the solid waste is dried, included with the city’s normal garbage, and used as fuel for a power plant.

To claim that American plants cannot do as well, or would go broke trying, is a deception. Nevertheless, our industries have had their way so long with most of the state and local authorities that they are not likely to give up. When there is a conflict involving recreational, agricultural, or aesthetic use of water with industrial application, industry almost always wins out. To be sure, the more thoughtful industrialists are changing their viewpoints, and a good deal of research on water disposal has been paid for with private funds and has been translated into full-scale treating facilities. But many of the offending plants are located in municipalities where domestic sewage winds up raw in the watercourse, and thus the companies have a reasonable “Why pick on us?” argument.

Industry spokesmen point out that sewage plants at Gary, Indiana, and Fort Chicago, Illinois, for example, have horribly polluted Lake Michigan for years, and it is not fair to make industries in the area put in expensive pollution-control equipment. They claim that even if all further pollution were prevented, it would take more than 25 years for Lake Erie to return to a theoretically clean state and 500 years for Lake Michigan to return to its preindustrial purity.

POLLUTION FROM FOOD PROCESSING

Food-processing industries, especially the small operators, are quite likely to take the line that if they are located in a community that doesn’t take care of its domestic sewage, including the unmentionable waste from mortuaries, why should anyone worry about the offal from meat-packing and dressing chickens? The Hudson River at Troy, New York, for example, is a slimy cesspool where eels writhe and fight over chicken entrails. In Sioux City, Iowa, the U.S. Public Health Service held public hearings in 1958 to outargue the knownothing and do-nothing meat-packers, who had been dumping stinking offal into the Missouri River, thus contaminating the river waters of four states. Sugar-beet-processing wastes, which smell worse than one would expect, polluted the whole of the North Platte when delivered to the river in Wyoming.

Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin recalls that in his hometown on a lovely little lake, the local creamery had always dumped all of its whey into the lake, rendering the water useless for anything else. Everybody in the village knew about it. But the creamery was the town’s biggest employer, and the local citizens never let out a peep. Finally the state water pollution commission ordered the creamery to stop.

The canning industry is a large water user, especially now that the farmers who sell their vegetables or fruit to the canneries make great use of pesticides. Today it takes 50 gallons of water to wash a case of canned fruit or vegetables whereas it took half that much 20 years ago. The pesticide flows into the river.

PULP AND PAPER WASTES

No industry has had more trouble and aroused more violent public reactions because of river pollution than the pulp and paper companies. There are about 3000 such firms in the United States employing more than 600,000 people. American production of paper and paperboard has more than doubled in the last two decades and is now about 40 million tons a year. The industry spokesmen make a big point of the fact that over this period a 50 percent reduction in pollution per ton of paper produced has been achieved. However, this is no great consolation to other water users, since they are concerned not with percentages but with amounts of gunk in the river — gunk per gallon.

What is the gunk? The worst polluter is socalled “sulfite liquor.” This is the runoff liquor containing the nonfibrous material removed from the wood chips during the cooking process. It is not toxic in the sense that it would poison an animal or infect a human being. It can be broken down by bacterial attack in the water, but this requires a large amount of oxygen. Thus the worst effect of paper-and-pulp-mill wastes is that the BOD (biological oxygen demand) soars so high that fish and other water creatures are quickly suffocated. Pollution of this kind is naturally most common in those river basins where the forest cover is of the type from which paper can be made. The Northern coniferous trees are best suited to the sulfite process; hence plants using this manufacturing method are mainly in the North. The Columbia River has chronic sulfite-liquor pollution. In the last 15 years, however, the Kraft paper process, which can handle Southern pine, has resulted in the proliferation of paper mills along the Chattahoochee, the Savannah, and other Southern rivers.

Senator Muskie claims that the Androscoggin River in Maine is the worst-polluted stream in the country. Years ago a dam was built which trapped behind it the effluent from numerous pulp and paper mills. Even if there is no further pollution, he maintains, this trapped pollutant will make fish life impossible for many years, perhaps forever.

Wastes from Kraft mills are alkaline rather than acid, but their drain of oxygen supply is just as great. One giant mill on the Coosa River, which runs through Georgia and Alabama, pours into the stream wastes which absorb as much oxygen as does untreated sewage from a city of 200,000 persons. These wastes, although not toxic or dangerous in the way that sewage and certain byproducts of the chemical industry are, have essentially the same end effect since they rob the water of oxygen needed to assimilate the more perilous gunk. Silt breaks the “chain of food” in a river or lake because it makes the water opaque to sunshine, thus killing microscopic plant life. Papermill waste liquors break the chain at several links, since all of the assimilation processes in fresh water, except putrefaction, require oxygen.

TEXTILES AND STEEL

The concentration of textile plants in the South over the past few decades has put a new load on Southern rivers. One textile mill in Georgia pours into the Chattooga River wastes equivalent in BOD to the sewage of 112,000 people. The processes of bleaching cotton, flax, hemp, and jute produce a filthy waste containing fatty and oily residue washed from the raw fabric. Wool washings make a highly polluting waste consisting of an emulsion of dirt and bacteria in water, with soap and complex proteins as emulsifying agents.

Steel companies have been very effective in destroying rivers, and, among all industries, have tended to be the least cooperative — in fact, the most belligerently uncooperative. Pollution of the Mahoning River in Ohio and Pennsylvania by acid, lime, oil, and grease discharged from steel plants has made this river unusable as a source of municipal water, hindered its use by other industries, and destroyed its value for recreation. The arrogant refusal of three Youngstown steel companies to give effluent data to the Public Health Service has triggered a demand for inclusion of a subpoena clause in the new federal pollution bill.

