December 15, 2024
Tomorrow, December 16, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Safe Drinking Water Act, signed into law on December 16, 1974, by President Gerald R. Ford, a Republican. The measure required the Environmental Protection Agency to set maximum contaminant levels for drinking water and required states to comply with them. It protected the underground sources of drinking water and called for emergency measures to protect public health if a dangerous contaminant either was in or was likely to enter a public water system.
To conduct research on clean drinking water and provide grants for states to clean up their systems, Congress authorized appropriations of $15 million in 1975, $25 million in 1976, and $35 million in 1977.
The Safe Drinking Water Act was one of the many laws passed in the 1970s after the environmental movement, sparked after Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring explored the effect of toxic chemicals on living organisms, had made Americans aware of the dangers of pollution in the environment. That awareness had turned to anger by 1969, when in January a massive oil spill off Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Then, in June, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire.
The nation had dipped its toes into water regulation during the Progressive Era at the beginning of the twentieth century, after germ theory became widely understood in the 1880s. Cleaning up cities first meant installing sewer systems, then meant trying to stop diseases from spreading through water systems. In 1912, Congress passed the U.S. Public Health Service Act, which established a national agency for protecting public health and called for getting rid of waterborne illnesses—including the life-threatening illness typhoid—by treating water with chlorine.
It was a start, but a new focus on science and technology after World War II pointed toward updating the system. The U.S. Public Health Service investigated the nation’s water supply in the 1960s and discovered more than 46,000 cases of waterborne illness. In the 1970s it found that about 90% of the drinking water systems it surveyed exceeded acceptable levels of microbes.
In February 1970, Republican President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.” He called for “fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”
Later that year, Congress passed a measure establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, and Nixon signed it into law.
Widespread calls to protect drinking water ran up against lobbyists for oil companies and members of Congress from oil districts. They complained that the science of what substances were dangerous was uncertain and that how they would be measured and regulated was unclear. They complained that the EPA was inefficient and expensive and was staffed with inexperienced officials.
Then, in 1972, an EPA study discovered that waters downstream from 60 industries discharging waste from Baton Rouge to the Mississippi River’s mouth in New Orleans had high concentrations of 66 chemicals and toxic metals. Chemical companies had sprung up after World War II along the 85 miles between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, potentially polluting the water, while the lower end of the Mississippi River collected all the runoff from the river itself.
Two years later, an analysis of drinking water and cancer death rates among white men in that same area of Louisiana suggested that carcinogens in the water might be linked to high cancer rates. Louisiana representative Lindy Boggs, a Democrat, told Congress that “it is really vitally important to our region that we have controls enforced on the toxic organic compounds that come into the river from the industrial and municipal discharges, from runoffs from from agricultural regions, from accidents on the river, and from chemical spills on the river.”
Concerns about the area of Louisiana that later came to be known as “Cancer Alley” were uppermost, but there were chemical companies across the country, and Congress set out to safeguard the lives of Americans from toxins released by corporations into the nation’s water supply. The Safe Drinking Water Act, the first law designed to create a comprehensive standard for the nation’s drinking water, was Congress’s answer.
The new law dramatically improved the quality of drinking water in the U.S., making it some of the safest in the world. Over the years, the EPA has expanded the list of contaminants it regulates, limiting both new man-made chemicals and new pathogens.
But the system is under strain: not only have scientific advances discovered that some contaminants are dangerous at much lower concentrations than scientists previously thought, but also a lack of funding for the EPA means that oversight can be lax. Even when it’s not, a lack of funding for towns and cities means they can’t always afford to upgrade their systems.
By 2015, almost 77 million Americans lived in regions whose water systems did not meet the safety standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act. In addition, more than 2 million Americans did not have running water, and many more rely on wells or small systems not covered by the Safe Water Drinking Act.
The Biden administration began to address the problem with an investment of about $22 billion to upgrade the nation’s water systems. The money removed lead pipes, upgraded wastewater and sewage systems, and addressed the removal of so-called forever chemicals and proposed a new standard for acceptable measures of them.
What this will mean in the future is unclear. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to increase production of oil and gas—although it is currently at an all-time high—and such projects are often slowed by environmental regulations. On Tuesday, December 10, he posted on social media, “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!”
“[B]y ignoring environmental costs we have given an economic advantage to the careless polluter over his more conscientious rival,” Trump’s Republican predecessor Nixon told the nation in 1970. “While adopting laws prohibiting injury to person or property, we have freely allowed injury to our shared surroundings.” When he signed the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974, President Ford added simply: “Nothing is more essential to the life of every single American than clean air, pure food, and safe drinking water.”
—
Notes:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/93rd-congress/house-bill/13002
https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyNET.exe/9100C9IA.TXT
Lindy Boggs, November 19, 1974, Congressional Record, p. 36401.
https://fluxconsole.com/files/item/211/109412/SurvivingCancerAlleyReport.pdf
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-environmental-quality
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-signing-the-safe-drinking-water-act
https://www.maine.gov/dhhs/mecdc/environmental-health/dwp/pws/SDWA50.shtml
Bluesky:
therickwilson.bsky.social/post/3lcztibn3e22q
It a strange time that I have a nostalgia for Richard Nixon. That’s how bad our current situation is. Thanks Heather.
I’m not uneducated. I have a BA in PoliSci and a JD law degree from the University of Miami. I practiced law for almost 18 years and was a judge for almost 16 years before I retired in 2022. But I was not a student of history otherwise. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the historical perspective you bring to every topic. As I said, I’m not uneducated, but I sure am stupid about so much. Thank you for the lessons, dear Professor.