Three steel companies — the U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana, Inland Steel in Chicago, and Youngstown Sheet and Tube — are considered to be the chief sources of pollution in the Calumet River and the adjacent waters of Lake Michigan. The Acme Steel Company discharges raw sewage and unneutralized steel-pickling liquor (strong acid) into the Little Calumet River. The filth from the Calumet system of steel companies has affected the whole Chicago area. The currents of Lake Michigan are so sluggish that the wastes do not disperse or float away. They just sit there in the water near the shore and fester. Chicagoans don’t seem to care.

Petroleum oil and fuel have added to Lake Michigan’s mixture of assorted crud. Although the production end of the petroleum business has in the main stopped percolating oil-well brine into freshwater wells and streams, some of the giant refineries located near water have not been so scrupulous. Raritan Bay in New Jersey is guaranteed to smear any small boat with oil in a few days. Even when expensive attempts are made to clean up refinery wastes, some of the extremely smelly chemicals, such as mercaptans and thiophenols, give any potable water which they contact a lingering skunky odor. Oil chemicals are also responsible for unpleasant flavor in fish.

Heat has become the latest industrial pollution worry. The temperature of the Mahoning River in Ohio at one time reached 140 degrees Fahrenheit and higher as it picked up steel-mill effluents near Youngstown. This forced local industries to slow down operations or actually to shut down entirely during periods of low flow.

Excessive heat does a lot of things to a river, some of which we do not yet understand. It kills fish. It accelerates chemical reactions, causing some wastes to be toxic which would have been harmless in cool water. It strips oxygen from the water and hence reduces the ability of scavenging bacteria to do their job. On the other hand, a modest amount of heating seems to make for good fishing. On Lake Erie and the Potomac and Delaware rivers, at least in stretches where other pollutants are not too thick, fishing is best where power companies return their once-through cooling water. The warmer water apparently stimulates the growth of fish food.

The tightest state regulations are those that Pennsylvania set up in 1960. Stream temperature may not be raised above 93 degrees Fahrenheit at any time. No new discharges may be made into a stream suitable for trout propagation if they will drive stream temperature above 58 degrees Fahrenheit. These regulations have been under steady attack. They are claimed to be unrealistic, both from the standpoint of economics (costly for electric power companies) and because many warm-water organisms thrive at temperatures higher than 93 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat problem is serious for atomic energy installations on the Columbia and Savannah rivers. It will become an important factor in the location of future atomic-power as well as conventional steampower plants.

POLLUTION PREVENTION

Over the past few years, some of the giant corporations have begun to spend real money on prevention of water pollution. Du Pont, which makes more chemical products in its far-flung plants than anybody else, accordingly has a wider diversity of waste materials to dispose of. In dealing with Du Pont, federal government agencies are dealing with an entity almost as large and complex as the state of New York. Something of this company’s style and resoluteness in tackling pollution problems can be perceived by a look at operations in the Charleston, West Virginia, region of the Kanawha River Valley. There are twelve chemical manufacturing plants, employing 25,000 people. Du Pont’s Belle Works alone resulted in over 300 sources of wastes feeding into about 3 billion gallons of cooling water per day, then into some 40 outfalls to the river.

In 1958, at Du Pont’s urging, 9 individual firms joined with it in cooperating with the West Virginia Water Resources Division and the U.S. Geological Survey in a quantitative assay of a 62-mile stretch of the river. Du Pont’s laboratories analyzed over 1500 samples each week for 6 weeks. As a result of this survey, goals of waste reduction were set up. The biological oxygen demand has been reduced in Du Pont’s own waste effluents by more than 90 percent.

Most of the highly diluted wastes are directed to a large biological treatment plant, where selected bacteria destroy the organic chemicals. Foam suppressants are added; the temperature and acidity are kept at the optimum. In order to cope with the extreme swings of the river flow, huge tanks of 5-million-gallon capacity are used to impound the wastes when the flow to the Kanawha dips as low as 800 cubic feet per second. The liquids are released under state supervision during the winter when the runoffs may be as high as 100,000 cubic feet per second.

Du Pont is quick to try out new techniques. In one of its plants on the Sabine River, it accomplishes cooling by air from giant fans rather than by water. At the Victoria Plant in Texas 4 alligators are part of the conservation system. These were put on guard to repulse an invasion of nutria (small rodents) which were in the habit of sabotaging the pond walls and canal banks.

Like the oil industry, Du Pont and other big chemical companies have dug mile-deep wells to dispose of salt water and other unmanageable pollutants. Some of them are successful; some are just expensive holes in the ground.

A common Du Pont practice in most of its river plants is to conduct waste water to “passport ponds,” where it is checked for pollutants before it goes back to the river.

It has been estimated that since 1963 the entire manufacturing industry has spent 4 percent of its annual $14 billion capital investment on pollution control. In many instances, the amount compares poorly with what is spent on advertising — for such products as detergents, as a case in point — but it is much more than it was a decade ago.

There has been a noteworthy trend toward cooperation between municipalities and private companies. If a company is bigger than the town, the municipal sewage may be accommodated in the company’s waste-disposal system. Thus the three small towns of Lake and Westernport, Maryland, and Piedmont, West Virginia, on the upper Potomac all send their raw sewage into the pollutioncontrol system of the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company. Conversely, when a river or lake city has a large modern sewage system, it will often contract to handle waste effluents from chemical companies. The technology of treatment of sewage and of organic chemical wastes is virtually the same. Main reliance is placed on bacteriological (activated sludge) processes in both.

Cooperation of industry with state authorities reached its height in the activities of the Ohio River Valley Sanitation Commission (ORSANCO). When this body was organized in 1948, with state and industry representatives from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky, the Ohio was the foulest-smelling river in the land. At the time, sewage treating of any kind was available to only one percent of the population along the river’s banks. Today treating facilities serve 97 percent, though most of them handle primary treatment only. A good deal of progress has been made in dealing with industrial wastes, but in general the standards remain somewhat lenient. Furthermore, 15 percent of the industries on the Ohio have failed to meet even these lenient standards.

The paper manufacturers, being on the whole the worst offenders, have formed a National Council for Stream Improvement. What can you do with pulp wastes? As early as 1943 the Sulfite Pulp Manufacturers’ Research League started growing yeasts on waste sulfite liquor. Nearly every sulfite plant now has a yeast plant next to it. This is not enough, however, to make much of a dent in the massive total of wastes.

The Kimberly-Clark Corporation has built for a Wisconsin plant a 30-million-gallon evaporating pond to store spent liquor during the summer. When partly dried, this material can be used in place of asphalt for road making. The company makes no charge and pays part of the hauling. At the Niagara plant there are not enough roads in the vicinity to get rid of the liquor in this way. There a soil filtration system is used. Sandy, permeable soil is sprayed with the wet liquor, which is carried deep into the soil by rains. When it joins the natural groundwater, it has had the equivalent of a bacterial treatment for sewage.

Other companies, such as Weyerhaeuser, have experimented with the use of dilute spent liquor for irrigation in the Pacific Northwest. Sprinklers are used. Unfortunately this is too expensive a way to irrigate, except for crops such as tobacco, and they don’t grow tobacco in the state of Washington.

For the chemical industry, a new type of consultant has emerged — the professional limnologist (the freshwater expert). Limnologists will offer services such as exhaustive surveys of stream biology and chemistry before a new plant is built and continuous monitoring of stream health after it starts operating. The consultant will give advice about which sort of waste can be tolerated by the stream and which cannot. The guiding principle of limnology is that in the water “diversity is stability.” As long as each of the major types of aquatic life (bacteria, algae, protozoa, mollusks, insects, fish) is represented by a relatively large number of species, each doing its ecological job. the self-cleaning ability of the stream is preserved, whatever pollutant may be present. But when pollution begins to drive out or destroy species, leaving some of the jobs undone, the stream is hurt.

This is a new science only in the sense of being applied to chemical refuse. However, there are still more unknowns than knowns. Chemicals can be experimentally synthesized and put into production much faster than limnologists can decide what effect they have on the animal kingdom (including people) or the plant kingdom. In the case of lead compounds from gasoline additives, it took more than 40 years of universal use before they were found unexpectedly to be dangerous.

What incentive should be offered private industry to do a real cleanup job? One possibility is tax relief. Another possibility is faster write-off for investments in pollution-abatement equipment. The Johnson Administration is also considering pollution penalties of the same type used by the Germans in the Ruhr Valley.

RAW SEWAGE

In most countries the contamination of water with sewage increases as rapidly as attempts at correction. In industrialized countries, the pace of water purification barely keeps up with increased loadings. In the United States almost 20 million people still discharge raw sewage to waterways. Existing sewage-disposal plants are adequate to serve only between 70 and 80 percent of the people who use them, and there is still a huge amount of raw untreated sewage that gets into the Great Lakes and the larger rivers. The St. Lawrence Waterway has brought in more ships that dump sewage into the Great Lakes. Lake Erie can be regarded as one big sewage reservoir. The multiplication of large motorboats with “heads” that simply dump raw toilet effluent into the lake is believed to have caused more than one minor hepatitis epidemic.

In 1961 various federal installations discharged over 46 million gallons of untreated sewage per day directly into surface waters or on the ground: this was 3 percent of the total estimated 1.5 billion gallons of municipal sewage discharged without treatment, but it was a very dirty 3 percent. The Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, so polluted the New River area that a serious epidemic of viral hepatitis broke out among the residents (including marines) who ate infected oysters. Chlorination of the camp’s sewage was clearly needed immediately, but repeated requests for such action from state authorities to the Department of the Navy in Washington elicited no replies whatsoever.

The Navy has also maintained a stony imperturbability in regard to the incredibly filthy shipsewage conditions which it causes in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Under present laws, and without an official complaint from the governor of Hawaii, all the Public Health Service can do is wait until the sewage drifts to the California coast, whereupon Governor Pat Brown can summon in the federal agencies, who have express authority over interstate pollution. That could take quite a while, and in the meantime, the principal harbor of our fiftieth state festers and stinks like a giant cesspool.

Other federal sewage scandals exist at Hamilton Air Force Base, Marin County, California; Elmendorf Air Force Base, Anchorage, Alaska (raw sewage); England Air Force Base, Rapides Parish, Louisiana (raw sewage to the Red River); Philadelphia Navy Base (raw sewage and industrial waste to the Delaware River); U.S. Federal Penitentiary, Steilacoom, Washington (untreated sewage and wastes from cannery, laundry, piggery, slaughterhouse, and milk-processing plant discharged to Puget Sound); U.S. Coast Guard Yard, Baltimore (sewage from urinals and toilets discharged to 15 septic tanks, 14 of which overflow to nearby watercourses).

Although Congress has specific legislation before it to put a stop to such disgusting practices, it continues to be more difficult to get the military authorities to act than to persuade the municipalities. Cleaning their own sewage is not part of their “primary mission.” If the Bureau of the Budget narrows them down to a choice between a new football field and a sewage-treating project, they will choose the football field.

A U.S. Senate committee has reported that we must spend at least $600 million a year merely to catch up with the need for nationwide sewagetreating facilities, both civil and military. To meet present deficiencies and future needs will require $1.7 billion a year until 1980 and increasing amounts after that. This is a very conservative estimate, since it does not take into account the installation of separate sewers for water runoff and for domestic and industrial wastes.

One troublesome drawback to all present sewage-treating processes is the fact that even severe chemical treatments leave certain phosphorusand nitrogen-containing compounds in the effluent water. These are nutrients for aquatic life, and from that point of view are looked upon with some favor by the Fish and Wildlife Division of the Department of the Interior. However, beyond a certain limit they become water-despoilers. They result in such a tremendous growth of algae (microscopic water plants) that the available dissolved oxygen is used up, and the water is again a dark and unhealthy mess.

An interesting positive use of reclaimed sewage waters for growing algae is in making food for animals. At Lancaster, California, the North American Aviation Company has harvested algae, which are high in protein, and fed them to chickens, which thrived.

A curious instance of the indirect effect of upsetting the balance of nature by providing too much marine nutrient is the disappearance of the once lush kelp forests off the coast of Southern California. The kelp has been devoured by sea urchins, ravenous pincushion-like creatures, which have multiplied in unprecedented numbers as the result of the vast sewage increase from the Los Angeles Basin. Maybe we can find something that will cat the sea urchins.

Who would want to drink reclaimed sewage water? This is a foolish question because millions of people have been doing so to some degree for years. More than once, a sanitary chemist has stood before a group of city fathers with a glass of reclaimed sewage water on the table, and bas said, “Gentlemen, this is the purest water you will have ever been privileged to drink. Here, have a sip!” And everybody has slunk away.

Actually, a large percentage of chemically treated municipal water throughout the country has been exposed to sewage contamination. Chicago’s potable water comes from Lake Michigan, for example, a sink for innumerable small and large sewer systems.

A case where sewage water is directly and deliberately processed into drinking water is that of the Whittier Narrows water-reclamation plant of the Los Angeles County sanitation districts. The plant takes millions of gallons of sewage a day from an enormous area. First the solid matter is settled out in the usual primary step; it is then exposed to activated sludge, and is finished off with chlorine. At this stage the California Institute of Technology can find nothing wrong with it. But even so, the Whittier Narrows water does not go directly into local waterlines. Instead it is pumped into spreading basins. There it settles into the groundwater supply of the county. Diluted by the natural groundwater, it is then pumped into community faucets from wells.

Pennsylvania State University is doing some research on the use of treated sewage water for irrigation. The 3-million-gallon-per-day effluent from the State College community is put through filtration, aeration, an activated sludge step, and chlorination to remove 95 percent of the waste’s biochemical oxygen demand, making it nearly pure enough to drink. It is then sprinkled through special nonfreezing spray heads to replenish groundwater supplies in the area. Percolation through the soil results in removal of 99 percent of the phosphorous, 88 percent of the nitrogen, and practically all of the detergents. The success of this kind of treatment depends on the soil. If it is too porous, the percolation time is not long enough to use the soil as a treating material; if it is too impervious, waterlogging will occur.

We need not only an open-minded consideration of new concepts of sewage management; we need a new way of extracting money from the citizens. Bond issues and property taxes for sewers are reaching the breaking point. One solution would be to establish sewerage as a straight utility rather than as a tiny increment added to the water bill. A house owner gladly pays $11 a month for telephone service. Why shouldn’t he pay a somewhat similar amount to have his household wastes disposed of in a thoroughly safe and foolproof manner?

HARNESSING THE WATER SUPPLY

The amount of water on earth is virtually constant; hence the problem of an ever multiplying human race is to get it in usable form and to apportion it. If we could obtain rain where we need it or could even accurately predict where and when it would fall and in what amount, we would have a start. Eventually, we know we are going to need the oceans both for water and for atomic power, but we are now faced with the question of whether it is best to meet local scarcities by desalting seawater or by impounding and transporting the huge reserves of fresh water going to waste in subarctic rivers. In the meantime, the challenge of rainmaking has nagged us, especially over the past 20 years, and we are beginning to realize that one reason for our notable lack of a breakthrough in this field is that we don’t know enough about the weather. There are too many things about the process of rainfall that we don’t understand.

Tropical storms — and, in fact, all rainstorms — are nature’s way of desalting seawater. The great water cycle — evaporation from the oceans, leaving the salt behind; rain; runoff to rivers, with huge intermediate losses to the air by evaporation from the soil, from lakes and ponds, and by transpiration of plants — has turned out to be a most untidy way to run a planet occupied by 3 billion human beings, whose demand for sweet water is insatiable. We usually get too much or too little at the wrong time. This is a fault of nature, but it is our own fault that we waste such appalling amounts of fresh water, chiefly by evaporation from irrigation canals and reservoirs.

Over the past several years an unexpected strategy developed by chemists shows promise for cutting down these evaporation losses. The trick is to add to the water traces of harmless surfactant compounds such as the higher alcohols, which form molecular layers on the surface of quiet lakes or ditches and reduce the rate of evaporation by creating a micro-thin barrier through which the water molecules find it hard to escape into the air. This technique does not work so well in large windswept bodies of water since waves break the surface film. Results have been promising in Australia and in our Southwest in certain large-scale experiments. Improvements in chemically anchoring the film, so that it is less easily ruptured, are being studied, though the high cost of the necessary chemicals is discouraging.

Most of the present costs of water, especially as made available to the irrigation farmer, are wholly deceptive. Such a farmer claims he will be ruined if water costs him more than one cent per thousand gallons. He usually gets it at that price, but it is a gift from the taxpayers pure and simple. The farmer pays nothing on the amortizations of large dams and reservoir construction, for which a considerable part of the expenditures consists in locating the impoundments or the conduits at such levels that gravity can deliver the water to his crops. Having one-cent water, the farmer wastes it in leaking ditches and in excessive irrigation runs.

If we continue to evaluate irrigation water at the absurd price of one cent per 1000 gallons, no method of desalting seawater or even of large-scale transportation of water, such as the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) plan for bringing the excess water of the Northwestern rivers of the continent to 33 states of the Union, to Mexico, and to Canada, will be worth considering for irrigation. Pumping charges would make the price soar. We are up against social and political barbed wire packed with high voltage, which may fence us in against considering any great continental water enterprises.

WATER FROM THE SEA

Critics of the desalinization program of the federal government have been quick to point out that even if water were available from the oceans at prices lower than what coastal cities now pay for water from other sources, desalted seawater would still cost 10 to 15 times too much for the Utah or Arizona farmer. This point is important since among large water users it is only the irrigating farmer who actually consumes water. Industry and municipalities borrow water and dirty it, but they do not consume it to any really significant extent. One can easily conceive of water-purification systems which would operate on sewage water and end the water shortage for industry and municipalities. Here the major problem is pollution, which creates a scarcity of clean water. It is the farmer, who cannot recover the water which his plants release or his soil evaporates, who would in the long run benefit from desalinization of seawater on a gigantic scale, but it is precisely the farmer who cannot afford such desalted water.

Before we decide whether such vast projects as desalinization plants powered by nuclear energy or NAWAPA are practicable, we are going to have to concede that they will saddle the city taxpayer with a colossal burden of paying for farm benefits. Since the city taxpayer is already making good the difference between one-cent-per-1000-gallon water to the irrigator and a realistic cost of 5 or 10 times as much, he may hesitate to make it a multiple of 30 or 40. In the meantime, however, as security against local droughts and as a substitute for much more stringent antipollution measures, the city man is interested in desalinization.

In general, for large installations some form of distillation seems to be the answer, and where power can be sold and mineral by-products can find a market, the heat of distillation may best be provided by atomic fission. For smaller plants, operating on water of lower salt content than seawater, the electrodialysis process, in which salt is forced out of brackish water electrically through plasticmembranes, is moving ahead fast and competes with the “reverse-osmosis” technique, in which a separating membrane is also used but high pressure instead of electricity is the motive force.

President Johnson, in justifying the research and development money he wants spent by the Office of Saline Water in the Department of the Interior ($29 million in fiscal 1966), has said we need new ideas. There is no paucity of them. The OSW now screens about 400 proposals a year.

None of the current approaches seems capable of making potable water at less than one dollar per 1000 gallons. City water in the United States now averages from 10 to 35 cents per 1000 gallons. However, there are communities in this country and abroad that would think the dollar price a bargain. At least 1000 towns in the United States have to use water containing up to one percent salt. Seawater contains 3.5 percent salt.

Although many processes are being studied, two dramatic changes in our ways of thinking about water desalinization have changed the pace and direction of development. One is the favorable theoretical economics of very large combined nuclear-energy and desalting plants. The second (and perhaps more important) is the concept of applying such a process to reclaim mixtures of sewage water and seawater or of sewage water alone. This may lead to an effective solution of the water-pollution problems of big coastal, river, or lake cities.

The importance of this notion is suggested by the vigorous counterattacks it has provoked from the coal industry, which fears that coal may be dislodged from its last precious stronghold as a fuel in electric power plants. The National Coal Association, the National Coal Policy Conference, and the United Mine Workers write passionate letters to the President, claiming with eloquence and bitterness that the nuclear processes involve government subsidies in the form of artificially low prices for nuclear fuels; that they may blow up New York City; and that even if they are successful, they would put 5 men out of work for every man they put in a job, since production of heat from coal provides about 5 times as many jobs as the production of the same amount of heat from nuclear fuel. In this last point they are undoubtedly right, and indeed it is probably the strongest economical justification for nuclear processes.

If it were not for their manpower savings, one might be suspicious of the correctness of estimated power costs from nuclear plants, since the Atomic Energy Commission makes it very hard to find out just what nuclear fuels do cost. Some utility companies, such as Consolidated Edison Company, which has operated a nuclear power plant at Indian Point, just below Peekskill, New York, maintain that the burning of uranium costs 22 cents a million British thermal units of heat energy produced, while by comparison coal costs 29 cents, fuel oils 33 cents, and gas more than 40 cents. The Con Ed people think that uranium will be under the 20 cents mark in a few years.

This is for electric power. The dramatic aspect of these figures applied to water treatment has come out in the recent proposal of the Bechtel Corporation for a 150-million-gallon-per-day desalting operation for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. If electric power is produced at the same time from part of the steam evolved by nuclear heating and this power is sold at 4 mills per kilowatt-hour, a going rate in the area, Bechtel shows that the cost of water can be as low as 22 cents per thousand gallons. To match the 150 million gallons of water, 1800 megawatts of power would be distributed, which is enough for a city with a population of 2 million and is considerably more than the hydroelectric power yielded at Hoover Dam.

A week after the Bechtel study contract was signed, San Diego had an earthquake. Evidently to quell superstitious fears of earth tremors releasing a mushroom cloud, Bechtel recommended that the desalinization electric power plant be located on an artificial island offshore from Sunset Beach.

The Bechtel prospectus has naturally been closely examined by its enemies as well as its friends. There seems every likelihood that it will go through and that by the middle 1970s Southern California will have fresh water from the sea in enough volume to supply a city of 750,000, about one sixth of the population of Los Angeles. This would be 50 times larger than the biggest current desalting operation, which is located in the Caribbean island of Aruba and is run by Shell Oil Company. There is some doubt that the water from the Feather River Valley in Northern California, which will start flowing southward in the 1970s, will cost any less, since over 400 miles of transportation are involved and pumping costs are usually estimated at 10 cents per thousand gallons per 100 miles. This water has to be pumped over the Tehachapi Mountains, which separate Northern from Southern California. The Atomic Energy Commission has agreed to help California build a nuclear power plant to do this pumping job more cheaply.

In the meantime, the state of New York, rendered unbearably restless by its awful pollution troubles and a long drought, decided to sign up with American Machine & Foundry Company for a small nuclear plant at Riverhead, on the northeast shore of Long Island, to turn out a million gallons of desalted water a day (enough for the needs of 10,000 rural people) as well as 2500 kilowatts of electricity per hour and up to 500,000 curies of cobalt 60 isotope a year. The latter is a new idea and may show some profit for plants of this size, since cobalt 60 is in demand the world over for miniature power packages and for scientific use. For much larger plants, the by-products could be minerals from the sea, including chlorine, sodium, magnesium, calcium, potassium, bromine, boron, and even silver and gold. Phosphate fertilizers could be produced, as shown by W. R. Grace & Company, by pretreatment of seawater with phosphoric acid. This would also reduce the scaling-up of evaporators with magnesium and calcium salts.

When the combination nuclear plants are applied to mixtures of sewage water and seawater, a distillation residue of considerable complexity will result. Some decomposition of organic material might take place, with the possibility of creating an air-pollution nuisance. However, the use of standard chemical absorbers and auxiliary treatment of the overhead water would probably still make the total cost of producing clean water from such a witches’ brew reasonable in comparison with the present clumsy methods of sewage handling. The greatest virtue of such total treatment is that it would eliminate the hideously complicated murk of thousands of trace chemical pollutants which we suspect will otherwise haunt the lives of those living in our river and lake cities from now on. The use of nuclear power would also eliminate a large fraction of the air pollution which now comes from the burning of coal or fuel oil for electric power production.

Desalting of seawater involves an embarrassing problem that has not been entirely solved: What do you do with all the salt obtained as a by-product? In plants designed to furnish drinking water to a large city the sodium chloride residue would be huge. The only answer seems to be to pump the hot concentrated brine back into the ocean, hoping that it will disperse fast enough so that it does not build up in the processing cycle and that it does not unduly pollute the continental-shelf marine habitat, the most productive part of the ocean as far as salt-water fish are concerned. Probably there is more danger to the fish from the by-product heat than from excess salt. These questions need to be answered to be sure that we would not be replacing one form of water pollution with another.

RETHINKING THE PROBLEM OF COST

In considering grand programs, such as a series of half-a-billion-gallon-per-day desalting plants or the colossal movement of waters, such as proposed in the NAWAPA project, we must develop a new philosophy of costs. The NAWAPA concept was proposed by the Ralph M. Parsons Company and has been introduced to the Senate Public Works Committee by Senator Frank E. Moss of Utah. The enormous amount of water running uselessly into the sea from Alaska, Canada, and the Northwestern United States would be collected and stored in an intercontinental system of reservoirs at relatively high elevations. By means of a reservoir-canal-river system the water would then be redistributed throughout the continent from Canada to Mexico, generating power as it descended into the sea.

NAWAPA could provide 36 trillion gallons per year, enough to irrigate 40 million acres of land in our Western states (more than is now being irrigated) and yield 100 million kilowatts of electric power, equivalent to 75 Hoover Dams. It would bring the Great Lakes back to their normal level, increase the output of Niagara Falls, and open up a navigable canal from the St. Lawrence River to the Pacific Ocean. It would cost about $100 billion and take 20 years to complete.

NAWAPA is by far the biggest public works project ever considered. However, it contains internal defects that should oblige us to reflect on our whole continental philosophy of water. NAWAPA would double our irrigation water supply, but do we want more irrigated land? It would create a “Northwest passage,” but what good is that? It would give Mexico the equivalent of an Aswan Dam, but are we in the business of growing Mexican cotton? It would make the Great Lakes deeper, but is that a good way to solve the sickening pollution of Lake Erie and Lake Michigan?

In a sense, NAWAPA is an agricultural pork barrel for the farmers of three countries. It is based on the erroneous premise that we have a basic water shortage in most of North America. In fact, we have a shortage only of clean water. Building a big dam and a reservoir for flushing purposes is one way to try to clean up a river. (The Army Corps of Engineers proposed it for the Potomac.) But it is a very inefficient and very expensive way to cope with pollution. It would not solve, for example, one of our most critical poison-water dilemmas — how to remove trace quantities of dangerous organic chemical wastes. There is another defect in this method of getting more clean water: storage dams represent essentially an irreversible action committed upon a river. The river is tied in chains. If you decide later you must treat the river water instead of diluting it, you have already built your monument of concrete and must pay the interest on it. Acreage has been inundated.

For several decades the storage-dam concept has been fiercely defended by the sacred cliché that “electricity makes low-cost water possible.” This is certainly true where the electric power source is reasonably close to a large market for power, as would be the case with nuclear desalting plants in coastal cities. But the easy hydroelectric dam sites are used up, and it costs a good deal of money to transport electric power. The claim of the Reclamation Bureau that the taxpayers get reimbursed (except for costs that are written off against nonreimbursable aspects such as flood control or recreation) from profits on power has been disputed by modern economists. Some funny bookkeeping is involved, since the Reclamation Bureau pays low interest, well below the government’s rate on new bond issues. The NAWAPA scheme, however, would go a long way toward curing the pollution problem in the United States by installing proper sewage and industrial waste-treating facilities.

MEN WHO HAVE TRIED

In the field of water pollution, there are probably no two more knowledgeable men in the country, including all scientific as well as practical elements of know-how, than Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine and Representative John Blatnik of Minnesota. Senator Muskie knows the problem as exgovernor of his native state, and he knows how penny-pinching can block action. For example, in his own town of Waterville, a local sewer district was established; it issued revenue bonds, completely rebuilt the city sewers, cleaned up the tributary streams, but found that because of the authorized debt limit there was no money left for sewage treatment.

The device of forming districts or “authorities” of several communities to evade the debt limit was invented by a Waterville lawyer, and the idea spread over the country, but this did not help lonely Waterville. On the other hand, Allegheny County in Pennsylvania contracted for a $100 million sewage treating system to service 125 communities, created the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, and issued revenue bonds; and every three months the Allegheny County homeowner gets a bill prorated on his water bill.

Edmund Muskie understands the terrifying rocky stubbornness of New England, which would rather decay than spend money. He knows the story of the Merrimack River, one of the dirtiest stretches of water in the history of the world. But the political history of the Merrimack is even grimier. Although the Merrimack’s pollution has been bemoaned for 80 years, not one town on the main stem of the river has treated its sewage.

The Merrimack psychosis is the reason we need federal action. Until 1945 the Massachusetts Department of Public Health had no enforcement powers and could make only pallid recommendations to the legislature. But even the present control law has no teeth nor any provision for improvement grants. The Merrimack Valley is a depressed area, and the textile industries that did not flee to the South let it be known that sewer rates would break their straining backs. Bond issues for sewage treatment were defeated by incredible margins: 5 to 1 in Haverhill and 7 to 1 in Lowell. Even the U.S. Public Health Service got itself involved in a scandal when it was revealed that one of its officials had promised the Massachusetts authorities that federal enforcement would not be initiated. In 1963, Governor Endicott Peabody requested federal help, but the Public Health Service was refused data by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, which would not name any industrial polluters. In a public hearing, an official of the state Public Health department became so insulting to federal representatives that the meeting ended in a donnybrook. A basic trouble is that the people are not willing to pay a reasonable price for fresh water. They have a vague notion that water should be free, like air. Local water boards won’t charge higher prices to pay for water or sewage treatment because, as the citizens along the Merrimack have shown at the polls, the members of the water boards would promptly lose their jobs.

The Public Health Service had even less luck in New Jersey in the case of Raritan Bay. Here the details of the failure to act appear to have been hushed up, but such men as Representative John Dingell of Michigan have pointed out that every federal agency involved showed dereliction: the Public Health Service, because contamination which infected shellfish was being put into the bay; the Coast Guard, because they failed to restrict pumping of oil into the bay waters; and even the Army Corps of Engineers, because the Flood Control Act of 1899 gives them responsibility to take action when dangerous substances are being inserted into water. No attempt was made, according to Dingell, to control even the pumping of sewage from federal installations into this gray lagoon.

Interstate commissioners have claimed, preposterously, that the Arthur Kill is immaculate as far as Raritan Bay is concerned. Humble Oil Company, American Cyanamid, and General Aniline & Film have been dumping organic wastes from Arthur Kill into the bay for decades; and eight and a half years after formal objection had elicited from the state of New Jersey only a mild scolding, Representative Dingell was so fed up with lack of action by the U.S. Public Health Service that he demanded that the function of federal water-pollution policing be transferred from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to the Department of the Interior.

Up to now the U.S. Public Health Service has legally been empowered to act only in cases involving interstate waters or at the invitation of the governor of a single state. But the Public Health Service has not been aggressive. The water-pollution authority is buried under layers of bureaucracy, reporting ultimately to the Surgeon General. Organized like the Army, the Public Health Service has a strong esprit de corps, and a great desire not to make any enemies. In such cases as Raritan Bay it has acted with all the resoluteness of a wet noodle.

Both the House and the Senate heartily supported transferring authority from the U.S. Public Health Service to a new Federal Water Pollution Control Administration headed by an assistant secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. In the Water Pollution Act of 1965, the House and Senate agreed on increased grants for sewer projects, grants for water-pollution research, and a general stiffening of the federal backbone. Will the Water Pollution Act do the job? Not unless it is adequately financed. President Johnson has asked for $50 million for a start on a program that might cost $10 billion over the next decade.

Without at least this much money the act will not accomplish what must be accomplished. It may prevent some future outright horrors such as Raritan Bay, and conceivably even clean up the Merrimack River, but it is not going to achieve the President’s goal of “preventing pollution before it happens.” It does not propose any really basic remedy for industrial pollution, such as President Johnson’s suggestion of a “user fee,” similar to the brilliantly successful system used in West Germany. It does not tie together a great national water reuse program with large-scale elimination of all types of pollution. It proposes a police action rather than a really concerted plan. It would add policemen but not planning engineers.

What must somehow be pounded into the heads of the people who govern us is that as far as the eye can see into the future, our big problem in water is pollution. The problem of water shortages is a problem of treating dirty water, whether the dirt is in the form of municipal sewage, industrial waste, salt, or silt.

The difficulty is that dealing with pollution — in the broad sense involving, for instance, soil erosion and salt invasion of groundwaters, as well as the more obvious and smelly modes of degrading fresh water — necessitates stepping on innumerable toes outside of a particular federal department. The more rationally James M. Quigley, Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare and Commissioner of the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration, approaches his enormous job, the more hisses and catcalls he will get. Even the hitherto mild and spiritless activities of the Public Health Service have caused tantrums of rage among the states, among industrialists, and among other federal departments.

Because of its polite remonstrances the HEW Department has been accused of a ravening will to power. If Mr. Quigley attempts to promote what is the most promising solution to urban water problems — the combined reclamation of sewage water and seawater (for example, the reclamation of the Hudson River, which would end New York City’s prolonged agony) — he will be regarded as a veritable demon. A demon is precisely what we need, if the President will stand behind him. We need a man tough as an old saddle and fearless as a wolverine.

An alternative to one-department planning on a grand scale has always been a “council” or a committee. (One recalls the old definition of a camel — a horse designed by a committee.) In 1943 the Federal Inter-Agency River Basin Committee (“Firebrick”) was created to encourage cooperation between the Army Corps of Engineers and the Departments of Agriculture and of the Interior in studies of multiple-purpose dams. The members sat on their hands. The Corps and the Reclamation Bureau went ahead building dams as they saw fit, and the Soil Conservation people continued their same tours of duty. In 1964 a Federal Inter-Agency Committee on Water Resources (“Icewater”) was set up, consisting of representatives of Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, HEW, and the Federal Power Commission. These men have harrumphed and yawned suspiciously at each other, but we still have no overall resources policy.

There is no agency in the federal government authorized to determine the policies, make the decisions, and give the supervision required for water resources development; and in the area of pollution, which underlies water resources, there is not even a shadow of such authority. The 1965 model was the Water Resources Council headed by the Secretary of the Interior and reporting directly to the President. This was a body hastily drafted to give the thirsting voters of the Northeast an impression that their troubles would be ended by virtue of a series of powwows. It shows no signs of establishing before the public the fact that pollution and water reuse are matters of driving urgency.

In the New York predicament the state has shown more insight than the federal government. Governor Rockefeller’s $1.7 billion program for abatement of water pollution, if coupled with reduction of losses and installation of full water metering (New York City loses twice as much water in its transmission system — 400 million gallons a day — as the city of Boston uses), would go further to relieve the local famine than such airily conceived notions as diverting water from Canada. The plan to use salt water to fight fires in New York City will help.

Unfortunately, the majority of the people and even a majority of the Congress still do not understand the gravity of our water-pollution problems. Cleaning up the rivers is viewed by many as part of the “beautification” program, like getting the automobile junk piles out of sight. Improving the scenery docs not purge the water. In my opinion the League of Women Voters is doing the best job countrywide in educating people to the importance of the water problem. It has placed water pollution high on its list of “continuing responsibilities.”

To implement the mighty efforts needed in water reuse, desalting, and soil control, we need a crash program exceeding the magnitude and pace of the Manhattan Project, which developed the nuclear bomb. This is especially true in the research and development aspects of antipollution. Some tremendous gaps in our knowledge and know-how exist which must be filled by an immense acceleration of research.

As a professional chemist, I cannot resist the temptation to point out one promising approach to the problem of organic chemical pollution which is receiving no federal money at all. This is the development of strains of bacteria or ferments that would selectively digest the trace poisons in industrial effluents. Private chemical and petroleum industries are working along such lines for their own purposes. Standard Oil of New Jersey, for example, has developed a microbiological process for converting petroleum into food. There are known strains of microflora that will selectively chew the wax out of crude oil or will chew the sulfur out of it. Dow Chemical Company uses selected bacteria to destroy phenolic chemical wastes. Maybe there are bugs that could be grown which would even thrive on minute but still toxic concentrations of endrin, DDT, and the other pesticides that are killing our fish and probably degrading our own livers. There could certainly be developed special microbic scavengers that would do a faster and better job in our sewage plants.

Research work of this kind needs to be done intensively and patiently with astronomical numbers of time-consuming experiments. And yet to my knowledge no system of experiments has been started with the specific goal in mind of controlling water pollution. We leave it to nature to provide the bacteria for sewage treatment, but nature is not a sanitary engineer, and nature is a great believer in time. Time, however, is of the essence. We run all kinds of races against disaster. Certainly not the least of these is the race against disease and ugliness — the race to clean up our once sweet waters.